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by password4321
653 days ago
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Discord's back end is amazing and they've blogged about a lot of it over the years (https://hn.algolia.com?query=%22How%20Discord%22). Not as smooth sailing on the front end though, and unfortunately they threaten to ban accounts using alternative clients, though there have been several (https://hn.algolia.com?query=Discord%20client). Discord is good enough for most users and since it was one of the first to fully leverage WebRTC in-browser for voice chat (without requiring an account), the network effect is almost impossible to overcome at this point. This is incredibly unfortunate as closed chat ecosystems are an information black hole (except possibly when user generated content is licensed to the highest bidder for LLM training, what a gold mine!) PS. It's worth mentioning in any Discord discussion with the (though the usual "could get banned" caveat applies): it is possible to export from Discord using https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter |
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I thought about building a scraper using something simplistic like Puppeteer to login to my account since the Discord browser experience is basically the same as the Discord app (which makes sense since its Electron). It would just issue a command to scroll arbitrarily up on a given channel/etc. until a certain earliest date was reached, and scrape all the data.
But.... again I'm sure that they have all sorts of mechanisms to detect unusual user behavior, so this might be JUST as vulnerable to detection as the aforementioned DiscordChatExporter.
Even leviathan walled gardens like Google let you export your data in a reasonable fashion (Google Takeout) - this is probably my biggest issue. On the other hand even if I could find an equivalent user-friendly platform, I'd never be able to convince all my contacts to migrate off Discord.