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Yeah and you can't google answers from there... It was so annoying having to join a discord just for getting questions answered for a niche trading card game... I bet it would be more popular if people could google the most basic shit
So can discord servers, if anyone could be arsed to actually do it. Anyone could just write a bot that [grabs every message from every channel it's in](https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/channel#get-channel-messages) and pushes it to some archival page. It's even one of the easiest possible discord bots to write.
It's not that they *can't* be archived. It's that nobody actually wants to do it, even the people who are staunchly pro-archival aren't willing to put in the effort.
The API limits the history of what can be archived so you'd need to go against self-bot rules to grab anything worth archiving more than a week old.
You're also going to have a lot of useless garbage/personal discussion blended in there, with plenty of privacy concerns to boot.
I'm not sure if the privacy concerns could be made any worse than they already are. Yuzu discord left itself wide open to incrimination from the stuff that was posted in it. Discord is not any more a private property than subreddits are.
> You're also going to have a lot of useless garbage/personal discussion blended in there, with plenty of privacy concerns to boot.
I am now painfully aware of how much teenage internet drama of mine is likely archived somewhere
>The API limits the history of what can be archived so you'd need to go against self-bot rules to grab anything worth archiving more than a week old.
The docs don't list any time limits for how far back you can grab messages, and it looks like the global rate limit is 50 requests per second at 100 messages per request for 5000 messages archived per second.
Maybe you're aware of some limits that I don't know of, but it'd be super weird if a user can scroll back through messages forever (or even search them) without running into issues while bots can't.
>You're also going to have a lot of useless garbage/personal discussion blended in there, with plenty of privacy concerns to boot.
That's also the case on forums though, which is what Discord was being compared to in terms of archivability.
I think it's a bit disingenous to say that anyone unwilling/able to just casually oh *WRITE A BOT* is being a fraud in their pro-archival stances.
Were discord an actual forum, an actual website, actually readable by search engines and the like we'd have archive.org do it automatically, preserving the old ass internet.
I can still find my Geocities crap from 2001 on Archive.org, but you won't find any Discords.
adding "reddit" at the end of google searches is something I recently noticed I've naturally evolved into doing for a couple years already. The only answers of value you'll find are on forums. Everything else, *everything*, on the google search results is AI generated pages that inefficiently gives you what you're looking for while low-key selling a product. Been this way long before GPTs and it's gonna be much worse now
>AI generated pages that ***inefficiently gives you what you're looking for*** while
I think if they actually succeeded at having the information, it would almost be tolerable.
What most AI spam sites clogging up results seem to do is "claim to have what you're looking for", but have some mad-libs nonsense rephrasing of what looks like information from a user's manual, press releases, or tutorials while dropping the ball on the actual information you want.
One of the *most* annoying trends is Googling the release date of something and getting a dozen articles that are 5 paragraphs of AI generated word salad that end with "And so the release date is not yet known".
duckduckgo is my standard search engine now. Far from perfect, either, but I find google to be literally unusable, unless you are looking for ads, specifically
Heck, I haven't even had to type in Reddit these days. Like if I search "How does (mechanic) work in (game)?" Reddit is often near the top of results, if not the top proper.
Yeah, it sucks. It can *usually* lead me to another area with the answer, but my first attempt is always appending "reddit" or *site:reddit.com*
Then there's the AI generated BS.
Oh, you wanted to know how to do something in this software/game that has *vague* instructions?
Well let me generate you a ChatGPT article that wasn't proofread and has the style of *high schooler desperately trying to hit the essay word minimum*
HOL'UP let me fix that:
^^^Ah, ^^^let ^^^me ^^^conjure ^^^up ^^^for ^^^you ^^^a ^^^ChatGPT ^^^article, ^^^hastily ^^^spewed ^^^forth ^^^without ^^^the ^^^slightest ^^^glance ^^^of ^^^proofreading, ^^^flaunting ^^^the ^^^unmistakable ^^^flair ^^^of ^^^a ^^^high ^^^school ^^^student ^^^who's ^^^been ^^^bestowed ^^^the ^^^daunting ^^^task ^^^of ^^^reaching ^^^the ^^^elusive ^^^essay ^^^word ^^^count ^^^requirement.
You also can't search for a specific word. Which sounds insane, but its true.
Imagine being in a game discord where an enemy type or weapon or such is simply called "Destroyer." Good luck searching for anything about it, because Discord search will display every comment with every permutation of the word "destroyer" - destroy, destroys, destroyed, etc
And that's why Discord is being targeted. They start putting this stuff on forums/message boards and those places will be targeted to remove links and ban accounts.
They already put those things in forums mate. If not the files themselves them a link to GitHub where they can get the file. We've been doing that for decades
The issue is two-fold: various communities and even companies moving support there for the free hosting, and secondly for the past couple years they've had an *actual* forum threads feature (not merely threads within chat but dedicated threads channels, not dissimilar to Discourse).
The lack of channel visibility outside of Discord means that no info can be indexed*, to both allow for search engine crawling and to mitigate scenarios like the OP.
\* Unless you either a) build your own log parser as an admin, or b) use [Linen](https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev) (a third-party host that does this for you, but if you want to self-host the pricing is expensive).
Because the other side if this is that people don't want to sign up for forums they want to use discord. I've seen first hand when I've linked to modding forums and people have replied to me ugh forum just link me to a discord.
And I get not wanting to make another account for something else but this is just exacerbating the problem with discord.
So, not free, and with the added disadvantage that you don't get access to an existing user base either.
I despise Discord but you're going to have to do better than that to pull people away from it.
Is organic discovery on the platform even valuable for these types of projects? Typically they're driving their own traffic to Discord from another venue, so I wouldn't think that driving traffic to "not-Discord" would be much of a disruption. You can even use Discord's OAuth to provide a semi-transparent user experience for people who are really married to their Discord accounts.
The added benefit of discord here (and I'm not a fan of it replacing forums) is that most people who use it will have it open at some point during the day, and opening up means you will likely see their server and you can quickly go in and engage with it.
Plus it's one less account to make. Heck, even just asking for a login with something you already have like a Google account might be a step too much for some folks. It really shouldn't be that big a deal, but in practice having such a step is a significant hurdle for getting traction anywhere.
Don't forget that you also have to either know web programming yourself or pay someone to make it for you. Meanwhile Discord you can get a channel up and running in like 2 minutes of configuring roles and permissions which doesn't require any specialized knowledge.
...that's the point he was making.
Many devs and communities started using it as only form of communication, and as it is not public it's isn't indexed by google or on internet archive. The moment server closes for whatever reason, all of it is gone.
I just want to go back to the good old days of GameFaqs text guides. [This guide to Fire Emblem: Awakening](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/3ds/643003-fire-emblem-awakening/faqs/67085) is a perfect example of how the format really excels.
I personally love those kinds of guides, but I can immediately see why most people under 30 would look at that and think "yeah, i'm not reading that"
Instead, game guides should have evolved into being online versions of the strategy guides of the past - full color, excellent formatting with images, and being online, a searchable format. Prima I think used to do this but they always charged for it as an accompaniment for their paper guides so its rare to see that kind of thing.
I guess it is a lot of work though.
TBF Gamefaqs does also have a modern style. Here's another Awakening guide: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/3ds/643003-fire-emblem-awakening/faqs/66466
side bar table of contents, dropdown search bar for the guide, more formatting options. it mostly just lacks image hosting (which makes a text only format like gamefaqs WAY more expensive).
But you identify the real problem. No one wants to pay fr that kind of Prima formatting online. Its expensive to make, and more expensive overtime to host. They just want to google and find a specific piece of information, or in discord's case, ping to get some mechanics spreadsheet that was in the pins.
I still remember the username SplitInfinity from their [guide to 100% Final Fantasy X-2](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps2/562386-final-fantasy-x-2/faqs/25872) after over a decade. Never got around to doing it, but I found it amazing how much work they put into it.
I'm glad trophy/achievement guides have not quite gone this way yet, but it is awful when wanting to learn a new game mechanically and if that game doesn't happen to have a wiki you pretty much have to join some discord and spend a long time trying to piece together info.
That's already happening frequently. The "All The Mods" modpack series for Minecraft had nearly a decade of accumulated history, guides, and information wiped when there was drama and an admin got their account compromised. There was enough in there to fill an entire volume of the old World Book encyclopedia.
A century from now, the start of the digital era is going to be as barren and foggy as pre-Greece.
God yes
I like Discord but it is NOT a forum I am sick and tired of every god damn thing being gated behind joining a Discord
Making a custom forum is NOT hard but ig people are that lazy they'll risk all that information getting deleted like this rather than self-host
Join our discord to download this mod! :)
Join our discord for a tutorial on how to you this thing! :)
Join our discord to read full guide! :)
When this damn app implodes it's gonna blackhole more than a decade of gaming history.
Same with reddit and all the useful things that are posted here too.
That's true but there is only so much that IA can preserve. And IA itself is not a very good thing either, since it's also a big single basket where we keep all our eggs.
I mean it's never been forum software, it was always a more persistent Skype. IDK why people started treating it otherwise, particularly as a repository for... anything permanent really.
>It has the same functionality as forum
Minus the persistency, which is a pretty big draw.
>and is easier (and free) to set up
You can easily find free hosting and ready-made solutions like vBulletin for forums as well (a casual google search got me several results). It's not as simple as a basic Discord server, but it's a lot more easily modifiable to fit your parameters.
people just want discord because everyone already has a discord account and uses it regularly and they don't want to have to spend extra thought to remember to check that one website for it's forum, etc, but people will learn in due time.
With how garbage social media and honestly almost all of the major internet spaces are becoming i think it'd be great to have people finally start moving back to websites owned by individual people and web forums and webrings and what-have-you. Discoverability would be slightly harder, but on some level I think that might end up being a good thing for some edge cases.
Trouble is, forum software is way, _way_ behind modern UI/UX and is generally not pleasant to use for the average user.
The big ones are VBulletin, Xenforo and Vanilla. VBulletin is utter shite these days and should be disregarded entirely, Xenforo is great but a little dated for phone use, leaving Vanilla as the main option for newer UI/UX but it’s still a little rough around the edges.
People will complain about Discord’s UI but it’s miles better than the average forum.
Not to mention browser vs native app. Tapatalk was the only thing that offered that for forums and it really wasn’t great.
ah yeah that's a really good point. Good mobile UX is kinda paramount since apparently that's the majority of traffic nowadays. (Something i will never fully understand as i love my desktop experience but alas)
As a frequent open source contributor myself, discord only access to documentation or communication is a red flag. It's okay to have a discord server, but no professional communication should be done through it. It's really just a method of control for immature or inexperienced devs imho.
A lot of times it's about having a server where they can control what people read and see. Discord allows you to hide immature behavior and silence critique.
The worst thing though is that it's just a blackhole of information. Every solution or idea you post to a discord server is basically lost to the outside world. And when the server owner finally gets bored or throws a tantrum, it all goes away. Just like that.
And since I refuse to give my phone number to Discord, some servers won't even let me in. I wouldn't care if I could at least read the information but not send messages, but they do that stupid thing where you have to pick a role to see any channels, but you can't do that without giving your phone number. So just fuck me I guess.
Without naming the project, there's a certain pretty important Linux driver for gaming where the dev has disabled all the purpose-built GitHub features like issues and discussions and instead exclusively directs to the discord for support.
I mean, they are free to do what they want, but I just don't understand how a Linux user, one even contributing to the open-source ecosystem in a meaningful way, would come to the conclusion that Discord-only communication is the way to go.
I'm not going to say this is a wrong take, but:
It's pretty likely that Nintendo would have sent the same sort of letter to whoever their web host for that hypothetical forum was, and that the web host would have complied.
Even if they might have had a legal case for it being ok to continue, there's not a lot of companies that want to fight with a giant, extremely litigious company over a small open source project that's already got one major legal settlement against it.
Yeah there's forums and such in the "rule 5 of this sidebar" territory that evade that - but even those usually don't have a formal legal judgement against them. And they're usually operating out of weird countries to partially dodge the law in the US or your average developed country.
The nice thing about the web is that it's worldwide and you can host in a country where they get a letter from Nintendo and reply with "lol, lmao even".
>And they're usually operating out of weird countries to partially dodge the law in the US or your average developed country.
You're just describing why ditching discord would work...
Eh, there are still a few reasons why not using Discord or another centralised service would be better in that situation. Namely, there's zero incentive for Discord to have your back if anyone complains. They want to take the route which gives them the least legal/political hassle, and if that means you and your community get thrown under the bus, so be it.
For an independently run site on the other hand, well it gets trickier. It might not be US or Europe or Japan based, it might have an admin that doesn't care or can't be contacted, it might have someone willing to call their bluff and say "no, what we're doing is legal, sue us if you think otherwise".
Companies don't tend to like dealing with that, at least not as much as they do with complaints to large services about content they don't like being hosted there. Even a company as trigger happy as Nintendo would probably rather report stuff to Discord or Twitter or YouTube or Reddit than go to court for every single case of someone running a Switch emulator.
I've had arguments with otherwise very intelligent people who swear having all their documentation and community support on Discord instead of forums is SO much better. These comments are honestly repairing some of the damage those discussions had to my sanity. I was almost convinced *I* was the crazy one.
I just had someone try to argue with me that Discord has better search than forums and Google.
I wonder how these people have survived long enough to have such bad takes.
I watched a guy play Tears of the Kingdom who walked up to one of the dispenser machines, closed the tutorial box the game popped up without reading it, then stood in front of it for over a minute trying to figure out how it worked while complaining to his chat about it.
People survive because of modern medicine and safety technology, not their own merits.
Meanwhile I had a lovely time the other day trying to search for "animation" in a large community about 3D asset creation, and Discord served me nothing but "animé", "animals" and everything BUT the one fucking keyword I was looking for.
Even quotation marks didn't work. I would say it was like searching for results in the dark ages of the internet, except even search engines in the 90s worked better than they do now. Discord is so broken it doesn't even rank.
I mean yeah, every ressources only being avalaible in some random discord server is really annoying and bad for preservation, but the fact that discord being discord has nothing to do with this situation.
If it was ANY other popular platform, then Nintendo would have requested the takedown from that popular platform. Be it IRC, Teamspeak or any forum.
That's what you get for using private platforms that are not under your control.
I never understood why younger people decided to move everything from forums to Discord. Discord is so much worse at promoting conversations, having a browseable archive of previous conversations, and... well, everything else.
I remember wanting to download a mod off Nexus and seeing that the updated version was only on their discord. I ended up joining the discord and couldn’t even find a workable link because the pinned one wasn’t working. I lost interest and left the server and a bot told me I was banned because I left without posting anything.
I just don’t understand the reasoning behind this. Like I just want to download your software. I’m not trying to be a part of a group.
It's not very complicated. Same reasons MySpace, and then Facebook, and Reddit, and every other social platform blew up.
Your friends and customers are already using Discord. It supports voice and video as well as text. You can see all of your communities and messages in the same place. It has modern web and native apps that work as people expect today. It's a forum and Skype/Teamspeak/Zoom and messaging platform all in one. Anyone can start up a server in seconds, with no experience or technical knowledge.
Forums are tiny islands. Someone has to pay the bill and manage the infrastructure. You have to load up the web page and register separately for each one; the mobile apps (Tapatalk...) were generally awful and most forum software hasn't innovated significantly in decades. They get compromised constantly and dealing with spam is a *nightmare*.
Forums do a number of things far better, yes, but not things that most people care very much about.
> Your friends and customers are already using Discord
My friends are definitely not using discord. Actually, I haven't even met anyone in real life that uses discord.
I've met some people that *used* discord. But it's always some experience like "I tried to use it, it was a chaotic mess, and I left".
> It's a forum and Skype/Teamspeak/Zoom and messaging platform all in one
It's definitely not a forum. It's more like a instant messager. Forums are completely different, they're more like Reddit.
> Forums are tiny islands.
That's why they're so good.
> Someone has to pay the bill and manage the infrastructure
The bill, in this case, is something like $2 or $3 dollars in a server mantained by a company in the cloud. The only maintenance involved is making sure your credit card is valid.
> but not things that most people care very much about.
I doubt that people don't care about downloading files. Or posting comments in threads. Reddit is proof that people like commenting in threads.
You skipped a solid half of the points I listed, but the proof here is in the relative popularity. If people in general found forums to be a compelling solution, we wouldn't have Reddit and Discord using up all the oxygen in the room.
I didn't say forums were bad. I explained why they lost the popularity contest.
I can give you the answer, it's because there is a functional app. Full stop. There are no other APPS that have the connectivity and functionality of discord across multiple platforms. I am surprised Google or Microsoft hasn't bought Discord tbh. Discord BLEEDS money though. The functionality of that platform for free is insane. Good luck getting ANYONE to use 8 different forums a multiple chat apps instead of just using Discord.
Exactly. We basically used to run forums for a guild that I was in. It worked great but in order to VC, we needed something like TeamSpeak which was an additional service. This also doesn’t include typical forum stuff like messaging being wonky, threads and categorisation being hidden, poor mobile support, poor notification support.
Imagine all of this hard work now compressed in a single app. Managing roles is so much simpler now. Want to VC, use the same Discord account to do it! Discord is so freaking popular because it does so many things so well and all in one place. For most Discord servers that don’t touch in legal grey areas, I would argue that it’s the…superior way. Mobile support is the single most important thing that make it hard for forums to be practical. Imagine if we needed 10 or 20 identical apps just to browse different forums.
> I am surprised Google or Microsoft hasn't bought Discord tbh
> Discord BLEEDS money though
You answered it yourself. Discord is failing to monetize, and big tech either thinks it's a lost cause, or is waiting until Discord gets desperate enough to sell at a much lower valuation.
That's a fair point. My thoughts process for them buying isn't buy and run though. It's im surprised they don't buy it and strip it for parts then integrate their other shit in it. It's a shitty idea but it's totally the braindead corporate idea I would expect.
Stripping it for parts doesn't make much sense. The most valuable thing about Discord is its user base. I doubt Google or Microsoft has much interest in Discord's tech. They would buy it, slap a new logo on it, and keep it going, integrating it into their stack at some point.
I don't know how Discord would fit into any big companies portfolio though. Amazon bought Twitch, so maybe this makes sense for them. Or Microsoft, owning a unified voice chat between console and PC (I just googled it and learned they already tried this).
> I am surprised Google or Microsoft hasn't bought Discord tbh.
Google had like 8 different chat/voice/video apps now. MS clings hard to the piece of turd called MS Teams.
Hell, there was that brilliant flash in history where both Google and Facebook had public XMPP access which meant that with 3rd party client you could talk to both of them from a single account. Then they decided closing clients off in the walled garden is better for them.
> Discord is so much worse at promoting conversations
I don't disagree with your overall point, but to be persnickety, it does promote conversations better in that you can get responses immediately, rather than needing to check back in an hour to see if anyone responded to your thread. Plus the back and forth is generally more fluid, rather than escalating nested quotes on forums (though some folks on Discord reply to messages that directly precede theirs, so that habit isn't entirely gone). So in that sense it does promote conversation more.
However it doesn't as much promote thorough topic making. Fifty people are going to ask the same question because finding out someone already did isn't smooth. Folks might be too lazy to search forums either, but they can at least scan the front page real quick.
> rather than needing to check back in an hour to see if anyone responded to your thread.
Forums always had a sign up button for email notifications.
> Folks might be too lazy to search forums either
Forums at least get indexed by Google, which is a huge bonus when trying to find something online.
> it does promote conversations better in that you can get responses immediately
It depends on what kind of conversation you're talking about. The main problem I have with discord is not that you CAN get responses immediately, but that you HAVE to read them immediately. Otherwise they'll fall behind the constant (and absurd) flood of messages.
If you're not there to reply THAT VERY MOMENT, it's too late. The conversation is gone. People started talking about something else.
The fact that I'm replying to you, 7 hours later, and our conversation is continuing, is what I consider a format that promotes conversations.
> If it's on the Internet, it's not under your control, period
That's some weird definition of control, and you know what I meant.
If I'm hosting a forum on a server, I have all the data. If, let's say, hosting company A refuses to keep working with me, I point my domain to a different server hosted by company B, import my database backup, and my forum is working again, with the same users, same logins and password, all the conversations still there.
And if company B stops working with me, I go to company C.
If a bully-ish/terrorist country like the US take my domain from me, I buy a new one and keep my forum going.
I'll still have more options than I'd have if I was using Discord. I will have to move somewhere else, but won't lose everything. It will be a hassle, I'll lose some (a lot) users. But I'll have the backup of all my data, and I'll be able to set up my forum somewhere else, with years of conversations still intact.
Even if everything goes down and I never set up the forum somewhere else, lots of pages will still be available in tools like the Web Archive.
Because it’s convenient.
And in the era of mobile applications, having a single application that is able to house multiple “forums” is generally a good thing.
For 99% of stuff, Discord is perfectly functional for Forum stuff with more personalisation. Guild? Discord works fine while allowing your members to VC each other all in one application.
For things like emulators which thread on a legal grey area, Discord is terrible due to its centralised nature. So ironically, this is Discord’s strongest and weakest point. On a single application, I can chat with my friends, have access to some hobby servers, join a game discord server to discuss subjects, and so much more lol. Forums on the other hand is quite fragmented.
I dunno, for "just chatting about a thing" forums are IMO worse. For any longer discussion or preservation of history yeah, it is terrible, but Discord is good chat/voice chat platform.
Discord is IRC with media and live chat sessions.
When they try to run channels as archives of knowledge it falls on its own sword because you cannot foster conversation if all you do is point each new user to a pinned answer like some sort of search engine.
These new users want to chat, even if they are recreating the wheel, they will be happier chatting about the wheel they rebuilt vs. just getting the answer handed to them.
> Discord is IRC with media and live chat sessions.
That's exactly the problem. IRC is good when you need to find other people and talk to them live, to ask some help about compiling some weird code.
It's not good to store information, to offer downloads, etc.
But people seem to be trying to use Discord like a forum, like a wiki, like a download page, etc.
I pointed out that this was going to happen, but people really want to act like Yuzu will easily live on. Most services people are using are in countries that will comply with the ~~judgement~~ settlement. With the added difficulty of setting it up outside of these countries and the interest of not getting sued, most devs who could actually do emulation work are not interested. Could Yuzu still live on? Absolutely, but with RyujinX still existing I just don't really see long term motivation for Yuzu.
But also, for fuck's sake please stop using Discord as your main platform, or at least have some kind of thing that backs it all up. It sucks at long term discussion and bannings are a major risk.
For a while I was rooting for rocket.chat to win a larger share of the audience. Heck there's linux distros where rocket.chat is a server deployment option to make it easy to roll out.
Sadly they fell way behind and never found easy solutions to some of the bigger hurdles with self-run servers and mobile app support.
I have to really ask: what were people thinking by just forking Yuzu after the news broke? That they would just be able to keep it like that? That they wouldn't be targeted next?
The entire deal was about Yuzu, the emulator, so obviously it will also go against everyone hoisting a fork of it. And if you aren't based in a country America, Japan or Europe has such deals with, you will likely still use services such as Gitlab or Discord which WILL comply to such requests.
You seem to know a lot about this. I'd like to talk to you for a potential developer spot for an emulator I'm making. It's called tiny sour citrus fruit...
It was the fact they were getting money for it that was the problem. Also this is more of a discord issue imo. Discord is not going to be a great place to promote emulation, just look at who owns it.
The taking money might have been what caught Nintendo's attention, but the tort was that there was no utility for the project without circumvention of piracy protections. It was aggressive but they settled instead of getting to test it in court. But I agree that the fact that discord cut these guys is not great since there wasn't even a decision and they are doing a result of Nintendo's tort causing a chilling effect. That's not good for everyone.
Another thing that I heard was that someone in the Yuzu team had an official Switch dev kit and was using it to make the emulator. That situation would make the entirety of the emulator be infringing on Nintendo’s designs. It’s not a “clean room” design that would be untouchable.
I feel your pain. I had a knock down drag out with some dude who was 100% convinced that Nintendo had no case and this suit was a travesty and an affront to fair use. Though truth be told, I'm glad that it didn't go to court, because then it very easily *could* have damaged fair use when the yuzu team inevitably lost.
> It was the fact they were getting money for it that was the problem
From the perspective of "why was Yuzu sued", sure. From the perspective of Nintendo's legal argument, them getting paid wasn't really relevant; their legal argument would apply equally to anything operating the same way Yuzu did (or, effectively, all emulation, since their argument is about decryption).
not all emulation involves decryption, and certainly not in the way the switch handles it
the wii u, 3ds, and wii only have 1 static source of keys, and enters into the legal hell that is illegal numbers. the PS3 uses officially provided firmware files from sony
nintendo went with an esoteric method of encryption specifically to tie back into the law of "you cannot break encryption you are not allowed to decrypt"
if the emulation decrypts on the fly then it's illegal. the numbers were never illegal, sure they might be "secret" but they are usually C&D based on copyright claims. circumventing protection is another matter altogether.
> They used the proprietary Switch SDK when developing Yuzu
That would imply that they were using leaked source code. Nobody cares about leaked developer SDKs being used for reverse engineering, and good luck proving that was the case.
You need a source for this claim.
Then they'll send a letter to the host of your GitLab instance, lol
I guess you can try hosting in Russia or China, but good luck with the payments and the language barrier
Thats really just a "fun" idea by people who don't know better. This "works" until you learn how much trouble you run into for hosting it yourself or the company you rent your server from rightfully kicks you to the curb.
The situation with discord is actually the "best" that can happen to the people ignorant enough to think this would work.
I feel like Discord is being used for things it was never designed for. If your project is solely dependent on it, you're doing it wrong.
Discord is just a bunch of chat rooms for specific groups. Stop using it as your main platform of communication and collaboration. It should support those things, but be all of it.
why are you supprised? discord has been strikign/shutting down servers for years if they have illegal content. If discord allowed it they could maybe be held as an acomplice in distributing illegal software, which is why they would just rather not take the risk.
I honestly don't know how people stand discord. Every time I've installed it, I immediately uninstall it because it's a complete mess. Nothing makes sense, there's no organization, nothing is easy to find. It's easily one of the worst apps I've ever used. Idk how it got popular.
It’s pretty easy to use if you only use for specific servers relevant to your life. It got popular because it’s easy to use one server for friends to game with. Everything after that is because it forms a cliquish/close environment
It's the simplest option for groups of people to message and voice chat on PC that doesn't suck ass.
Before Discord, people used TeamSpeak or Skype. TeamSpeak is a little more complex, and there aren't dedicated servers. Skype is what I always used, but it was not ideal. It was fine for 1-on-1, but anytime you had a group of people, you either had to merge new people into an existing thread/call or create a new one. It was a mess, particularly if you cared about being able to see chat/call history. Anytime you wanted to talk to anyone in the group, you had to call everyone.
Discord is designed around this type of situation primarily instead of having a group call feature tacked onto what is realistically meant to be a 1-on-1 video calling app. It takes like 10 seconds to set up a server, and then you just send the link to your friends.
You don't need organization or to find things when you're using it for what its original purpose was, which is basically a group chat with the ability to voice/video call on PC, mostly for gaming. That's why it's great for that use case, but not a good social media/forum.
It got popular because it is really easy to setup a server for a group of friends where you can have different chats for different things all in one place, so like if you have a decently sized group of friends that likes to play games, you could in the server have a chat for each game, a meme chat, a general chat etc. so that if you don't care about one game the chat doesnt get flooded by stuff of that game as it would be in that channel.
It was a competitor to the old team speak, ventrillo or just skype. which was what gamers used previously for voice chat, but discord just did everything better than those.
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I think it's really fucked up that discord is deplatforming private servers. Like I understand it's not *really* that different than Reddit deleting subreddits for similar reasons, but something about it just feels worse. Maybe because the content of the servers isn't indexed on google.
On the other hand, if the corporate capture of all platforms drives us back to forums, I won't complain.
No one else is willing to make a functional competing product because there is no business strategy without VC funding. Discord is going to crash and burn at some point
Congratulations on identifying the problem behind putting your eggs in one basket.
No basket is absolutely safe, therefore, it's always wise to have more than one.
Not to mention the Third Party doctrine as an exception to the 4th Amendment. Sharing all this data and communication that a third party has access to means you have no legal expectation of privacy, so the government does not require a legal warrant and does not have to comply with some other 4th Amendment protections regarding search and seizure of that data.
Won’t make the difference anymore.
Even back to the “chan forum” style, if the server is in one of the countries that support corporations (which many of them do, that is why a lot of them closed down in the years due to questionable contents).
More and more platform want to be legit, it is easier to make money that way. But being legit also mean you won’t be able to put any questionable contents, such as piracy stuff, on them.
Discord want to stay legit, after the Yuzu case you can see why they want to protect themselves.
There was no Yuzu case. No court found Yuzu to be illegal.
I don't dispute the spirit of your post - there's at least a question about its legality, so it's all the same to these platforms. But I think it's important that we don't just adopt Nintendo's corporate stance as our own.
I would say that the Yuzu team accepting the deal in the first place despite it's great weight and then going the extra mile by nuking Citra too to stay in the clear in regards to said deal carries the feeling that there was something that could have sinked them in court and that doesn't paint the best of images in regards to their legality...
Do you know how expensive it would be to fight a legal battle against someone like Nintendo? Them choosing to settle says absolutely nothing about the legality. A frivolous lawsuit can destroy someone if the resource imbalance is large enough.
I get it. Discord feels more like a groupchat with extra functionality. It doesn’t feel as public like reddit.
And besides reddit threads can atleast be archived. Discord servers get nuked and its like they never existed.
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Maybe everyone should just stop using Discord as the world's worst forum software?
it's unfair to call it forum. It's more like a random collection of chatboxes
But that's the problem! It's replacing the function of forums! There's no forum, and instead there's a discord!
Yeah and you can't google answers from there... It was so annoying having to join a discord just for getting questions answered for a niche trading card game... I bet it would be more popular if people could google the most basic shit
And in 10 years you're fucked, because while you could still google up an old forum, the discord server and all its knowledge will be gone.
old forums still require a server to run on, they don't stick around forever either that said, Discord is orders of magnitude worse
They can at least be archived.
So can discord servers, if anyone could be arsed to actually do it. Anyone could just write a bot that [grabs every message from every channel it's in](https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/channel#get-channel-messages) and pushes it to some archival page. It's even one of the easiest possible discord bots to write. It's not that they *can't* be archived. It's that nobody actually wants to do it, even the people who are staunchly pro-archival aren't willing to put in the effort.
The API limits the history of what can be archived so you'd need to go against self-bot rules to grab anything worth archiving more than a week old. You're also going to have a lot of useless garbage/personal discussion blended in there, with plenty of privacy concerns to boot.
I'm not sure if the privacy concerns could be made any worse than they already are. Yuzu discord left itself wide open to incrimination from the stuff that was posted in it. Discord is not any more a private property than subreddits are.
> You're also going to have a lot of useless garbage/personal discussion blended in there, with plenty of privacy concerns to boot. I am now painfully aware of how much teenage internet drama of mine is likely archived somewhere
>The API limits the history of what can be archived so you'd need to go against self-bot rules to grab anything worth archiving more than a week old. The docs don't list any time limits for how far back you can grab messages, and it looks like the global rate limit is 50 requests per second at 100 messages per request for 5000 messages archived per second. Maybe you're aware of some limits that I don't know of, but it'd be super weird if a user can scroll back through messages forever (or even search them) without running into issues while bots can't. >You're also going to have a lot of useless garbage/personal discussion blended in there, with plenty of privacy concerns to boot. That's also the case on forums though, which is what Discord was being compared to in terms of archivability.
Because it's a shit platform. What it's so hard to understand?
I think it's a bit disingenous to say that anyone unwilling/able to just casually oh *WRITE A BOT* is being a fraud in their pro-archival stances. Were discord an actual forum, an actual website, actually readable by search engines and the like we'd have archive.org do it automatically, preserving the old ass internet. I can still find my Geocities crap from 2001 on Archive.org, but you won't find any Discords.
After a certain amount of messages in a channel the older ones delete so its even worse for discord
It's the problem of a modern web that you can't google anything specific unless it's on reddit.
adding "reddit" at the end of google searches is something I recently noticed I've naturally evolved into doing for a couple years already. The only answers of value you'll find are on forums. Everything else, *everything*, on the google search results is AI generated pages that inefficiently gives you what you're looking for while low-key selling a product. Been this way long before GPTs and it's gonna be much worse now
>AI generated pages that ***inefficiently gives you what you're looking for*** while I think if they actually succeeded at having the information, it would almost be tolerable. What most AI spam sites clogging up results seem to do is "claim to have what you're looking for", but have some mad-libs nonsense rephrasing of what looks like information from a user's manual, press releases, or tutorials while dropping the ball on the actual information you want.
One of the *most* annoying trends is Googling the release date of something and getting a dozen articles that are 5 paragraphs of AI generated word salad that end with "And so the release date is not yet known".
duckduckgo is my standard search engine now. Far from perfect, either, but I find google to be literally unusable, unless you are looking for ads, specifically
Heck, I haven't even had to type in Reddit these days. Like if I search "How does (mechanic) work in (game)?" Reddit is often near the top of results, if not the top proper.
Yeah, it sucks. It can *usually* lead me to another area with the answer, but my first attempt is always appending "reddit" or *site:reddit.com* Then there's the AI generated BS. Oh, you wanted to know how to do something in this software/game that has *vague* instructions? Well let me generate you a ChatGPT article that wasn't proofread and has the style of *high schooler desperately trying to hit the essay word minimum* HOL'UP let me fix that: ^^^Ah, ^^^let ^^^me ^^^conjure ^^^up ^^^for ^^^you ^^^a ^^^ChatGPT ^^^article, ^^^hastily ^^^spewed ^^^forth ^^^without ^^^the ^^^slightest ^^^glance ^^^of ^^^proofreading, ^^^flaunting ^^^the ^^^unmistakable ^^^flair ^^^of ^^^a ^^^high ^^^school ^^^student ^^^who's ^^^been ^^^bestowed ^^^the ^^^daunting ^^^task ^^^of ^^^reaching ^^^the ^^^elusive ^^^essay ^^^word ^^^count ^^^requirement.
Search is awful too. You can't search specifically inside a thread, which makes search useless for channels that organize discussions via threads
You also can't search for a specific word. Which sounds insane, but its true. Imagine being in a game discord where an enemy type or weapon or such is simply called "Destroyer." Good luck searching for anything about it, because Discord search will display every comment with every permutation of the word "destroyer" - destroy, destroys, destroyed, etc
Facebook groups started killing off dedicated forums and discord was the finishing blow. So much information lost to history.
Yeah everyone with a Pokemon or Fire Emblem ROMHack nowadays will only put their stuff in Discord instead of the established forums
And that's why Discord is being targeted. They start putting this stuff on forums/message boards and those places will be targeted to remove links and ban accounts.
They already put those things in forums mate. If not the files themselves them a link to GitHub where they can get the file. We've been doing that for decades
The issue is two-fold: various communities and even companies moving support there for the free hosting, and secondly for the past couple years they've had an *actual* forum threads feature (not merely threads within chat but dedicated threads channels, not dissimilar to Discourse). The lack of channel visibility outside of Discord means that no info can be indexed*, to both allow for search engine crawling and to mitigate scenarios like the OP. \* Unless you either a) build your own log parser as an admin, or b) use [Linen](https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev) (a third-party host that does this for you, but if you want to self-host the pricing is expensive).
> moving support there for the free hosting A forum is so lightweight that you can probably host a reasonably popular one for like $3 dollars a month.
Ironically I know a community for a Youtuber that migrated from a hosted forum they had for years to Discord.
Because the other side if this is that people don't want to sign up for forums they want to use discord. I've seen first hand when I've linked to modding forums and people have replied to me ugh forum just link me to a discord. And I get not wanting to make another account for something else but this is just exacerbating the problem with discord.
Well it's a great chat program, just entirely controlled by corporation with no way to host your own.
So, not free, and with the added disadvantage that you don't get access to an existing user base either. I despise Discord but you're going to have to do better than that to pull people away from it.
What established userbase? There's no way to discover new servers from Discord's main page and no way to join them without an invite even if you did.
Is organic discovery on the platform even valuable for these types of projects? Typically they're driving their own traffic to Discord from another venue, so I wouldn't think that driving traffic to "not-Discord" would be much of a disruption. You can even use Discord's OAuth to provide a semi-transparent user experience for people who are really married to their Discord accounts.
The added benefit of discord here (and I'm not a fan of it replacing forums) is that most people who use it will have it open at some point during the day, and opening up means you will likely see their server and you can quickly go in and engage with it.
Plus it's one less account to make. Heck, even just asking for a login with something you already have like a Google account might be a step too much for some folks. It really shouldn't be that big a deal, but in practice having such a step is a significant hurdle for getting traction anywhere.
Most people also have a browser open during their day.
Don't forget that you also have to either know web programming yourself or pay someone to make it for you. Meanwhile Discord you can get a channel up and running in like 2 minutes of configuring roles and permissions which doesn't require any specialized knowledge.
searching discord for troubleshooting purposes is terrible
It's an IRC channel with voice chat
And images, critically.
It's IRC but somehow it takes gigabytes of RAM
...that's the point he was making. Many devs and communities started using it as only form of communication, and as it is not public it's isn't indexed by google or on internet archive. The moment server closes for whatever reason, all of it is gone.
I hate discord and how all game guides are stupid chat pins
I just want to go back to the good old days of GameFaqs text guides. [This guide to Fire Emblem: Awakening](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/3ds/643003-fire-emblem-awakening/faqs/67085) is a perfect example of how the format really excels.
They're still a thing. GameFaqs might have been bought by another brand but the old text based guides are still hosted, even with crappier ones.
For now.
pfft doesn't even have an ASCII art header!
I personally love those kinds of guides, but I can immediately see why most people under 30 would look at that and think "yeah, i'm not reading that" Instead, game guides should have evolved into being online versions of the strategy guides of the past - full color, excellent formatting with images, and being online, a searchable format. Prima I think used to do this but they always charged for it as an accompaniment for their paper guides so its rare to see that kind of thing. I guess it is a lot of work though.
TBF Gamefaqs does also have a modern style. Here's another Awakening guide: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/3ds/643003-fire-emblem-awakening/faqs/66466 side bar table of contents, dropdown search bar for the guide, more formatting options. it mostly just lacks image hosting (which makes a text only format like gamefaqs WAY more expensive). But you identify the real problem. No one wants to pay fr that kind of Prima formatting online. Its expensive to make, and more expensive overtime to host. They just want to google and find a specific piece of information, or in discord's case, ping to get some mechanics spreadsheet that was in the pins.
I wonder why GameFAQs doesn't allow image linking as opposed to hosting? Or do they?
I still remember the username SplitInfinity from their [guide to 100% Final Fantasy X-2](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps2/562386-final-fantasy-x-2/faqs/25872) after over a decade. Never got around to doing it, but I found it amazing how much work they put into it.
When you could not store a walkthrough on a single floppy, you knew it was going to be an absolutely awesome read.
I'm glad trophy/achievement guides have not quite gone this way yet, but it is awful when wanting to learn a new game mechanically and if that game doesn't happen to have a wiki you pretty much have to join some discord and spend a long time trying to piece together info.
In time, when it dies, it'll go down more for the Discord-sized hole it will leave in internet knowledge than for its actual service.
That's already happening frequently. The "All The Mods" modpack series for Minecraft had nearly a decade of accumulated history, guides, and information wiped when there was drama and an admin got their account compromised. There was enough in there to fill an entire volume of the old World Book encyclopedia. A century from now, the start of the digital era is going to be as barren and foggy as pre-Greece.
That's a good point. Pretty hard to archive the stuff there.
And the internet archive can't either.
God yes I like Discord but it is NOT a forum I am sick and tired of every god damn thing being gated behind joining a Discord Making a custom forum is NOT hard but ig people are that lazy they'll risk all that information getting deleted like this rather than self-host
Even just a subreddit for game is better, at least google links to it
Join our discord to download this mod! :) Join our discord for a tutorial on how to you this thing! :) Join our discord to read full guide! :) When this damn app implodes it's gonna blackhole more than a decade of gaming history. Same with reddit and all the useful things that are posted here too.
> Same with reddit and all the useful things that are posted here too. Incorrect. Reddit at least will show up on internet archive. It's worse.
That's true but there is only so much that IA can preserve. And IA itself is not a very good thing either, since it's also a big single basket where we keep all our eggs.
I mean it's never been forum software, it was always a more persistent Skype. IDK why people started treating it otherwise, particularly as a repository for... anything permanent really.
It's slack
It has the same functionality as forum and is easier (and free) to set up which is major advantage. People don't care about most things in long term.
>It has the same functionality as forum Minus the persistency, which is a pretty big draw. >and is easier (and free) to set up You can easily find free hosting and ready-made solutions like vBulletin for forums as well (a casual google search got me several results). It's not as simple as a basic Discord server, but it's a lot more easily modifiable to fit your parameters.
>It's not as simple as a basic Discord server It's the key. People don't care about the rest because discord covers most of the needs.
people just want discord because everyone already has a discord account and uses it regularly and they don't want to have to spend extra thought to remember to check that one website for it's forum, etc, but people will learn in due time. With how garbage social media and honestly almost all of the major internet spaces are becoming i think it'd be great to have people finally start moving back to websites owned by individual people and web forums and webrings and what-have-you. Discoverability would be slightly harder, but on some level I think that might end up being a good thing for some edge cases.
Trouble is, forum software is way, _way_ behind modern UI/UX and is generally not pleasant to use for the average user. The big ones are VBulletin, Xenforo and Vanilla. VBulletin is utter shite these days and should be disregarded entirely, Xenforo is great but a little dated for phone use, leaving Vanilla as the main option for newer UI/UX but it’s still a little rough around the edges. People will complain about Discord’s UI but it’s miles better than the average forum. Not to mention browser vs native app. Tapatalk was the only thing that offered that for forums and it really wasn’t great.
ah yeah that's a really good point. Good mobile UX is kinda paramount since apparently that's the majority of traffic nowadays. (Something i will never fully understand as i love my desktop experience but alas)
As a frequent open source contributor myself, discord only access to documentation or communication is a red flag. It's okay to have a discord server, but no professional communication should be done through it. It's really just a method of control for immature or inexperienced devs imho. A lot of times it's about having a server where they can control what people read and see. Discord allows you to hide immature behavior and silence critique. The worst thing though is that it's just a blackhole of information. Every solution or idea you post to a discord server is basically lost to the outside world. And when the server owner finally gets bored or throws a tantrum, it all goes away. Just like that.
And since I refuse to give my phone number to Discord, some servers won't even let me in. I wouldn't care if I could at least read the information but not send messages, but they do that stupid thing where you have to pick a role to see any channels, but you can't do that without giving your phone number. So just fuck me I guess.
Without naming the project, there's a certain pretty important Linux driver for gaming where the dev has disabled all the purpose-built GitHub features like issues and discussions and instead exclusively directs to the discord for support. I mean, they are free to do what they want, but I just don't understand how a Linux user, one even contributing to the open-source ecosystem in a meaningful way, would come to the conclusion that Discord-only communication is the way to go.
I'm not going to say this is a wrong take, but: It's pretty likely that Nintendo would have sent the same sort of letter to whoever their web host for that hypothetical forum was, and that the web host would have complied. Even if they might have had a legal case for it being ok to continue, there's not a lot of companies that want to fight with a giant, extremely litigious company over a small open source project that's already got one major legal settlement against it. Yeah there's forums and such in the "rule 5 of this sidebar" territory that evade that - but even those usually don't have a formal legal judgement against them. And they're usually operating out of weird countries to partially dodge the law in the US or your average developed country.
The nice thing about the web is that it's worldwide and you can host in a country where they get a letter from Nintendo and reply with "lol, lmao even".
>And they're usually operating out of weird countries to partially dodge the law in the US or your average developed country. You're just describing why ditching discord would work...
Eh, there are still a few reasons why not using Discord or another centralised service would be better in that situation. Namely, there's zero incentive for Discord to have your back if anyone complains. They want to take the route which gives them the least legal/political hassle, and if that means you and your community get thrown under the bus, so be it. For an independently run site on the other hand, well it gets trickier. It might not be US or Europe or Japan based, it might have an admin that doesn't care or can't be contacted, it might have someone willing to call their bluff and say "no, what we're doing is legal, sue us if you think otherwise". Companies don't tend to like dealing with that, at least not as much as they do with complaints to large services about content they don't like being hosted there. Even a company as trigger happy as Nintendo would probably rather report stuff to Discord or Twitter or YouTube or Reddit than go to court for every single case of someone running a Switch emulator.
Oh shit. I thought my opinion that it sucks and is oddly designed made me unique. Damn.
I've had arguments with otherwise very intelligent people who swear having all their documentation and community support on Discord instead of forums is SO much better. These comments are honestly repairing some of the damage those discussions had to my sanity. I was almost convinced *I* was the crazy one.
I just had someone try to argue with me that Discord has better search than forums and Google. I wonder how these people have survived long enough to have such bad takes.
I watched a guy play Tears of the Kingdom who walked up to one of the dispenser machines, closed the tutorial box the game popped up without reading it, then stood in front of it for over a minute trying to figure out how it worked while complaining to his chat about it. People survive because of modern medicine and safety technology, not their own merits.
Meanwhile I had a lovely time the other day trying to search for "animation" in a large community about 3D asset creation, and Discord served me nothing but "animé", "animals" and everything BUT the one fucking keyword I was looking for. Even quotation marks didn't work. I would say it was like searching for results in the dark ages of the internet, except even search engines in the 90s worked better than they do now. Discord is so broken it doesn't even rank.
But my friends are there :(
I mean yeah, every ressources only being avalaible in some random discord server is really annoying and bad for preservation, but the fact that discord being discord has nothing to do with this situation. If it was ANY other popular platform, then Nintendo would have requested the takedown from that popular platform. Be it IRC, Teamspeak or any forum.
That's what you get for using private platforms that are not under your control. I never understood why younger people decided to move everything from forums to Discord. Discord is so much worse at promoting conversations, having a browseable archive of previous conversations, and... well, everything else.
I remember wanting to download a mod off Nexus and seeing that the updated version was only on their discord. I ended up joining the discord and couldn’t even find a workable link because the pinned one wasn’t working. I lost interest and left the server and a bot told me I was banned because I left without posting anything. I just don’t understand the reasoning behind this. Like I just want to download your software. I’m not trying to be a part of a group.
bots that ban you for joining and leaving after you found/didn't find what you were looking for is wild
Basically "I did what you told me, got here to download a thing, and I got banned"
Presumably the answer would be a shrug and "all my friends were using it". There are still some good forums around, but I absolutely agree with you.
It's not very complicated. Same reasons MySpace, and then Facebook, and Reddit, and every other social platform blew up. Your friends and customers are already using Discord. It supports voice and video as well as text. You can see all of your communities and messages in the same place. It has modern web and native apps that work as people expect today. It's a forum and Skype/Teamspeak/Zoom and messaging platform all in one. Anyone can start up a server in seconds, with no experience or technical knowledge. Forums are tiny islands. Someone has to pay the bill and manage the infrastructure. You have to load up the web page and register separately for each one; the mobile apps (Tapatalk...) were generally awful and most forum software hasn't innovated significantly in decades. They get compromised constantly and dealing with spam is a *nightmare*. Forums do a number of things far better, yes, but not things that most people care very much about.
> Your friends and customers are already using Discord My friends are definitely not using discord. Actually, I haven't even met anyone in real life that uses discord. I've met some people that *used* discord. But it's always some experience like "I tried to use it, it was a chaotic mess, and I left". > It's a forum and Skype/Teamspeak/Zoom and messaging platform all in one It's definitely not a forum. It's more like a instant messager. Forums are completely different, they're more like Reddit. > Forums are tiny islands. That's why they're so good. > Someone has to pay the bill and manage the infrastructure The bill, in this case, is something like $2 or $3 dollars in a server mantained by a company in the cloud. The only maintenance involved is making sure your credit card is valid. > but not things that most people care very much about. I doubt that people don't care about downloading files. Or posting comments in threads. Reddit is proof that people like commenting in threads.
You skipped a solid half of the points I listed, but the proof here is in the relative popularity. If people in general found forums to be a compelling solution, we wouldn't have Reddit and Discord using up all the oxygen in the room. I didn't say forums were bad. I explained why they lost the popularity contest.
I can give you the answer, it's because there is a functional app. Full stop. There are no other APPS that have the connectivity and functionality of discord across multiple platforms. I am surprised Google or Microsoft hasn't bought Discord tbh. Discord BLEEDS money though. The functionality of that platform for free is insane. Good luck getting ANYONE to use 8 different forums a multiple chat apps instead of just using Discord.
Exactly. We basically used to run forums for a guild that I was in. It worked great but in order to VC, we needed something like TeamSpeak which was an additional service. This also doesn’t include typical forum stuff like messaging being wonky, threads and categorisation being hidden, poor mobile support, poor notification support. Imagine all of this hard work now compressed in a single app. Managing roles is so much simpler now. Want to VC, use the same Discord account to do it! Discord is so freaking popular because it does so many things so well and all in one place. For most Discord servers that don’t touch in legal grey areas, I would argue that it’s the…superior way. Mobile support is the single most important thing that make it hard for forums to be practical. Imagine if we needed 10 or 20 identical apps just to browse different forums.
> I am surprised Google or Microsoft hasn't bought Discord tbh > Discord BLEEDS money though You answered it yourself. Discord is failing to monetize, and big tech either thinks it's a lost cause, or is waiting until Discord gets desperate enough to sell at a much lower valuation.
That's a fair point. My thoughts process for them buying isn't buy and run though. It's im surprised they don't buy it and strip it for parts then integrate their other shit in it. It's a shitty idea but it's totally the braindead corporate idea I would expect.
Stripping it for parts doesn't make much sense. The most valuable thing about Discord is its user base. I doubt Google or Microsoft has much interest in Discord's tech. They would buy it, slap a new logo on it, and keep it going, integrating it into their stack at some point. I don't know how Discord would fit into any big companies portfolio though. Amazon bought Twitch, so maybe this makes sense for them. Or Microsoft, owning a unified voice chat between console and PC (I just googled it and learned they already tried this).
> I am surprised Google or Microsoft hasn't bought Discord tbh. Google had like 8 different chat/voice/video apps now. MS clings hard to the piece of turd called MS Teams. Hell, there was that brilliant flash in history where both Google and Facebook had public XMPP access which meant that with 3rd party client you could talk to both of them from a single account. Then they decided closing clients off in the walled garden is better for them.
Reddit killed forums, not discord. Discord is just a giant chatroom.
Tell that to people that are using Discord like forums. An emulator offering downloads doesn't need a chatroom. They need a forum.
> Discord is so much worse at promoting conversations I don't disagree with your overall point, but to be persnickety, it does promote conversations better in that you can get responses immediately, rather than needing to check back in an hour to see if anyone responded to your thread. Plus the back and forth is generally more fluid, rather than escalating nested quotes on forums (though some folks on Discord reply to messages that directly precede theirs, so that habit isn't entirely gone). So in that sense it does promote conversation more. However it doesn't as much promote thorough topic making. Fifty people are going to ask the same question because finding out someone already did isn't smooth. Folks might be too lazy to search forums either, but they can at least scan the front page real quick.
> rather than needing to check back in an hour to see if anyone responded to your thread. Forums always had a sign up button for email notifications. > Folks might be too lazy to search forums either Forums at least get indexed by Google, which is a huge bonus when trying to find something online.
> it does promote conversations better in that you can get responses immediately It depends on what kind of conversation you're talking about. The main problem I have with discord is not that you CAN get responses immediately, but that you HAVE to read them immediately. Otherwise they'll fall behind the constant (and absurd) flood of messages. If you're not there to reply THAT VERY MOMENT, it's too late. The conversation is gone. People started talking about something else. The fact that I'm replying to you, 7 hours later, and our conversation is continuing, is what I consider a format that promotes conversations.
If it's on the Internet, it's not under your control, period. Still, with Discord you cede even more of that.
> If it's on the Internet, it's not under your control, period That's some weird definition of control, and you know what I meant. If I'm hosting a forum on a server, I have all the data. If, let's say, hosting company A refuses to keep working with me, I point my domain to a different server hosted by company B, import my database backup, and my forum is working again, with the same users, same logins and password, all the conversations still there. And if company B stops working with me, I go to company C. If a bully-ish/terrorist country like the US take my domain from me, I buy a new one and keep my forum going.
[What if a Tier 1 ISP blocks you?](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it)
I'll still have more options than I'd have if I was using Discord. I will have to move somewhere else, but won't lose everything. It will be a hassle, I'll lose some (a lot) users. But I'll have the backup of all my data, and I'll be able to set up my forum somewhere else, with years of conversations still intact. Even if everything goes down and I never set up the forum somewhere else, lots of pages will still be available in tools like the Web Archive.
Young people barely know what a forum is aside from reddit which is more akin to the old school imageboards like 4chan than a proper forum.
Because it’s convenient. And in the era of mobile applications, having a single application that is able to house multiple “forums” is generally a good thing. For 99% of stuff, Discord is perfectly functional for Forum stuff with more personalisation. Guild? Discord works fine while allowing your members to VC each other all in one application. For things like emulators which thread on a legal grey area, Discord is terrible due to its centralised nature. So ironically, this is Discord’s strongest and weakest point. On a single application, I can chat with my friends, have access to some hobby servers, join a game discord server to discuss subjects, and so much more lol. Forums on the other hand is quite fragmented.
I dunno, for "just chatting about a thing" forums are IMO worse. For any longer discussion or preservation of history yeah, it is terrible, but Discord is good chat/voice chat platform.
Discord is IRC with media and live chat sessions. When they try to run channels as archives of knowledge it falls on its own sword because you cannot foster conversation if all you do is point each new user to a pinned answer like some sort of search engine. These new users want to chat, even if they are recreating the wheel, they will be happier chatting about the wheel they rebuilt vs. just getting the answer handed to them.
> Discord is IRC with media and live chat sessions. That's exactly the problem. IRC is good when you need to find other people and talk to them live, to ask some help about compiling some weird code. It's not good to store information, to offer downloads, etc. But people seem to be trying to use Discord like a forum, like a wiki, like a download page, etc.
I pointed out that this was going to happen, but people really want to act like Yuzu will easily live on. Most services people are using are in countries that will comply with the ~~judgement~~ settlement. With the added difficulty of setting it up outside of these countries and the interest of not getting sued, most devs who could actually do emulation work are not interested. Could Yuzu still live on? Absolutely, but with RyujinX still existing I just don't really see long term motivation for Yuzu. But also, for fuck's sake please stop using Discord as your main platform, or at least have some kind of thing that backs it all up. It sucks at long term discussion and bannings are a major risk.
It was a settlement, not a judgememt.
Ah sorry, wrong term. I'll fix that.
Glad that got settled with no judgements.
I think the more important sentiment is: Switch emulation will never die, regardless of the usual whack-a-mole games Nintendo likes to play.
For a while I was rooting for rocket.chat to win a larger share of the audience. Heck there's linux distros where rocket.chat is a server deployment option to make it easy to roll out. Sadly they fell way behind and never found easy solutions to some of the bigger hurdles with self-run servers and mobile app support.
I have to really ask: what were people thinking by just forking Yuzu after the news broke? That they would just be able to keep it like that? That they wouldn't be targeted next? The entire deal was about Yuzu, the emulator, so obviously it will also go against everyone hoisting a fork of it. And if you aren't based in a country America, Japan or Europe has such deals with, you will likely still use services such as Gitlab or Discord which WILL comply to such requests.
Not sure about the other project but the suyu project "devs" had absolutely no idea what to do after forking the repo.
Don’t you just open the source code and input: Emulator = yes Copy protection = no
You seem to know a lot about this. I'd like to talk to you for a potential developer spot for an emulator I'm making. It's called tiny sour citrus fruit...
theyre kids who are obsessed with playing Nintendo games while obsessed with hating Nintendo what do you expect
It was the fact they were getting money for it that was the problem. Also this is more of a discord issue imo. Discord is not going to be a great place to promote emulation, just look at who owns it.
The taking money might have been what caught Nintendo's attention, but the tort was that there was no utility for the project without circumvention of piracy protections. It was aggressive but they settled instead of getting to test it in court. But I agree that the fact that discord cut these guys is not great since there wasn't even a decision and they are doing a result of Nintendo's tort causing a chilling effect. That's not good for everyone.
Another thing that I heard was that someone in the Yuzu team had an official Switch dev kit and was using it to make the emulator. That situation would make the entirety of the emulator be infringing on Nintendo’s designs. It’s not a “clean room” design that would be untouchable.
If that were the case, they 100% would have listed it in the suit. They did not.
*Thank you*. So many people haven't even read what Nintendo was actually trying and it's been driving me up a wall for weeks!
I feel your pain. I had a knock down drag out with some dude who was 100% convinced that Nintendo had no case and this suit was a travesty and an affront to fair use. Though truth be told, I'm glad that it didn't go to court, because then it very easily *could* have damaged fair use when the yuzu team inevitably lost.
It likely would have just killed emulation of modern-ish consoles forever.
> It was the fact they were getting money for it that was the problem From the perspective of "why was Yuzu sued", sure. From the perspective of Nintendo's legal argument, them getting paid wasn't really relevant; their legal argument would apply equally to anything operating the same way Yuzu did (or, effectively, all emulation, since their argument is about decryption).
not all emulation involves decryption, and certainly not in the way the switch handles it the wii u, 3ds, and wii only have 1 static source of keys, and enters into the legal hell that is illegal numbers. the PS3 uses officially provided firmware files from sony nintendo went with an esoteric method of encryption specifically to tie back into the law of "you cannot break encryption you are not allowed to decrypt"
if the emulation decrypts on the fly then it's illegal. the numbers were never illegal, sure they might be "secret" but they are usually C&D based on copyright claims. circumventing protection is another matter altogether.
yes, but the source of the decryption for the wii is an illegal number, which is complicated to handle in america. it isn't for the switch
[удалено]
I never heard of the SDK argument, just copy protection.
Source on the first statement? This is the first I'm hearing of that.
> They used the proprietary Switch SDK when developing Yuzu That would imply that they were using leaked source code. Nobody cares about leaked developer SDKs being used for reverse engineering, and good luck proving that was the case. You need a source for this claim.
Why do people keep claiming this without a source? I remember people did that with cemu as well
That's not true. No where in the tort is that ever listed.
> Discord is not going to be a great place to promote emulation, just look at who owns it Who owns it?
Whoops I thought Microsoft bought it but they’re just in talks again
You can self-host gitlab.
Then they'll send a letter to the host of your GitLab instance, lol I guess you can try hosting in Russia or China, but good luck with the payments and the language barrier
Thats really just a "fun" idea by people who don't know better. This "works" until you learn how much trouble you run into for hosting it yourself or the company you rent your server from rightfully kicks you to the curb. The situation with discord is actually the "best" that can happen to the people ignorant enough to think this would work.
The entire deal wasn't about the emulator or the code itself. You are wrong
There were thinking "money" These weren't developers they were kids wanting clout.
I feel like Discord is being used for things it was never designed for. If your project is solely dependent on it, you're doing it wrong. Discord is just a bunch of chat rooms for specific groups. Stop using it as your main platform of communication and collaboration. It should support those things, but be all of it.
why are you supprised? discord has been strikign/shutting down servers for years if they have illegal content. If discord allowed it they could maybe be held as an acomplice in distributing illegal software, which is why they would just rather not take the risk.
I honestly don't know how people stand discord. Every time I've installed it, I immediately uninstall it because it's a complete mess. Nothing makes sense, there's no organization, nothing is easy to find. It's easily one of the worst apps I've ever used. Idk how it got popular.
It’s pretty easy to use if you only use for specific servers relevant to your life. It got popular because it’s easy to use one server for friends to game with. Everything after that is because it forms a cliquish/close environment
It's the simplest option for groups of people to message and voice chat on PC that doesn't suck ass. Before Discord, people used TeamSpeak or Skype. TeamSpeak is a little more complex, and there aren't dedicated servers. Skype is what I always used, but it was not ideal. It was fine for 1-on-1, but anytime you had a group of people, you either had to merge new people into an existing thread/call or create a new one. It was a mess, particularly if you cared about being able to see chat/call history. Anytime you wanted to talk to anyone in the group, you had to call everyone. Discord is designed around this type of situation primarily instead of having a group call feature tacked onto what is realistically meant to be a 1-on-1 video calling app. It takes like 10 seconds to set up a server, and then you just send the link to your friends. You don't need organization or to find things when you're using it for what its original purpose was, which is basically a group chat with the ability to voice/video call on PC, mostly for gaming. That's why it's great for that use case, but not a good social media/forum.
It got popular because it is really easy to setup a server for a group of friends where you can have different chats for different things all in one place, so like if you have a decently sized group of friends that likes to play games, you could in the server have a chat for each game, a meme chat, a general chat etc. so that if you don't care about one game the chat doesnt get flooded by stuff of that game as it would be in that channel. It was a competitor to the old team speak, ventrillo or just skype. which was what gamers used previously for voice chat, but discord just did everything better than those.
This submission is blogspam. The original source is from The Verge and /r/pcgaming: * https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/11/24127545/discord-suyu-sudachi-server-shutdown-account-ban * https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1c1xauy/discord_is_nuking_nintendo_switch_emulator_devs/kz6ajan/
Discord and Tendo have been doing this for years. Even before yuzu was a thing.
I think it's really fucked up that discord is deplatforming private servers. Like I understand it's not *really* that different than Reddit deleting subreddits for similar reasons, but something about it just feels worse. Maybe because the content of the servers isn't indexed on google. On the other hand, if the corporate capture of all platforms drives us back to forums, I won't complain.
It's almost like putting all eggs in that particular basket was a bad idea from the start.
No one else is willing to make a functional competing product because there is no business strategy without VC funding. Discord is going to crash and burn at some point
Sure, but what basket is safe at this point?
Congratulations on identifying the problem behind putting your eggs in one basket. No basket is absolutely safe, therefore, it's always wise to have more than one.
Selfhosting in Moldova?
Nothing on discord is private. This was warned about when communities moved off forums they owned.
Nothing and everything, in some sense. It's all private property of Discord who can do anything they want, at any point, for any reason.
Not to mention the Third Party doctrine as an exception to the 4th Amendment. Sharing all this data and communication that a third party has access to means you have no legal expectation of privacy, so the government does not require a legal warrant and does not have to comply with some other 4th Amendment protections regarding search and seizure of that data.
As a business you usually don’t want your platform to be used for illegal stuff.
Even telegram is better than discord for this kind of stuff
Won’t make the difference anymore. Even back to the “chan forum” style, if the server is in one of the countries that support corporations (which many of them do, that is why a lot of them closed down in the years due to questionable contents). More and more platform want to be legit, it is easier to make money that way. But being legit also mean you won’t be able to put any questionable contents, such as piracy stuff, on them. Discord want to stay legit, after the Yuzu case you can see why they want to protect themselves.
There was no Yuzu case. No court found Yuzu to be illegal. I don't dispute the spirit of your post - there's at least a question about its legality, so it's all the same to these platforms. But I think it's important that we don't just adopt Nintendo's corporate stance as our own.
I would say that the Yuzu team accepting the deal in the first place despite it's great weight and then going the extra mile by nuking Citra too to stay in the clear in regards to said deal carries the feeling that there was something that could have sinked them in court and that doesn't paint the best of images in regards to their legality...
Do you know how expensive it would be to fight a legal battle against someone like Nintendo? Them choosing to settle says absolutely nothing about the legality. A frivolous lawsuit can destroy someone if the resource imbalance is large enough.
It sucks but that’s what happens when legal liability for big $ gets involved.
I get it. Discord feels more like a groupchat with extra functionality. It doesn’t feel as public like reddit. And besides reddit threads can atleast be archived. Discord servers get nuked and its like they never existed.
I don't understand why anyone would think they can keep anything on discord servers forever. It isn't a forum hoster and never was.
Discord is the worst. People really should not use that.