YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google

90 points DeepLogin 1 hour ago 55 comments

privacyishuman 1 hour ago | parent

Fluxer is what people should look at if they're trying to get off discord.

Imustaskforhelp 1 hour ago | parent

Fluxer is amazing.

Quick self-promo to my website: https://mirror.forum which can help people find some fluxer communities and also help migrate discord communities to fluxer. It also works for not just fluxer but also matrix and stoat as well.

I have submitted Fluxer 2 times on Hackernews if not more, I really really strongly believe that people of HN should look into it more & (maybe my website as well :D)

layer8 59 minutes ago | parent

Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content. The site also doesn’t explain what it is about. It says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means), but Fluxer doesn’t seem to be bound to terminals?

Imustaskforhelp 35 minutes ago | parent

> Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content.

Yes! Feedback is great and means a lot to me. I never thought about that. I do wonder though how do I exactly fix that as monospace is rather the core identity of my website. I might have to re-think the whole website but I will try to provide the ability for your own fonts. I would sincerely love some great feedback here as well because I had built it extremely with monospace in mind because I thought that it would look good. But perhaps it looks good but monospace is not practical here as you suggest. I can be wrong, I usually am and it was just me wishing to play with monospace fonts.

> says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means),

It just sort of reflected the style of it being terminal or (retro?) but if I have to answer what that means: It probably means nothing relevant, as such, I will remove it.

(Full story for those curious)

It was an experiment: I just had bought a domain out of an mirror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475 (TLDR: someone on HN wanted to show someone else mirror so they showed mirror.org and It led to a very high price so I wondered what the cheapest mirror.<tld> which I like could be), mirror.online was available for 1st year for 1$ at Namecheap (I use tld-list.com to find cheap domain tlds)

(extreme side note I also have a custom tampermonkey script to sometimes find the cheapest one ie. completely available not premium domains but yeah I need to make the script slightly better)

[I built the project because the domain was idling and I wanted to experiment with the architecture of a pure golang binary with modernc sqlite and a 7$/yr VPS and https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/ and I wanted a real project for that so I thought of it after discovering fluxer]

It is sadly vibe-coded. Thus the terminal-graded community comment. I am sorry if I didn't disclose it. I tried to show it to people and didn't get much response and so in the end, I was still happy with the experiment because I just wanted to tinker around but after its completion I was satisfied thus I didn't tinker more with it other than running it and showing it to my friends sometimes.

But knowing that a person cares about it to give me feedback enough makes me warrant to fix the changes that you've mentioned. I will try to fix them.

I will try to add an about-me page and make it better.

Though that being said, I think that the domain renewal is coming soon and I might sell the domain as renewal of 20$ is still slightly expensive for me for experiments (college student budget here!). If I do that, I will hopefully try to create a last archive.org pointing to a new subdomain of a more long lasting domain that I will try to have.

Have a nice day :-D

pavel_lishin 1 hour ago | parent

Do Fluxer, etc., solve the problem of discoverability that this is supposed to help with? Or is it just a not-closed platform?

DexesTTP 23 minutes ago | parent

Fluxer has special "forum" areas that are meant to be searchable on the global web, and discussions in chat channels are private. Which is a much better approach for that issue than Discord "make every message from public servers searchable" imo.

john_strinlai 1 hour ago | parent

why Flxuer and not any of the other dozen or so replacements that have been mentioned every time a discord thread pops up?

DexesTTP 21 minutes ago | parent

It's already self-hostable witha single-client connection ability, and there's ongoing work to make the Fluxer site and all of the self-hosted servers able to federate (with a prototype planned for the end of the year)

hmartin 1 hour ago | parent

How does it compare to Zulip?

BorisMelnik 56 minutes ago | parent

phpBB!

SOTGO 1 hour ago | parent

I'm tentatively hopeful. I think it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord, and at least this is continuing to move towards fixing a lot of the problems that migration caused. I do wonder why they chose now though, it seems like there's potentially a lot of value in keeping this data private, or at least selling it for a fee

ganoushoreilly 1 hour ago | parent

Don't forget why this happened. Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues.

Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.

Freedom2 1 hour ago | parent

Do you have an example of opinions that are counter to the narrative that faced reprisal?

ganoushoreilly 1 hour ago | parent

Are you really questioning if there is reprisal against users or communities that don't toe the line? Cancel culture?

Let's talk Covid discussion, Hunter Biden's laptop, Political opinions, Discussions on Sexuality & Gender, etc. Ironically look at Bluesky last year and the efforts to switch because there was no longer suppression of certain opinions? (How'd that work out).

perchedonstilts 40 minutes ago | parent

>Let's talk Covid discussion, Hunter Biden's laptop, Political opinions, Discussions on Sexuality & Gender,

Let's not. Your cherry picked list of topics reveals you'd never listen to opposition/reality.

ganoushoreilly 29 minutes ago | parent

You sound like you're fun at parties (as long as the discussions follow your opinions).

You do realize where your actions here in this thread are the exact thing we're talking about right? Thankfully this is an open discussion and everyone is free to see it and so far the HN crew haven't been quick to stifle real conversation.

hilariously 15 minutes ago | parent

You do realize your list of choices indicates you follow a groupthink so dense that having a discussion with you is considered a foregone conclusion to most rational human beings?

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhjSYYRGNprYzOArDU9B5...

Here's a nice youtube playlist from Dr. Wilson on why discussing Covid conspiracies is basically a right wing talking point and lie. A damnable lie even.

If you want to "discuss Covid" go right ahead, but repeating misinformation that effectively led to the death of millions of people should leave you ashamed, as you are either a tool of evil or despicable yourself.

Enjoy the open discussion!

john_strinlai 9 minutes ago | parent

>You sound like you're fun at parties

are you going to claim censorship or thought-policing if it's pointed out to you that personal insults are not cool here?

cowlevel 34 minutes ago | parent

On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.

You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".

ganoushoreilly 27 minutes ago | parent

Hell, some of the dev groups ban any discussion of USING llm's in code development. It's intentionally alienating and driving people away. Many of which I have found on Discord. Though even Discord seems to be having a moment of thought policing.

john_strinlai 1 hour ago | parent

im pretty sure most people moved to discord because it is easy and has a lot of nice features, not because they were scared of global thought police

axus 1 hour ago | parent

But they sure are upset now that Discord bans accounts based on reports to its thought police.

ganoushoreilly 58 minutes ago | parent

Both things can be true.

john_strinlai 48 minutes ago | parent

i doubt it is true for the majority, though.

in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.

cowlevel 37 minutes ago | parent

Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.

add-sub-mul-div 29 minutes ago | parent

You can openly be a white supremacist on Twitter now. The reason some people still aren't happy is because what they really want is to be able to have terrible opinions and not be disliked and shunned, which isn't possible. Social repercussions and censorship are different things.

devilsdata 22 minutes ago | parent

I've found that people with terrible opinions aren't happy to stay in their own groups. They want to be part of the nice groups.

perchedonstilts 43 minutes ago | parent

>Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues

This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.

Discord become popular because they capitalized on the emerging online gaming community in the 2010s by offering a convenient and most importantly FREE platform for people to hop online and game with friends/talk with strangers who shared a similar interest.

cowlevel 35 minutes ago | parent

This is true but I think it's both.

The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak. It ran on your own servers and that made it hard to set one up. That's why Discord groups are called "servers", they were hijacking established teamspeak terminology their audience would be familiar with.

And reddit died around the same time by extreme over-moderation.

john_strinlai 34 minutes ago | parent

>The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak.

dont forget about vent and mumble!

cowlevel 32 minutes ago | parent

I don't think they were ever popular. It was always TeamSpeak.

john_strinlai 31 minutes ago | parent

vent was massively popular. basshunter even has a chart-topping song about it. "Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA" or "We're sitting in Ventrilo, playing DotA"

mumble, admittedly, not so much.

AllegedAlec 29 minutes ago | parent

Vi sitter här i venten och spelar lite DotA

ganoushoreilly 30 minutes ago | parent

Your response is the "Chef's kiss". It's exactly these kind of policing actions that drives content away from the masses.

No one said discord wasn't popular. It's substantially popular with gaming communities. It's also very popular with non gaming communities, many of which found it an an alternative to Reddit and others.

AllegedAlec 30 minutes ago | parent

> This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.

"This is such a wrong thing to say that I'm surprised you haven't received reprisal for it"

Proving his point in real time

perchedonstilts 28 minutes ago | parent

It's blatant rage bait/conspiracy thinking. I would argue it goes against HNs guidelines.

Karrot_Kream 31 minutes ago | parent

I don't think this is true for most people on the big issues but do think it's true for a lot of small issues. Reddit (and HN) lead to a lot of pageant show dynamics where the people with the time to hit the buttons decide what content to boost. Small Discord communities are free from that.

JDups 21 minutes ago | parent

Discord is popular because a very significant amount of people prefer the casual social instant chatting aspect over the slower threaded style of forums, especially young people.

nitwit005 15 minutes ago | parent

I'd say the evidence rather strongly suggests people are mostly going to discord to talk about video games and share anime art.

The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.

Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.

nozzlegear 6 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

moralestapia 1 hour ago | parent

>many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord

This was a feature.

This was desired.

This was welcomed by all actors involved.

(You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server)

madrox 1 hour ago | parent

It's to get more users. This is only applying to servers meant to be public, which is probably already getting scraped

gdulli 43 minutes ago | parent

It's a disgrace what the "open" internet has become.

flxngll 1 hour ago | parent

For channels with over 1000 members. I think you have to opt in for your server to be discoverable. Looks like the public message feature is opt out rather than opt in if the server is discoverable.

samtheDamned 1 hour ago | parent

This seems like it would alleviate part of the concern I see on HN a lot regarding open source projects keeping their knowledge bases on isolated and unsearchable discord servers. It's still on a proprietary platform but this might be an improvement overall.

Imustaskforhelp 1 hour ago | parent

I think that it can be a good change depending on how you interpret it but suppose it becomes part of Google search engine then, wouldn't it allow Google's AI quick summary to search/scrape that and have it part of training process

Or having all of the search/scrape data itself be part of the training process of Google/other's AI process?

A quick LLM search gives me the answer as a "maybe", but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up. I remain slightly skeptical as to why Discord wishes to open up to Google*

john_strinlai 1 hour ago | parent

>Discord wishes to open up to Google

they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.

>but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up.

one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.

addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.

Imustaskforhelp 31 minutes ago | parent

> they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.

My apologies. I didn't see that and skimmed through the web-page and I thought that it was a discord-google specific deal.

> one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.

> addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.

True, that can very well be the case but my question of AI training still stands. Couldn't this make many discord texts/discussions part of AI training corpus and AI models as has been the case for many such situations.

I but am just slightly worried about all the AI training that can happen but other than that, its a good change!

freediver 1 hour ago | parent

Just to note that Google is not mentioned in the title and indeed nowhere in the article. Searching the web is broader than 'google'.

rdmuser 1 hour ago | parent

I'm always so conflicted about editing article titles like this for posts. I stick to original titles since that's the rules but it's tempting not to every time I see a post hit front page with good hooks edited in. These edits clearly work and rarely seem to be punished.

myself248 15 minutes ago | parent

It's like every smartphone is an iPhone, in the parlance of headlines. It's fewer letters.

rdmuser 1 hour ago | parent

You can opt out at an account level. I just checked and I'm already opted out so it seems like it might be using your previous data opt out settings.

CM30 18 minutes ago | parent

Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.

I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.