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I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

601 points by dandano 1y ago

squeaky-clean 1y ago
My friend group just uses a separate group chat where the purpose is just to say "Hey I'm hopping onto discord if anyone wants to hang out" and it works well enough.
exiguus 1y ago
I love the Idea. And i would adopt the solution if i didn't already have one. Personally, in my circle of friends, we use slack (at first the free plan and now a payed plan). During the pandemic we moved to the payed plan, because of the restriction on members in huddles/calls (and also because we want endless history and our own encryption keys). Currently we have Game (D&D e.g.), PP and Small-talk channels that we use to have huddles that everyone can join. Mostly we create other channels on demand to organise things. Or share knowledge, music and so on. One nice feature with slack is, that you can receive notification if a huddle starts in a channel, also on mobile, if you have the app. I don't know how often we use this notifications to join the small-talk channel. Personally, i join them every other week because i get notified. PS: If someone from slack reads this, please do a friends plan, something between the free and pro plan :)
fudged71 1y ago
What I get from this is that Discord needs to make this notification able to be enabled.
Leo-thorne 1y ago
I really like this idea, especially the music quiz and birthday reminder. I've been wanting to build a bot for my friend group that shows up now and then when things go quiet, just to gently remind us of something warm. It doesn’t interrupt anyone, but quietly adds a bit of connection to the group.
lloydatkinson 1y ago
I don’t understand why you’d use both Signal and Discord?
dangus 1y ago
Do you have a link to the bot?
- dandano 1y ago
  I don’t sorry - I could clean up the repo and make it public. But if you follow the discord py tutorials it’s very simple to implement.
  - dangus 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - andrewaylett 1y ago
      Fixing a social problem by technical means? That's rare enough to merit shouting about it, even if it's not generally applicable.
    - pchangr 1y ago
      From the guidelines: “Hacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” I think this satisfies my intelectual curiosity.
      - dangus 1y ago
        I understand the guidelines, I am not claiming the post violates guidelines.
        pchangr 1y ago
        I didn’t claim it violated them either. I just thought having a curious story was a good enough value for this post to exist. I don’t think it needs code or a product.. in fact .. I wish more people did this kind of posts.. and just encourage people to do stuff for the sake of it .. be it a notification system for your friends … or just a story about friendship.
taraindara 1y ago
This was a fun read. Being experienced in various methods of self hosting, it was cool to learn of coolify. Seeing more people get into self hosting always makes me happy.
- udev4096 1y ago
  What? This has nothing to do with it. If author was interested in self-hosting, he would have used mumble or something instead of signal/discord
CHUCKEESH 1y ago
[flagged]
dnrvs 1y ago
i built the same thing (though only the notifier, not all the stat tracking) for my friend group back in 2017 when PUBG came out and we were trying to play together as often as we could. can confirm it worked great. i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch
mordae 1y ago
Watch Years and Years (2019).
Aachen 1y ago
s/something/a Discord bot/ to unclickbait the title..
- tetris11 1y ago
  genuinely unbelievable that the story is so highly voted with such a vague title
  - timerol 1y ago
    The clickbait makes you click, and the story is about a cool hack, so you upvote. I don't see how this is unbelievable
    - tetris11 1y ago
      hn readers aren't usually so easily baited
      - udev4096 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - Night_Thastus 1y ago
        Yes, they absolutely are. HN is not as niche as it used to be, and clickbait works on everyone.
- codingdave 1y ago
  I completely disagree. The point is the impact it has on lives, not the tools used to build it. I would enjoy it if more people focused their writing on the impact their work has on people, and less on the tools and processes used. Or at the very least, clearly delineate the build from the impact.
  - deltarholamda 1y ago
    I see where you're coming from, but I like the way the story is formatted. There's plenty to doom and gloom about with the state of tech right now, but this is a good reminder that sometimes even Big Internet tools, with a little ingenuity, can sometimes be repurposed to serve the users and not some corporation's bottom line. It's kind of a throwback to the olden days where you might stand up an IRC server or something similar just for your friend group. I like seeing people returning to the small internet where it serves as a substrate for real people doing real things.
aCodeCrafter 1y ago
This is really interesting as a way to keep people connected on a regular basis. I wonder if something similar could be done for groups who aren't necessarily into gaming: like say a "virtual fireplace" where folks could just pop into a call and talk
- mebizzle 1y ago
  Discord is already like that for a lot of niche communities and fandoms that aren't necessarily gaming; it just all evolved on a gaming-focused platform.
  - apps4datr2025 1y ago
    [dead]
donatj 1y ago
Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew. There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
- s0rce 1y ago
  Discord, sort of, but its not as personal and its not as clear who is actually present.
- wildpeaks 1y ago
  I still miss the unique ICQ green/red lists feature, it would let you control who can see you're online without a second account.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  Inreally enjoyed that, especially on ICQ. My first real job was a night operations role at a reservation services company, managing incidents and doing database maintenance work. There was alot of waiting involved, and I would chat on icq with a lot of random people in Europe. I ended up meeting one person! The problem is… people are people and do nasty things. I have a good friend who is a few years younger. She found herself on the “information superhighway” at 13-14, blue collar parents who had no idea what she was doing alone on AIM or what that was. She find herself meeting this charming guy… who happened to be in his 30’s. Learning about how common that was was very sobering… as this thing that represented fun and friends to me ended up being malevolent to many.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  Discord indicates who's online with the green dot. It can be modified to never show you're online, or show 'away' or something, but it's similar. It also displays how many are online in a channel on a server, and then you can open the list. Despite that, however, it still feels 'different' to how it was, but I think we're also 'different'. Being (significantly) older now I have more responsibilities and pressures for my time so I'm less likely (like zero chance) to be sitting idle waiting for random chats. We'd have to ask those who are, now, the age we were then - but then they also have no frame of reference. My son is often chatting to his friends online, but I think they're exclusively friends from meatspace rather than electronic strangers.
echelon_musk 1y ago
s/life savior/life saver/
pyfan878 1y ago
hogged to death :/
thedanbob 1y ago
> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like. Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons. [0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb84fc19187530a07N.jpg_960x960q75.jpg_.avif https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...
- f3b5 1y ago
  While this is a pretty cool hardware project, I would be quite annoyed to be your partner. No offense, but it almost reads as satire that you want to flash LEDs in every corner of the house if your wife doesn't look at her phone notifications quickly enough.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Can you explain why it's worse than normal landline phones that you can hear in the entire house?
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    No offense, but your privilege is offensively visible. Deaf people need this.
    - stndef 1y ago
      Yup! I have significant hearing loss to the point that I'm useless without hearing aids. I'm going to take this idea for my partner to use to get my attention if needed. Having it tie into Home Assistant is a win for me as well.
eveld 1y ago
This reminds me a lot of the days when we would just hang in ventrillo and teamspeak to just hang out even when not playing games. Especially around the time when communities gathered around dedicated servers were still a thing. Miss those days :(
ZeroCool2u 1y ago
I have a similar friend group that hangs out on discord now due to the post college diaspora and we even use a Signal group chat. However, it sounds like it's a smaller group, because we've taken to literally sending bat signal gifs into the chat when someone gets online and it works well enough for us :)
russellbeattie 1y ago
Interesting. But in my experience, the Australian need for daily social interaction with a group of peers - preferably including some sort of large alcoholic beverage - is quite a bit above average. Not sure how a group of Americans would respond.
Pyrodogg 1y ago
"Scheduling" can become a four-letter word when it comes to adults organizing for game nights. In many groups game night rarely seems to rise to the formality of scheduling sports with organized practice/play sessions. It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
- tomashubelbauer 1y ago
  TIL about "four-letter word" as an ESL speaker. If anyone else is confused about the linguistic compression algorithm that squeezes "scheduling" into just four letters, the magic is, of course, profanity! And "four-letter word" seems to be a polite way of saying something is or can become a PITA.
  - wavemode 1y ago
    yeah calling something a "four-letter word" is intended to evoke the idea that, people react negatively upon merely hearing the word (as though it were an expletive)
ksynwa 1y ago
If folks don't want to understandably install the discord app perhaps notifications could be sent through something like ntfy. Like create a dedicated channel for notifications for this and have the interested people subscribe to it. Can't say for sure if the discord.py library will allow for something like this but I think it should be possible.
turbopasi 1y ago
Reminds me of our Teamspeak Server, that we have already running for over 2 decades. Not only for playing games but more for just come online and hang out, quietly sitting next to each other, "lurking". We do this almost every evening, someone is always there. Probably couldn't live without it T.T.
johndhi 1y ago
I had the idea of making a website where anyone of a group of friends can post their evening plans - go to trivia, play tennis, etc - and others would be able to sign up to join. Never made it but glad to see these things can work.
- johndhi 1y ago
  Anyone know if something like this already exists I could buy or use?
  - elendee 1y ago
    I sketched out an app like this but with the added feature that you have a slider to indicate your commitment level. The event poster can set a collective-commitment-threshold which triggers once sufficient commitment is reached. Currently working on another web app though...
  - Grimblewald 1y ago
    use a kanban board. FOSS options exist for web-hosted implementations. Kanban works because It supports a 'backlog' of events to do, timelines for things to do that are on a deadline (e.g. concerts) and allows people to add activities / plans to backlogs which get moved to 'ready to do' as things are done / cleared. Keeps everything organised and simple, with good over-sight on what's going on when. Downside is it requires friends already somewhat technical or at least willing to learn.
  - gorpomon 1y ago
    This was the original purpose of Twitter-- it was advertised as a network where anyone could post what they're doing and notify their friends immediately. Even until recently tweets could be received via SMS (not sure about the current status of that feature) so you'd see in real time what they're up to. Of course, Twitter/X/etc are a far cry from that now-- but it could be worth trying where you and your friends use the service like that.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    I do think this is an interesting idea. Lemme see if I can do this. How do you think the UI/UX should look like. Here's what I am thinking. You sign in It asks you what you want to do And at what time (hour) in another column and (date) in another column And then it asks you the location And then we can have a contact-me: which could lead to discord or signal. Or, if you aren't comfortable sharing that info, then you could have a shareable link that you can share with anyone and then they can write their email or whatever and you would get live notifications through mail or whatever platform you decided. Lemme know if we are on the same page? EDIT: I have created a mvp but like, the problem is that it's just a form y'know and I just created something where you would input in this information and it would give html and then you can host it and using https://formsubmit.co/ https://formsubmit.co/ you can use it. Though I guess one of the issues is that you have to validate each form in formsubmit (not good for ephemeral forms) and I guess it also shows email but there's a way to hide it too. Also, I guess the problems aren't of forms but of discoverability. How do you make people discover your forms but I guess one way could be of having a list of all your forms or just the current ones that you want to show (IDK?) on github pages for example and then you could just share the github pages link to anyone or just have it in a about me section of most messengers? Also.. Maybe then if you wanted to rather share it to anybody you could create a additional place where anybody can share their forms/such website. But I am not sure if what I've all said is the best user experience.
rpgbr 1y ago
I always try to solve problems by using what people already have, so I wonder if having another group on Signal, where only “I'm playing!” messages would be allowed, couldn't fix the issue…?
- Ringz 1y ago
  I’ve always thought this way and it’s amazing what applications and problems you can solve or replace with text files (csv, TXT, md), calendars (shared) and email. If I had to estimate, 80-90%? I always believed in the power of simple tools and don’t reinvent the wheel.
  - rpgbr 1y ago
    There's that theory that all apps are just glorified (and/or multiplayer) txt files or spreadsheets. Which is true in… 80–90% of the cases?
    - fragmede 1y ago
      what're the last 10-20%?
- dandano 1y ago
  I think it was the fact that actions spoke louder than words for us. It’s easy to say “I’ll jump on” but then you get distracted and then 30 mins later you go online. Similarly to when people say “leaving now” and then they start getting ready to leave. Because we are notified that someone has taken the action of going online they are 100% available to chat or play a game.
  - lazyeye 1y ago
    Do discord events allow for connections to ifttt or zapier? Or even just trigger a webhook? If so then you can trigger a smart light bulb in each persons home via these services. To get this to work you create 2 applets triggered by the same webhook. One to turn the light on, then another to turn it off after a specified delay.
braiamp 1y ago
Please, fix the contrast of the clicked links and your background. The discord.py link is unreadable. Same with supabase and coolify. Those I'm sure I haven't visited.
- drewtato 1y ago
  This comment is so interesting because clearly, it's the unvisited color that's broken, you know this, and you even typed it out, but it is so common for visited links to be darker than unvisited links that it makes you assume the opposite.
m-hodges 1y ago
This is great. For years I’ve been wanting to solve the “link problem” in my Signal group. My friends post a ton of great links that get lost in the scrollback and I’d love a way to get just a dedicated queue. I’ve thought about things like a private subreddit or even just a different link group; but everything just felt like moving the problem and change management. Great to see this type of solution worked for you!
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  I think Signal should just create a pin option like how discord and a lot of others have. But in the meantime if I had to genuinely suggest a method without any friction if you are okay with using code like the author did, then I'd suggest something and lemme know what you think Why don't you just create a special emoji that would only be used for the purposes of Pin, like (Oh the irony), and then have a signal cli or signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot where you could do something like /pins and it would show the pins but you would need a different mobile number or account for that and honestly just a big hassle. I could think of other ways but we would never reach the native User experience that signal could provide if it would allow pin natively EDIT: Even a more simpler way could be if we could just search the chat emojis and we could just search <the pin emoji> and it would show it Also I am surprised that HN doesn't allow emojis
  - apps4datr2025 1y ago
    [dead]
baby 1y ago
I tried that a long time ago with teamspeak, and then discord, but my friends are not big users of these tools and so it didnt work. Discords do too much. If whatsapp could do this it could work
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  I do think that whatsapp could do this tbh if it would actually provide its api like discord does. Telegram feels like it can definitely do such stuff and I found in my opinion that its way easier to host telegram bot on cloudflare than it is on discord so theoretically you could even have it as a cf worker with a deploy on cf button so as to even people who don't know too much about deploying could use it.
- cubefox 1y ago
  WhatsApp should totally add that as a feature! A voice chat room with join notifications.
- henryaj 1y ago
  WhatsApp has this now - https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338 https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338
Arainach 1y ago
I didn't see this in the article, but why not just organize the games in a Discord text channel? Discord has very granular notifications that seem the perfect solution here, so folks can see there are unread messages in #games, and the folks gaming are already on the server. One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
- dandano 1y ago
  This was going to be my next idea if the bot didn't go well! For unread messages in Discord, you have to actively go into the discord app to check it. The fact that the bot only sends a notification when someone has taken the action to jump into discord signals that you're ready to chat right now. It avoids the 'I'll be on in 30ish', where in reality that might not happen. Talk is cheap.
- bombcar 1y ago
  One Big Chat is great for the terminally online. Everyone else gets horribly behind. Organized channels is the way to go and spending time thinking about setup is worth it. Otherwise they develop naturally and haphazardly.
- jedimastert 1y ago
  The discord of '22 was, iirc, very different from now, or at least the culture around it. It looks like they just only used it for a single voice chat lobby
  - Arainach 1y ago
    The Discord of 2020 and before absolutely supported text channels, voice channels, multiple of the above, customizable notifications, and everything required here. Like OP and many others I found myself on a number of Discord servers during the pandemic for voice/video chat, gaming together, etc. and that app was the straightforward solution both for organizing and the actual event for groups of any size from 4-20.
  - ghostly_s 1y ago
unethical_ban 1y ago
It seems to me a common enough use case that it should be built into discord. I think the "I am here, now" alert does more than the "hey who is around?" message.
apps4datr2025 1y ago
[dead]
stevage 1y ago
That actually sounds really nice. > Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages. My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement... I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.
mlok 1y ago
There is a very weird display bug on this site : when I access it in lanscape horizontal position, with my iPhone 8 on Brave or Safari : all the text is trembling, unable to settle on a size. Trapped in a resizing loop. If I rotate the phone verically it settles properly and then also horizontally. But if I reload the page (horizontally) it goes nuts again :)
peterldowns 1y ago
Fun story. This reminds me of the summer my friends and I were all still around our small town — we used the Yo! app the same way, as a bat signal to meet up and get into nonsense. Someone would start Yo!ing and then once there was a critical mass of return Yo!s we'd switch to text/phone and link up. Good times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)
subjectsigma 1y ago
I need the opposite of this. Some of my friends just want to sit in Discord and play the same three games all day every day. I either need a way to get them to do something different or to find new friends
outlore 1y ago
This reminds me of the Houseparty app that took off with my friend group during Covid. It had a mechanism to notify others when someone had joined a party. Fun times
guicen 1y ago
Reminds me of those old coworking circles I used to be part of. Not about being productive really, but more about giving people a reason to show up and talk. Friction gets replaced with rhythm.
udev4096 1y ago
Going from signal to discord is crazy. How can you be OK with knowing that your personal voice chats are being monitored, recorded and sold to the next highest bidder? How can it be so easy to choose convenience over that? Or is it that we have essentially given up and wanna actively take a part in mass surveillance?
- augment_me 1y ago
  The trade-off here is a social connections versus privacy/integrity. I can make the decision to use Signal or whatever, but as long as my whole social circle does not do the same, it wont be useful. And since when they do the swap, they have to convince their whole social circle to do the same, this becomes an impossible task. Either you have 10 different apps for different friends that lie on different places on the ethics of privacy, or you just take the easy way out and use what everyone uses.
- sadeshmukh 1y ago
  Voice chats are e2ee, so I'm not sure where you're making this information up from.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Not every decision is about opsec. If, for what you're doing, you want people to be alerted about your actions without your explicit say-so, then signal is not the tool for that job. Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
  - crossroadsguy 1y ago
    Discord probably has a choice — free or ‘private/paid and then die sooner’. Sooner as in before a spectacular exit.
  - udev4096 1y ago
    That's the difference between people who give in and people who don't. This is not about "opsec", it's about exercising your fundamental right to privacy. Majority of people are reckless, the ones who take a second to think about it are not
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pizzathyme 1y ago
I wish discord would just implement this as a setting.
excalibur 1y ago
You guys have friends?
jrm4 1y ago
Man. Reminds me when many years back I had about 10 friends collaborating on a movie and I needed something between asynchronous and synchronous, so I stripped Wordpress down to just titles and little avatars on a front page feed thing. About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)
alliao 1y ago
Now I feel old, back in my days we all hung out on IRC and we broadcast a wav file to call on friends to join game, and had crazy scripts and bots that did weekly summary, best engagement line and so on and so forth
catigula 1y ago
It strikes me: is anyone else sick of people calling developing software "building"? Even as a software developer, it feels very supercilious.
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  For small projects I tend to use write because that's what it feels like. For bigger things where there is a design element, I'll usually say designed and wrote X instead if I want emphasize its non-triviality. I didn't think of it before but you're right building feels like implying more weight than it feels right. But also I concede this is quite subjective.
- elendee 1y ago
  I think there's a difference between software and scripts too. Unrepentant scripter4lyfe here
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  Yes. Especially things like "solutions architect".
- Retric 1y ago
  No, build “#3. To develop or give form to according to a plan or process; create” There’s a line between baking a cake and building a wedding cake where it stops being about the ingredients and starts being about the desired form. https://shunbridal.com/article/how-tobuild-a-wedding-cake https://shunbridal.com/article/how-tobuild-a-wedding-cake It’s in that context where building software makes sense. You need to link a bunch of different components together to make a greater whole.
  - catigula 1y ago
    I figured someone would attempt to use the technical definition to make their case. The problem isn't one of technical definitions, it's one of performative definitions. I am technically an Online Communications Solutions Integration Architect, and also a guy posting on an internet forum.
subpixel 1y ago
> it was a life savior when my little one was a newborn to jump onto Discord for even 5 minutes to chat with my friends, watch someone play a game and then log off for another diaper change I'm afraid I can't relate to this at all. I may a bit older and/or I may have less close friends but I prefer a very different kind of social contact that is more like make plans, meet up, rinse and repeat. Back in the AIM/ORC days I loathed being pinged all the time for chit chat - this system reminds me of that!
billdybas 1y ago
> The hardest part was convincing people to download the Discord app on their phone as most of us didn't have it downloaded. This was surprising to me – is this typical of most Discord users (primarily desktop users over mobile)?
- OkayPhysicist 1y ago
  Discord was originally a place to organize for playing videogames with people. If you're using it for that purpose, you're probably on your computer already (because that's where the games are). Thus, the mobile app ends up being more for checking in with your community while away from the computer, rather than a primary driver of your engagement with the platform.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  They could have been using it in browser. One of discords underrated decisions is that the browser version is fully featured and doesn't force you to download the app, a new user can join a server in their browser with just a name which is as low friction as you can get.
rockostrich 1y ago
I think Discord is the best chat app for friend groups and it's not even close. At this point I've written the following bots specifically for my friend group's server: # Music Quiz Bot Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist. The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot. This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal. # Birthday Bot This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them. # Plex Bot I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server. # Movie Quiz Bot Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  Not only Discord is not private, it’s looks, feels, and interacts bloated - extremely bloated. Sometimes I am forced to use it and I am almost constantly disgusted in those durations. Luckily around where I live “friend groups” are still far from Discord.
- sneak 1y ago
  The problem is that Discord isn’t e2ee and logs all chats in plaintext for all time, including all DMs. This makes it a nonstarter for me; friends don’t serve as honey in the surveillance trap for communication with their friends. Nothing that builds up an ever-growing surveillance database on private conversations between friends can be in the running for “best”.
kadhirvelm 1y ago
Wow so cool, I feel like if I had a light near by desk that turned on every time a friend was on discord voice, I'd be so much more likely to hop in for a few minutes over getting an notification. Something about the physical affordance feels harder to ignore
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  Check out Philips Hue or Govee lights with IFTTT integration - they can already do exactly this with Discord webhooks, no need to build it from scratch.
henryaj 1y ago
WhatsApp has a somewhat similar feature - pull up to start a group voice chat. You can ping others to let them know you're around. https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338 https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338
- fdgjgbdfhgb 1y ago
  The only time I've seen this feature be used is when my grandma accidentally turns it on in the family groupchat - I just don't wanna hang out with my friends in WhatsApp
vinceguidry 1y ago
God I'm so jealous you were able to get your friends to join Discord. My in-person friend group revolved around the bar we all went to. When the bar shut down, I floated the idea of a group chat but couldn't get anyone interested. No one wants to install another app and get notified more. In olden days, we'd just solve the problem with Facebook, but no one uses that anymore either. My friends are ordinary, normal, overworked people who need an easy option. The bar was that. Show up when you want to connect. Easy. So now there's nothing. I basically just lost all my friends. We all have each other's numbers but that's just not an option for coordination. Fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg, for making Facebook so shitty it's not even useful anymore for the one thing I ever found it useful for. I hope when we finally start coming for the billionaires, we come for you first.
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  Sorry to hear that. FWIW it feels like there was probably a mismatch in valuation of the friendship there. For my case I was able to convince many friends to connect on various chat platforms of their choice. Some friendships fizzled out, others are still going. And then there are some anew. Unfortunately a lot of our friendships are essentially default proximity relationships. These tend to not survive as soon as the first obstacle to proximity shows up if not enough people are willing to put in the effort to make it something more.
  - vinceguidry 1y ago
    For me, is not a friendship unless there's regular, in person interaction, online doesn't count. Even if I'd gotten them onto another platform the only thing it would have been used for is coordinating more in person events. I've had to end online interactions because it became clear i couldn't value the relationship. Bar was perfect. Then a huge hospital opened up across the street and they didn't want a run down bar there.
    - whatevertrevor 1y ago
      Yeah the requirements are pretty much the same for me. The friendships I was alluding to were basically in-person in-office sort of friendships that demanded a larger upkeep once the pandemic hit and later when I left my job. So like you I needed some online platform to coordinate in person meetups. It worked for the most part fortunately, but there were definitely some friendships that got lost along the way.
socalgal2 1y ago
I’m confused about what this solution does. I’d expect that as people move to discord all the message spam that was happening in signal would just eventually move over to discord as people got used to communicating there instead of signal
- demaga 1y ago
  It encourages people to speak rather than type. You don't get hundreds of messages per day by writing in email style. You get there if you have a lot of synchronous or near-synchronous communication in chat. It's kind of obvious that voice call suits this better, but there is friction involved in making an actual call. Discord voice channel might reduce the friction if you make this culture of hopping in and out of it.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  If you don't care about Security/Privacy, Discord has a great UI and is probably significantly better for free-flowing group conversations
725686 1y ago
I was surprised to see that there was half a million more, and not less!
- thomascountz 1y ago
  You've seen a cube hold a million dollars, but this server?—Well, it can hold a million friends :')
anigbrowl 1y ago
tl;dr author finds Discord better than Signal for online socializing
flooo 1y ago
I have several chat groups with friends and even with my wife to avoid this topic. With my wife, I have several now: one to share recipes, one to share the weeks meal plan, one to talk about the activities of our two year old and one to share houses we might be interested in buying. It’s great to separate for record keeping, but mostly to avoid forcing the conversation on some organisational thing when the other just needs eg to vent about something at work
asdf6969 1y ago
This is why it’s so hard to make local friends as an adult in a new city. Good inspiration for me to make something similar to keep in touch with real people!
ohashi 1y ago
We just use a slack. The overwhelming single channel? nope. channels for all the hobbies, shitposting, news, games, etc. We even have a discord notification for gaming channel when people get on the gaming channel. Separate notification for the chat channel if someone wants to just chill.

601 points by dandano 1y ago

My friend group just uses a separate group chat where the purpose is just to say "Hey I'm hopping onto discord if anyone wants to hang out" and it works well enough.

exiguus 1y ago

I love the Idea. And i would adopt the solution if i didn't already have one. Personally, in my circle of friends, we use slack (at first the free plan and now a payed plan). During the pandemic we moved to the payed plan, because of the restriction on members in huddles/calls (and also because we want endless history and our own encryption keys). Currently we have Game (D&D e.g.), PP and Small-talk channels that we use to have huddles that everyone can join. Mostly we create other channels on demand to organise things. Or share knowledge, music and so on. One nice feature with slack is, that you can receive notification if a huddle starts in a channel, also on mobile, if you have the app. I don't know how often we use this notifications to join the small-talk channel. Personally, i join them every other week because i get notified. PS: If someone from slack reads this, please do a friends plan, something between the free and pro plan :)

fudged71 1y ago

What I get from this is that Discord needs to make this notification able to be enabled.

Leo-thorne 1y ago

I really like this idea, especially the music quiz and birthday reminder. I've been wanting to build a bot for my friend group that shows up now and then when things go quiet, just to gently remind us of something warm. It doesn’t interrupt anyone, but quietly adds a bit of connection to the group.

lloydatkinson 1y ago

I don’t understand why you’d use both Signal and Discord?

dangus 1y ago

Do you have a link to the bot?

dandano 1y ago
I don’t sorry - I could clean up the repo and make it public. But if you follow the discord py tutorials it’s very simple to implement.
- dangus 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - andrewaylett 1y ago
    Fixing a social problem by technical means? That's rare enough to merit shouting about it, even if it's not generally applicable.
  - pchangr 1y ago
    From the guidelines: “Hacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” I think this satisfies my intelectual curiosity.
    - dangus 1y ago
      I understand the guidelines, I am not claiming the post violates guidelines.
      - pchangr 1y ago
        I didn’t claim it violated them either. I just thought having a curious story was a good enough value for this post to exist. I don’t think it needs code or a product.. in fact .. I wish more people did this kind of posts.. and just encourage people to do stuff for the sake of it .. be it a notification system for your friends … or just a story about friendship.

taraindara 1y ago

This was a fun read. Being experienced in various methods of self hosting, it was cool to learn of coolify. Seeing more people get into self hosting always makes me happy.

udev4096 1y ago
What? This has nothing to do with it. If author was interested in self-hosting, he would have used mumble or something instead of signal/discord

CHUCKEESH 1y ago

[flagged]

dnrvs 1y ago

i built the same thing (though only the notifier, not all the stat tracking) for my friend group back in 2017 when PUBG came out and we were trying to play together as often as we could. can confirm it worked great. i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch

mordae 1y ago

Watch Years and Years (2019).

Aachen 1y ago

s/something/a Discord bot/ to unclickbait the title..

tetris11 1y ago
genuinely unbelievable that the story is so highly voted with such a vague title
- timerol 1y ago
  The clickbait makes you click, and the story is about a cool hack, so you upvote. I don't see how this is unbelievable
  - tetris11 1y ago
    hn readers aren't usually so easily baited
    - udev4096 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - Night_Thastus 1y ago
      Yes, they absolutely are. HN is not as niche as it used to be, and clickbait works on everyone.
codingdave 1y ago
I completely disagree. The point is the impact it has on lives, not the tools used to build it. I would enjoy it if more people focused their writing on the impact their work has on people, and less on the tools and processes used. Or at the very least, clearly delineate the build from the impact.
- deltarholamda 1y ago
  I see where you're coming from, but I like the way the story is formatted. There's plenty to doom and gloom about with the state of tech right now, but this is a good reminder that sometimes even Big Internet tools, with a little ingenuity, can sometimes be repurposed to serve the users and not some corporation's bottom line. It's kind of a throwback to the olden days where you might stand up an IRC server or something similar just for your friend group. I like seeing people returning to the small internet where it serves as a substrate for real people doing real things.

aCodeCrafter 1y ago

This is really interesting as a way to keep people connected on a regular basis. I wonder if something similar could be done for groups who aren't necessarily into gaming: like say a "virtual fireplace" where folks could just pop into a call and talk

mebizzle 1y ago
Discord is already like that for a lot of niche communities and fandoms that aren't necessarily gaming; it just all evolved on a gaming-focused platform.
- apps4datr2025 1y ago
  [dead]

donatj 1y ago

Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew. There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.

s0rce 1y ago
Discord, sort of, but its not as personal and its not as clear who is actually present.
wildpeaks 1y ago
I still miss the unique ICQ green/red lists feature, it would let you control who can see you're online without a second account.
Spooky23 1y ago
Inreally enjoyed that, especially on ICQ. My first real job was a night operations role at a reservation services company, managing incidents and doing database maintenance work. There was alot of waiting involved, and I would chat on icq with a lot of random people in Europe. I ended up meeting one person! The problem is… people are people and do nasty things. I have a good friend who is a few years younger. She found herself on the “information superhighway” at 13-14, blue collar parents who had no idea what she was doing alone on AIM or what that was. She find herself meeting this charming guy… who happened to be in his 30’s. Learning about how common that was was very sobering… as this thing that represented fun and friends to me ended up being malevolent to many.
BLKNSLVR 1y ago
Discord indicates who's online with the green dot. It can be modified to never show you're online, or show 'away' or something, but it's similar. It also displays how many are online in a channel on a server, and then you can open the list. Despite that, however, it still feels 'different' to how it was, but I think we're also 'different'. Being (significantly) older now I have more responsibilities and pressures for my time so I'm less likely (like zero chance) to be sitting idle waiting for random chats. We'd have to ask those who are, now, the age we were then - but then they also have no frame of reference. My son is often chatting to his friends online, but I think they're exclusively friends from meatspace rather than electronic strangers.

echelon_musk 1y ago

s/life savior/life saver/

pyfan878 1y ago

hogged to death :/

thedanbob 1y ago

> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like. Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons. [0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb84fc19187530a07N.jpg_960x960q75.jpg_.avif https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...

f3b5 1y ago
While this is a pretty cool hardware project, I would be quite annoyed to be your partner. No offense, but it almost reads as satire that you want to flash LEDs in every corner of the house if your wife doesn't look at her phone notifications quickly enough.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  Can you explain why it's worse than normal landline phones that you can hear in the entire house?
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  No offense, but your privilege is offensively visible. Deaf people need this.
  - stndef 1y ago
    Yup! I have significant hearing loss to the point that I'm useless without hearing aids. I'm going to take this idea for my partner to use to get my attention if needed. Having it tie into Home Assistant is a win for me as well.

eveld 1y ago

This reminds me a lot of the days when we would just hang in ventrillo and teamspeak to just hang out even when not playing games. Especially around the time when communities gathered around dedicated servers were still a thing. Miss those days :(

ZeroCool2u 1y ago

I have a similar friend group that hangs out on discord now due to the post college diaspora and we even use a Signal group chat. However, it sounds like it's a smaller group, because we've taken to literally sending bat signal gifs into the chat when someone gets online and it works well enough for us :)

russellbeattie 1y ago

Interesting. But in my experience, the Australian need for daily social interaction with a group of peers - preferably including some sort of large alcoholic beverage - is quite a bit above average. Not sure how a group of Americans would respond.

Pyrodogg 1y ago

"Scheduling" can become a four-letter word when it comes to adults organizing for game nights. In many groups game night rarely seems to rise to the formality of scheduling sports with organized practice/play sessions. It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.

tomashubelbauer 1y ago
TIL about "four-letter word" as an ESL speaker. If anyone else is confused about the linguistic compression algorithm that squeezes "scheduling" into just four letters, the magic is, of course, profanity! And "four-letter word" seems to be a polite way of saying something is or can become a PITA.
- wavemode 1y ago
  yeah calling something a "four-letter word" is intended to evoke the idea that, people react negatively upon merely hearing the word (as though it were an expletive)

ksynwa 1y ago

If folks don't want to understandably install the discord app perhaps notifications could be sent through something like ntfy. Like create a dedicated channel for notifications for this and have the interested people subscribe to it. Can't say for sure if the discord.py library will allow for something like this but I think it should be possible.

turbopasi 1y ago

Reminds me of our Teamspeak Server, that we have already running for over 2 decades. Not only for playing games but more for just come online and hang out, quietly sitting next to each other, "lurking". We do this almost every evening, someone is always there. Probably couldn't live without it T.T.

johndhi 1y ago

I had the idea of making a website where anyone of a group of friends can post their evening plans - go to trivia, play tennis, etc - and others would be able to sign up to join. Never made it but glad to see these things can work.

johndhi 1y ago
Anyone know if something like this already exists I could buy or use?
- elendee 1y ago
  I sketched out an app like this but with the added feature that you have a slider to indicate your commitment level. The event poster can set a collective-commitment-threshold which triggers once sufficient commitment is reached. Currently working on another web app though...
- Grimblewald 1y ago
  use a kanban board. FOSS options exist for web-hosted implementations. Kanban works because It supports a 'backlog' of events to do, timelines for things to do that are on a deadline (e.g. concerts) and allows people to add activities / plans to backlogs which get moved to 'ready to do' as things are done / cleared. Keeps everything organised and simple, with good over-sight on what's going on when. Downside is it requires friends already somewhat technical or at least willing to learn.
- gorpomon 1y ago
  This was the original purpose of Twitter-- it was advertised as a network where anyone could post what they're doing and notify their friends immediately. Even until recently tweets could be received via SMS (not sure about the current status of that feature) so you'd see in real time what they're up to. Of course, Twitter/X/etc are a far cry from that now-- but it could be worth trying where you and your friends use the service like that.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  I do think this is an interesting idea. Lemme see if I can do this. How do you think the UI/UX should look like. Here's what I am thinking. You sign in It asks you what you want to do And at what time (hour) in another column and (date) in another column And then it asks you the location And then we can have a contact-me: which could lead to discord or signal. Or, if you aren't comfortable sharing that info, then you could have a shareable link that you can share with anyone and then they can write their email or whatever and you would get live notifications through mail or whatever platform you decided. Lemme know if we are on the same page? EDIT: I have created a mvp but like, the problem is that it's just a form y'know and I just created something where you would input in this information and it would give html and then you can host it and using https://formsubmit.co/ https://formsubmit.co/ you can use it. Though I guess one of the issues is that you have to validate each form in formsubmit (not good for ephemeral forms) and I guess it also shows email but there's a way to hide it too. Also, I guess the problems aren't of forms but of discoverability. How do you make people discover your forms but I guess one way could be of having a list of all your forms or just the current ones that you want to show (IDK?) on github pages for example and then you could just share the github pages link to anyone or just have it in a about me section of most messengers? Also.. Maybe then if you wanted to rather share it to anybody you could create a additional place where anybody can share their forms/such website. But I am not sure if what I've all said is the best user experience.

rpgbr 1y ago

I always try to solve problems by using what people already have, so I wonder if having another group on Signal, where only “I'm playing!” messages would be allowed, couldn't fix the issue…?

Ringz 1y ago
I’ve always thought this way and it’s amazing what applications and problems you can solve or replace with text files (csv, TXT, md), calendars (shared) and email. If I had to estimate, 80-90%? I always believed in the power of simple tools and don’t reinvent the wheel.
- rpgbr 1y ago
  There's that theory that all apps are just glorified (and/or multiplayer) txt files or spreadsheets. Which is true in… 80–90% of the cases?
  - fragmede 1y ago
    what're the last 10-20%?
dandano 1y ago
I think it was the fact that actions spoke louder than words for us. It’s easy to say “I’ll jump on” but then you get distracted and then 30 mins later you go online. Similarly to when people say “leaving now” and then they start getting ready to leave. Because we are notified that someone has taken the action of going online they are 100% available to chat or play a game.
- lazyeye 1y ago
  Do discord events allow for connections to ifttt or zapier? Or even just trigger a webhook? If so then you can trigger a smart light bulb in each persons home via these services. To get this to work you create 2 applets triggered by the same webhook. One to turn the light on, then another to turn it off after a specified delay.

braiamp 1y ago

Please, fix the contrast of the clicked links and your background. The discord.py link is unreadable. Same with supabase and coolify. Those I'm sure I haven't visited.

drewtato 1y ago
This comment is so interesting because clearly, it's the unvisited color that's broken, you know this, and you even typed it out, but it is so common for visited links to be darker than unvisited links that it makes you assume the opposite.

m-hodges 1y ago

This is great. For years I’ve been wanting to solve the “link problem” in my Signal group. My friends post a ton of great links that get lost in the scrollback and I’d love a way to get just a dedicated queue. I’ve thought about things like a private subreddit or even just a different link group; but everything just felt like moving the problem and change management. Great to see this type of solution worked for you!

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
I think Signal should just create a pin option like how discord and a lot of others have. But in the meantime if I had to genuinely suggest a method without any friction if you are okay with using code like the author did, then I'd suggest something and lemme know what you think Why don't you just create a special emoji that would only be used for the purposes of Pin, like (Oh the irony), and then have a signal cli or signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot where you could do something like /pins and it would show the pins but you would need a different mobile number or account for that and honestly just a big hassle. I could think of other ways but we would never reach the native User experience that signal could provide if it would allow pin natively EDIT: Even a more simpler way could be if we could just search the chat emojis and we could just search <the pin emoji> and it would show it Also I am surprised that HN doesn't allow emojis
- apps4datr2025 1y ago
  [dead]

baby 1y ago

I tried that a long time ago with teamspeak, and then discord, but my friends are not big users of these tools and so it didnt work. Discords do too much. If whatsapp could do this it could work

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
I do think that whatsapp could do this tbh if it would actually provide its api like discord does. Telegram feels like it can definitely do such stuff and I found in my opinion that its way easier to host telegram bot on cloudflare than it is on discord so theoretically you could even have it as a cf worker with a deploy on cf button so as to even people who don't know too much about deploying could use it.
cubefox 1y ago
WhatsApp should totally add that as a feature! A voice chat room with join notifications.
henryaj 1y ago
WhatsApp has this now - https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338 https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338

Arainach 1y ago

I didn't see this in the article, but why not just organize the games in a Discord text channel? Discord has very granular notifications that seem the perfect solution here, so folks can see there are unread messages in #games, and the folks gaming are already on the server. One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.

dandano 1y ago
This was going to be my next idea if the bot didn't go well! For unread messages in Discord, you have to actively go into the discord app to check it. The fact that the bot only sends a notification when someone has taken the action to jump into discord signals that you're ready to chat right now. It avoids the 'I'll be on in 30ish', where in reality that might not happen. Talk is cheap.
bombcar 1y ago
One Big Chat is great for the terminally online. Everyone else gets horribly behind. Organized channels is the way to go and spending time thinking about setup is worth it. Otherwise they develop naturally and haphazardly.
jedimastert 1y ago
The discord of '22 was, iirc, very different from now, or at least the culture around it. It looks like they just only used it for a single voice chat lobby
- Arainach 1y ago
  The Discord of 2020 and before absolutely supported text channels, voice channels, multiple of the above, customizable notifications, and everything required here. Like OP and many others I found myself on a number of Discord servers during the pandemic for voice/video chat, gaming together, etc. and that app was the straightforward solution both for organizing and the actual event for groups of any size from 4-20.
- ghostly_s 1y ago

unethical_ban 1y ago

It seems to me a common enough use case that it should be built into discord. I think the "I am here, now" alert does more than the "hey who is around?" message.

apps4datr2025 1y ago

[dead]

stevage 1y ago

That actually sounds really nice. > Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages. My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement... I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.

mlok 1y ago

There is a very weird display bug on this site : when I access it in lanscape horizontal position, with my iPhone 8 on Brave or Safari : all the text is trembling, unable to settle on a size. Trapped in a resizing loop. If I rotate the phone verically it settles properly and then also horizontally. But if I reload the page (horizontally) it goes nuts again :)

peterldowns 1y ago

Fun story. This reminds me of the summer my friends and I were all still around our small town — we used the Yo! app the same way, as a bat signal to meet up and get into nonsense. Someone would start Yo!ing and then once there was a critical mass of return Yo!s we'd switch to text/phone and link up. Good times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

subjectsigma 1y ago

I need the opposite of this. Some of my friends just want to sit in Discord and play the same three games all day every day. I either need a way to get them to do something different or to find new friends

outlore 1y ago

This reminds me of the Houseparty app that took off with my friend group during Covid. It had a mechanism to notify others when someone had joined a party. Fun times

guicen 1y ago

Reminds me of those old coworking circles I used to be part of. Not about being productive really, but more about giving people a reason to show up and talk. Friction gets replaced with rhythm.

udev4096 1y ago

Going from signal to discord is crazy. How can you be OK with knowing that your personal voice chats are being monitored, recorded and sold to the next highest bidder? How can it be so easy to choose convenience over that? Or is it that we have essentially given up and wanna actively take a part in mass surveillance?

augment_me 1y ago
The trade-off here is a social connections versus privacy/integrity. I can make the decision to use Signal or whatever, but as long as my whole social circle does not do the same, it wont be useful. And since when they do the swap, they have to convince their whole social circle to do the same, this becomes an impossible task. Either you have 10 different apps for different friends that lie on different places on the ethics of privacy, or you just take the easy way out and use what everyone uses.
sadeshmukh 1y ago
Voice chats are e2ee, so I'm not sure where you're making this information up from.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Not every decision is about opsec. If, for what you're doing, you want people to be alerted about your actions without your explicit say-so, then signal is not the tool for that job. Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  Discord probably has a choice — free or ‘private/paid and then die sooner’. Sooner as in before a spectacular exit.
- udev4096 1y ago
  That's the difference between people who give in and people who don't. This is not about "opsec", it's about exercising your fundamental right to privacy. Majority of people are reckless, the ones who take a second to think about it are not

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

pizzathyme 1y ago

I wish discord would just implement this as a setting.

excalibur 1y ago

You guys have friends?

jrm4 1y ago

Man. Reminds me when many years back I had about 10 friends collaborating on a movie and I needed something between asynchronous and synchronous, so I stripped Wordpress down to just titles and little avatars on a front page feed thing. About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)

alliao 1y ago

Now I feel old, back in my days we all hung out on IRC and we broadcast a wav file to call on friends to join game, and had crazy scripts and bots that did weekly summary, best engagement line and so on and so forth

catigula 1y ago

It strikes me: is anyone else sick of people calling developing software "building"? Even as a software developer, it feels very supercilious.

whatevertrevor 1y ago
For small projects I tend to use write because that's what it feels like. For bigger things where there is a design element, I'll usually say designed and wrote X instead if I want emphasize its non-triviality. I didn't think of it before but you're right building feels like implying more weight than it feels right. But also I concede this is quite subjective.
elendee 1y ago
I think there's a difference between software and scripts too. Unrepentant scripter4lyfe here
bongodongobob 1y ago
Yes. Especially things like "solutions architect".
Retric 1y ago
No, build “#3. To develop or give form to according to a plan or process; create” There’s a line between baking a cake and building a wedding cake where it stops being about the ingredients and starts being about the desired form. https://shunbridal.com/article/how-tobuild-a-wedding-cake https://shunbridal.com/article/how-tobuild-a-wedding-cake It’s in that context where building software makes sense. You need to link a bunch of different components together to make a greater whole.
- catigula 1y ago
  I figured someone would attempt to use the technical definition to make their case. The problem isn't one of technical definitions, it's one of performative definitions. I am technically an Online Communications Solutions Integration Architect, and also a guy posting on an internet forum.

subpixel 1y ago

> it was a life savior when my little one was a newborn to jump onto Discord for even 5 minutes to chat with my friends, watch someone play a game and then log off for another diaper change I'm afraid I can't relate to this at all. I may a bit older and/or I may have less close friends but I prefer a very different kind of social contact that is more like make plans, meet up, rinse and repeat. Back in the AIM/ORC days I loathed being pinged all the time for chit chat - this system reminds me of that!

billdybas 1y ago

> The hardest part was convincing people to download the Discord app on their phone as most of us didn't have it downloaded. This was surprising to me – is this typical of most Discord users (primarily desktop users over mobile)?

OkayPhysicist 1y ago
Discord was originally a place to organize for playing videogames with people. If you're using it for that purpose, you're probably on your computer already (because that's where the games are). Thus, the mobile app ends up being more for checking in with your community while away from the computer, rather than a primary driver of your engagement with the platform.
daedrdev 1y ago
They could have been using it in browser. One of discords underrated decisions is that the browser version is fully featured and doesn't force you to download the app, a new user can join a server in their browser with just a name which is as low friction as you can get.

rockostrich 1y ago

I think Discord is the best chat app for friend groups and it's not even close. At this point I've written the following bots specifically for my friend group's server: # Music Quiz Bot Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist. The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot. This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal. # Birthday Bot This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them. # Plex Bot I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server. # Movie Quiz Bot Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.

crossroadsguy 1y ago
Not only Discord is not private, it’s looks, feels, and interacts bloated - extremely bloated. Sometimes I am forced to use it and I am almost constantly disgusted in those durations. Luckily around where I live “friend groups” are still far from Discord.
sneak 1y ago
The problem is that Discord isn’t e2ee and logs all chats in plaintext for all time, including all DMs. This makes it a nonstarter for me; friends don’t serve as honey in the surveillance trap for communication with their friends. Nothing that builds up an ever-growing surveillance database on private conversations between friends can be in the running for “best”.

kadhirvelm 1y ago

Wow so cool, I feel like if I had a light near by desk that turned on every time a friend was on discord voice, I'd be so much more likely to hop in for a few minutes over getting an notification. Something about the physical affordance feels harder to ignore

ethan_smith 1y ago
Check out Philips Hue or Govee lights with IFTTT integration - they can already do exactly this with Discord webhooks, no need to build it from scratch.

henryaj 1y ago

WhatsApp has a somewhat similar feature - pull up to start a group voice chat. You can ping others to let them know you're around. https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338 https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338

fdgjgbdfhgb 1y ago
The only time I've seen this feature be used is when my grandma accidentally turns it on in the family groupchat - I just don't wanna hang out with my friends in WhatsApp

vinceguidry 1y ago

God I'm so jealous you were able to get your friends to join Discord. My in-person friend group revolved around the bar we all went to. When the bar shut down, I floated the idea of a group chat but couldn't get anyone interested. No one wants to install another app and get notified more. In olden days, we'd just solve the problem with Facebook, but no one uses that anymore either. My friends are ordinary, normal, overworked people who need an easy option. The bar was that. Show up when you want to connect. Easy. So now there's nothing. I basically just lost all my friends. We all have each other's numbers but that's just not an option for coordination. Fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg, for making Facebook so shitty it's not even useful anymore for the one thing I ever found it useful for. I hope when we finally start coming for the billionaires, we come for you first.

whatevertrevor 1y ago
Sorry to hear that. FWIW it feels like there was probably a mismatch in valuation of the friendship there. For my case I was able to convince many friends to connect on various chat platforms of their choice. Some friendships fizzled out, others are still going. And then there are some anew. Unfortunately a lot of our friendships are essentially default proximity relationships. These tend to not survive as soon as the first obstacle to proximity shows up if not enough people are willing to put in the effort to make it something more.
- vinceguidry 1y ago
  For me, is not a friendship unless there's regular, in person interaction, online doesn't count. Even if I'd gotten them onto another platform the only thing it would have been used for is coordinating more in person events. I've had to end online interactions because it became clear i couldn't value the relationship. Bar was perfect. Then a huge hospital opened up across the street and they didn't want a run down bar there.
  - whatevertrevor 1y ago
    Yeah the requirements are pretty much the same for me. The friendships I was alluding to were basically in-person in-office sort of friendships that demanded a larger upkeep once the pandemic hit and later when I left my job. So like you I needed some online platform to coordinate in person meetups. It worked for the most part fortunately, but there were definitely some friendships that got lost along the way.

socalgal2 1y ago

I’m confused about what this solution does. I’d expect that as people move to discord all the message spam that was happening in signal would just eventually move over to discord as people got used to communicating there instead of signal

demaga 1y ago
It encourages people to speak rather than type. You don't get hundreds of messages per day by writing in email style. You get there if you have a lot of synchronous or near-synchronous communication in chat. It's kind of obvious that voice call suits this better, but there is friction involved in making an actual call. Discord voice channel might reduce the friction if you make this culture of hopping in and out of it.
anigbrowl 1y ago
If you don't care about Security/Privacy, Discord has a great UI and is probably significantly better for free-flowing group conversations

725686 1y ago

I was surprised to see that there was half a million more, and not less!

thomascountz 1y ago
You've seen a cube hold a million dollars, but this server?—Well, it can hold a million friends :')

anigbrowl 1y ago

tl;dr author finds Discord better than Signal for online socializing

flooo 1y ago

I have several chat groups with friends and even with my wife to avoid this topic. With my wife, I have several now: one to share recipes, one to share the weeks meal plan, one to talk about the activities of our two year old and one to share houses we might be interested in buying. It’s great to separate for record keeping, but mostly to avoid forcing the conversation on some organisational thing when the other just needs eg to vent about something at work

asdf6969 1y ago

This is why it’s so hard to make local friends as an adult in a new city. Good inspiration for me to make something similar to keep in touch with real people!

ohashi 1y ago

We just use a slack. The overwhelming single channel? nope. channels for all the hobbies, shitposting, news, games, etc. We even have a discord notification for gaming channel when people get on the gaming channel. Separate notification for the chat channel if someone wants to just chill.