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.
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.
So basically discord finally got a usable search. I count that as a win.
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).
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.
wtf…… going to get worse after IPO!
Probably our only chance to find solutions to problems with open source software that uses Discord as their forum
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?
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.
Because IRC is awesome, always has been
That would be equally annoying. Probably a better signal to noise ratio on IRC though; Discord descends into memes almost instantly.
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.
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.
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!
Hey now you can’t say the R word that no longer dsm-5 compliant
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.
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.
You mean NNTP ?
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
Great news for open source AI.
Well yeah, it’s not encrypted. It would be the same as 10 years of Reddit posts or Lemmy posts scraped
This isn’t even them scraping private chats and small servers, they just scraped public servers in the discovery tab. None of that information was ever private, and every user can browse the chat history there.
Yeah, exactly. It may sound scary or like a violation of privacy, but there is no privacy when posting to public online areas.
“Researchers scrape thousands of hours of news footage from their TVs!” is about as big a deal, honestly.
In other words-- your sexting is safe, friends.
It also includes deleted messages. And they refuse to delete things when someone opts out.
It also includes deleted messages. And they refuse to delete things when someone opts out
Deleted messages are not included. Neither the public nor the API allows you to read deleted messages
Upon joining a server, users gain access to all non-deleted historical content within public channels, and the same is valid for data retrieval using their API.
Excellent point if searchcord used the api. They created unmarked bot accounts that save all the messages.
Searchcord yes, but not the researchers from the headline
There’s literally no difference. Each Discord server is like a tiny chunk of Reddit. If anyone expected any privacy on these servers, they’re nuts.
It’s indeed not a miracle.
Saving this article for the next time someone says “Just message me on discord its easier”.
Ooh! Do Teams next
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.
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.
But I want something like Discord. Just not corporate owned…
Matrix?
Not as featureful, but my friends and I run our own xmpp server
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?
If they aren’t comfortable with their Discord messages being public, perhaps they shouldn’t have posted those messages in a public forum that the public can access.
Meanwhile AI scrapers: This will be a fine addition to my collection.
🚩
marked safe
from Brazilian mass discord message leak
(never used discord)
