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Just a gentle warning: try out alternative Discord clients with a non-important account first. A few years ago, I used ripcord¹ and got automatically banned by

Just a gentle warning: try out alternative Discord clients with a non-important account first. A few years ago, I used ripcord¹ and got automatically banned by Discord - probably because I had started the original Discord client on the same computer, and this triggered some heuristics. Discord's first-level support was not willing to reinstate my account, and I had to² track down their head of security on Twitter to get my account reinstated. ¹) https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/, no new releases since 2021 ²) I'd not generally suggest this approach. However, since COVID we have been using Discord a lot for informal communication with our students. Losing access to a dozen course servers mid-semester was a huge problem for me.

yellowapple 2y ago
The same thing happened to me with Telegram years ago, when I logged into my account using the Haiku port of Telegram's desktop client.
- reddalo 2y ago
  Telegram allows third-party clients however
taurknaut 2y ago
What incentive do they have to control the client? Does discord have ads?
- chrisldgk 2y ago
  No third party ads like you might be thinking, but a lot of in-app upsells for discord nitro (their pro tier), server boosts, custom emotes and stuff like that. Their monetization scheme is very twitch-like, I’d not be surprised if they don’t like you using third party clients that don’t shove all of that in your face.
  - idle_zealot 2y ago
    And yet Twitch seems to allow BTT, which adds custom emotes and such that a user would normally need to pay for.
    - tart-lemonade 2y ago
      I haven't seen any streamers who officially put their sub emotes on BTTV/FFZ/7TV and enable them in their channel, so if anything they end up supplementing the sub emotes rather than providing a reason to avoid subscribing. Twitch could increase sub emote limits, but I'm not sure they would want to. Many emotes on FFZ et al are memes used in hundreds of channels and could not be used on Twitch even if copyright was not a concern due to violating many of the other sub emote guidelines: https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/emote-guidelines?language=en_US https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/emote-guidelines?language=e... So Twitch has no real reason to try and compete on this front. They just don't officially support it, which means anyone using the official Twitch app or not using any browser extensions will only see them as weird text in the chat. If Twitch updates the layout and breaks the extensions, the extensions will adapt, so power users get a ton of extra features at no cost to Twitch. While these services make money riding Twitch's coattails, anyone willing to pay for the premium tiers of these services is likely either a streamer who wants to load up more meme emotes for their chat to use (increases engagement) or is the kind of power user who subscribes to multiple streamers at tier 2 or 3, so I doubt they hurt Twitch's bottom line. If anything, going to war with these extensions would likely hurt their bottom line since features like FFZ's audio compressor make many streamers' terrible audio settings listenable.
  - cudder 2y ago
    Their official client also collects a disturbing amount of telemetry that they'll miss out on.
    - giancarlostoro 2y ago
      Reminds me of the time a friend on Discord mentioned a very specific brand of ramen I didnt google, only to see an ad for this very niche brand of ramen on Facebook when I opened Facebook two minutes later. I use Facebook and Instagram drastically less every time this happens. Cant make a cent off me if I am not on your platform.
- erk__ 2y ago
  Mostly to combat bots as far as I am aware, and it can be hard to programmatically tell the difference between a malicious bot and a normal user using a 3rd party client.
  - DrillShopper 2y ago
    With all that AI and machine learning out here I was lead to believe that this is largely trivial now.
- itishappy 2y ago
  Yes, Discord has ads. "Click this button to activate double XP in CoD" sort of thing They're fairly minimal and unobtrusive (and may even be opt-out), but also implemented with some minorly annoying dark patterns like being animated into existence in the middle of the toolbar. (I fairly commonly end up accepting "quests" when trying to change audio settings.) They also push Nitro the same way. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/25516720403223-Ads-Policy https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/25516720403223...
superkuh 2y ago
Yep. Discord is not a chat protocol. It is a proprietary corporate service. The reason you can't use alternative clients for their service is (the TOS and...) that the client spies on you and that data is (part of) your payment. They send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" and then recently "/science" (but it's still a POST with no response). Also their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. On launch the desktop client opens websocket server for command and control listening. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).
- neilv 2y ago
  I'm always saddened when I see an open source project's page say something like "Join us on Discord!" I can understand an open source project being on GitHub, since, at one point, they were a pretty warm-fuzzy place, and so attracted a lot of open source projects, before they sold out to Microsoft. But I really don't know how so many open source projects looked at Discord, early on, and thought that's a good idea. AFAICT, Discord is pretty antithetical to open source and, especially, libre software.
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    Because there isn't a good replacement in open source software. Matrix and others are pretty normie hostile. I help run a few Discord servers and due to financials, I'm always worried about extremely hostile actions by them to make money. My list of things good open source replacement would have: Decentralized chat servers with history Run a optional centralized login service so users have one login Optional centralized service knows what servers the user is a member of so any client they login to will automatically know which servers they are member of. Centralized Mobile Notification service Federation is absolutely not a requirement or a way around this.
unosama 2y ago
Stop voluntarily communicating through platforms that so easily ban you.
- yungporko 2y ago
  so virtually every platform on the entire internet?
  - vetrom 2y ago
    Yes. Centralized platforms and people unwilling to act against the aggregation effect are drivers of the market capture that make these antiuser activities normal.
- toastercat 2y ago
  I hear you, but the people I want to communicate with refuse to use platforms that don't so easily ban you.
- raphman 2y ago
  In this case, it was not my choice. I preferred other tools but network effects resulted in Discord becoming our group's primary mode of real-time communication for online courses and within the group.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  Let me go tell all my friends that. Why'd you waste your digital breath on such an inane comment?
toastercat 2y ago
I used to love Ripcord, but I wish the developer would take the FastSpring payment button off their site. I paid back in 2020 or so because it was fantastic back then, and I had hope development would continue. The Slack implementation is completely broken now, and the Discord implementation got so buggy, I finally made the switch to using the official Discord client in my browser instead.

yellowapple 2y ago

The same thing happened to me with Telegram years ago, when I logged into my account using the Haiku port of Telegram's desktop client.

reddalo 2y ago
Telegram allows third-party clients however

taurknaut 2y ago

What incentive do they have to control the client? Does discord have ads?

chrisldgk 2y ago
No third party ads like you might be thinking, but a lot of in-app upsells for discord nitro (their pro tier), server boosts, custom emotes and stuff like that. Their monetization scheme is very twitch-like, I’d not be surprised if they don’t like you using third party clients that don’t shove all of that in your face.
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  And yet Twitch seems to allow BTT, which adds custom emotes and such that a user would normally need to pay for.
  - tart-lemonade 2y ago
    I haven't seen any streamers who officially put their sub emotes on BTTV/FFZ/7TV and enable them in their channel, so if anything they end up supplementing the sub emotes rather than providing a reason to avoid subscribing. Twitch could increase sub emote limits, but I'm not sure they would want to. Many emotes on FFZ et al are memes used in hundreds of channels and could not be used on Twitch even if copyright was not a concern due to violating many of the other sub emote guidelines: https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/emote-guidelines?language=en_US https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/emote-guidelines?language=e... So Twitch has no real reason to try and compete on this front. They just don't officially support it, which means anyone using the official Twitch app or not using any browser extensions will only see them as weird text in the chat. If Twitch updates the layout and breaks the extensions, the extensions will adapt, so power users get a ton of extra features at no cost to Twitch. While these services make money riding Twitch's coattails, anyone willing to pay for the premium tiers of these services is likely either a streamer who wants to load up more meme emotes for their chat to use (increases engagement) or is the kind of power user who subscribes to multiple streamers at tier 2 or 3, so I doubt they hurt Twitch's bottom line. If anything, going to war with these extensions would likely hurt their bottom line since features like FFZ's audio compressor make many streamers' terrible audio settings listenable.
- cudder 2y ago
  Their official client also collects a disturbing amount of telemetry that they'll miss out on.
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    Reminds me of the time a friend on Discord mentioned a very specific brand of ramen I didnt google, only to see an ad for this very niche brand of ramen on Facebook when I opened Facebook two minutes later. I use Facebook and Instagram drastically less every time this happens. Cant make a cent off me if I am not on your platform.
erk__ 2y ago
Mostly to combat bots as far as I am aware, and it can be hard to programmatically tell the difference between a malicious bot and a normal user using a 3rd party client.
- DrillShopper 2y ago
  With all that AI and machine learning out here I was lead to believe that this is largely trivial now.
itishappy 2y ago
Yes, Discord has ads. "Click this button to activate double XP in CoD" sort of thing They're fairly minimal and unobtrusive (and may even be opt-out), but also implemented with some minorly annoying dark patterns like being animated into existence in the middle of the toolbar. (I fairly commonly end up accepting "quests" when trying to change audio settings.) They also push Nitro the same way. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/25516720403223-Ads-Policy https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/25516720403223...

superkuh 2y ago

Yep. Discord is not a chat protocol. It is a proprietary corporate service. The reason you can't use alternative clients for their service is (the TOS and...) that the client spies on you and that data is (part of) your payment. They send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" and then recently "/science" (but it's still a POST with no response). Also their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. On launch the desktop client opens websocket server for command and control listening. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).

neilv 2y ago
I'm always saddened when I see an open source project's page say something like "Join us on Discord!" I can understand an open source project being on GitHub, since, at one point, they were a pretty warm-fuzzy place, and so attracted a lot of open source projects, before they sold out to Microsoft. But I really don't know how so many open source projects looked at Discord, early on, and thought that's a good idea. AFAICT, Discord is pretty antithetical to open source and, especially, libre software.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  Because there isn't a good replacement in open source software. Matrix and others are pretty normie hostile. I help run a few Discord servers and due to financials, I'm always worried about extremely hostile actions by them to make money. My list of things good open source replacement would have: Decentralized chat servers with history Run a optional centralized login service so users have one login Optional centralized service knows what servers the user is a member of so any client they login to will automatically know which servers they are member of. Centralized Mobile Notification service Federation is absolutely not a requirement or a way around this.

unosama 2y ago

Stop voluntarily communicating through platforms that so easily ban you.

yungporko 2y ago
so virtually every platform on the entire internet?
- vetrom 2y ago
  Yes. Centralized platforms and people unwilling to act against the aggregation effect are drivers of the market capture that make these antiuser activities normal.
toastercat 2y ago
I hear you, but the people I want to communicate with refuse to use platforms that don't so easily ban you.
raphman 2y ago
In this case, it was not my choice. I preferred other tools but network effects resulted in Discord becoming our group's primary mode of real-time communication for online courses and within the group.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
Let me go tell all my friends that. Why'd you waste your digital breath on such an inane comment?

toastercat 2y ago

I used to love Ripcord, but I wish the developer would take the FastSpring payment button off their site. I paid back in 2020 or so because it was fantastic back then, and I had hope development would continue. The Slack implementation is completely broken now, and the Discord implementation got so buggy, I finally made the switch to using the official Discord client in my browser instead.