Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active.
Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called “Searchcord” based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.
Probably our only chance to find solutions to problems with open source software that uses Discord as their forum
I spent nearly three hours today between discord and matrix trying to figure out how to get these two pieces of software to talk using a certain protocol.
Imagine if there were online indexable platforms where people could publish this information so it’s easily accessible rather than having to scour through message logs hoping to find the right keywords. Such a technology surely doesn’t exist already, right?
I hate discord.
You mean NNTP ?
I don’t hate Discord, I simply hate that so many projects and companies have unanimously decided to use it as the wrong tool for the wrong job.
It’s fine for its intended use case, which is bickering with my friends about video games and fiction, and spamming each other with .gifs and meme images.
Discord is genuinely a great tool for what I used to use Skype for. Talking to my friends, and sharing dumb memes with them in a groupchat format. Companies need to learn that using it as a forum, a Q&A service, a wiki or any other information sharing purpose, is simply fucking retarded.
Language.
We can’t say the F-word on Lemmy?
That’s retarded!
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You can say whatever you want but people are going to judge you for it.
Most people here prefer to use inclusive language that doesn’t make anyone feel unwelcome.
People with actual mental deficiencies exist on Lemmy and it may or may not hurt them to use words like this.
If it hurts even one good person then it’s probably just worth increasing your vocabulary to avoid that.
Not to mention imo suggesting someone is actually “retarded” means they should be treated with understanding and patience. People who are deliberately ignorant don’t deserve that patience.
you get it to work? i didnt have time to get it working in both directions. matrix to discord worked fine but not the other way.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking here. I do not use any bridge between the two, but rather searched in separate communities for my answer. Would’ve been lovely if I could just use a search engine to search indexed forums or so, but since for some reason chat clients have taken the place of forums that’s just not doable.
I’d like to move away from Discord but sadly a bunch of friends still use it. I haven’t read up enough about the bridge thing to figure out if it actually serves a purpose I’d be interested in or not.
Yeah, but then you have something like when people protest deleted their history on reddit which is fine as a protest tactic but leaves a hole where your specific question came up but now there’s nothing there.
Seriously. It’s beyond painful when some open source project only uses Discord for communication. You have to hope that you post your question at a time when the right people are online, and that there’s not a more interesting conversation going on, otherwise it just gets lost. Index that whole dataset.
Given some similar issues, why is it some projects still use IRC then?
That would be equally annoying. Probably a better signal to noise ratio on IRC though; Discord descends into memes almost instantly.
Because IRC is awesome, always has been
there’s a difference between using irc for livetime troubleshooting and not having a forum at all and directing everyone to your livechat discord. i’m sure some sicko out there has run an OSS project on only IRC, but their project likely got no traction because a history of problemsolving posts is important in open source. generally speaking, you need:
- a wiki
- a static indexable searchable forum
- a live chat place for real time communication for novel problems
too many projects these days only have that last one in the form of discord
For projects I am involved with all irc chats are archived and searchable. There is nothing private, no registration needed and searchable.
Quite a bit different.
I’ve always wanted to contribute to The Cutting Room Floor wiki but they hide registration behind a Discord server bot that will give the registration code.
Index that whole dataset
I’ve seen a few projects doing just that with answeroverflow.com and they have come up in my web searches. Not really a solution but at least a stopgap.
Lol, I’ve read this headline and thought “thank fuck, probably the only option to have Discord’s content readable”, I like how universal this opinion is
🚩
marked safe
from Brazilian mass discord message leak
(never used discord)
This is just trolling, at this point.
Every time you post, you’re posting so that Meta, Google, Reddit and every known retail store like Walmart, Target, Kroger, etc. can see it because they bought that info or harvested it themselves. I think these are great announcements so people can see who sees and manipulates you with your own contributions of data.
The feedback loop is everywhere in tech.
So this is:
'Uh guys, Discord chats leaked…"
For… what, just literally everyone who used Discord between 2015 and 2017, everyone who was an early adopter?
Dear fucking god.
I used to say ‘someday, people will learn’, but fucking no obviously not, no they won’t, almost everyone is an idiot and/or truly doesn’t care.
… I guess this’ll be fodder for a whole bunch of dramatubers / pedohunters for the next year or so…
The disappearance of forum public discussion to unsearchable, unpreserved, discord semi-private discussion chambers is probably the largest informational catastrophe of the internet so far.
But I want something like Discord. Just not corporate owned…
Matrix?
Not as featureful, but my friends and I run our own xmpp server
I potentially agree, but as a possible competitor, I submit:
Everything DOGE has done in the last 3 months.
That information was at least available to capture.
With discord it was EULA-walled and anti-scraper locked
… No no no it all wasn’t.
The DOGE goons made up multiple logins to multiple US Gov databases that are not open to the public… inucluding the DoD’s SIPRNet…
… and we know at least some of these logins were also used from utterly unsecure personal devices, remotely, not onsite, and that they’ve been getting used by IP addresses from all over the place, all over the world, meaning said login creds have either outright been given away, or been compromised by other nation state’s hackers, or just total rando hackers.
It wasn’t the chats though. It was public servers that can be found through the discovery tab. I would love to be up and arms about this and convince people to switch but… Looking at it objectively, this isn’t terribly different from if they’d archived public subreddits and their posts.
Great news for open source AI.
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That’s good news. Internet archiving is an important endeavor because you never know when they‘ll pull the plug. Now it‘s a little more secured and probably far more useful than in Discord‘s hands alone.
Not for messages that are supposed to be private lol. Let me just make a copy of all texts you’ve sent over the last decade, for “archiving”.
If you think messages you post anywhere on the internet are private, you’re in for a bad time.
Texts are sent in plain-text and I wouldn’t recommend discussing anything you’d like to keep private via text.
This says it was done via the API so they wouldn’t be private messages.
So how does this work? Like how did they get those messages through API calls? Also, is this not something that Discord would dislike since it dilutes the value of their data horde?
They just wanted to find new slurs.
Saving this article for the next time someone says “Just message me on discord its easier”.
I see a lot of drama here in the thread, people decrying data leaks, how Discord is very very bad, and a number of people wanting the “good old days” of forums.
Yes. I like forums too, but, uh…
These researchers scraped publicly posted messages. Keyword here being “public”. How would anything similarly public, like a forum, be better?
I actually remember the times when forums were at their peak. I hung out on BZPower for Bionicle things, and the Relic News Forum for Homeworld modding. You know what they had? Google bots that scraped messages, looked for certain words, and populated websites with advertisements based on what it could scrape from forums.
Pretty sure Lemmy doesn’t do encryption either, unless there’s some very special, private Lemmy server that nobody has access to. So the researchers could’ve just as well scraped the fediverse.
How would anything similarly public, like a forum, be better?
Forums were the primary way that groups would talk with one another pre-global scale social media.
They could contain public subforums, but the majority of all of the forums that I’ve been a part of were not viewable without an account, which was manually approved or required a small payment (to make bans have a chance to actually stick).
People in general have no idea and just want to get spun up on drama and manufactured outrage.
Same thing happened when people started scrapping Twitter 10-15 years ago.
Yeah this being just as easy on bb forums or literally any webpage with a public comment section was my first thought as well…
Isn’t most of the internet scraped anyways, by the internet archive? The concerning part is that this is 100% going to be used to train some coomer brained AI. Scraping, botting, scamming: all those things are going to happen on large public communities.
Yeah, a lot of this push is about ushering in new laws to prevent data scraping.
Propaganda spreads easily through fake accounts—but how do we detect large-scale operations if they’re constantly creating and deleting accounts or trying to blend in with the rest of us? We’d need access to massive data sets to mine for patterns and expose coordinated behavior.
But the powers that benefit from shaping the narrative are the same ones pushing the idea that all scraping is bad. They want people to hate it, so they can justify laws that lock down access. That’s the end game.
People saw “scraped Discord messages” and immediately jumped to “oh shit fuck my private chats have been leaked everybody panic”.
I was hoping to play around with the dataset over the weekend to toy with some text-embedding techniques, but they’ve pulled the cord on the download links.
Anyone have a copy of the full archive they’re willing to share, or a magnet link?
wtf…… going to get worse after IPO!
If you don’t want strangers knowing what you say don’t join open servers it’s pretty easy
Open or close, going to get worse!
If they release closed discord chats they may as well go out of business people will flee
They and companies already doing so.
