If there’s no choice in this, it is bad. If “servers” are allowed to opt-in, and users are interrupted with a warning before posting on a “server” that has changed the setting, it’s possibly good.
I know Discord messages have never been secure, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a place people treated as private. Suddenly making messages accessible is like replacing all the bathroom stall dividers with transparent partitions: never was secure from a real threat, but there was a heightened expectation of privacy.
There are a lot of fandoms and communities and support groups with the intent to be public and having those indexed by your favorite search index will bring value, just like public web fora of the past and reddit (even ex-Twitter) before extreme monetization and slopification. But, changing any shared information or thoughts from inaccessible to accessible is virtually guaranteed to cause harm via unwanted disclosure and those harm could be irreparable and impossible to balance with the benefits of accessibility.
This news is mixed, with a side of anxiety. I’m not really sure what’s going to show up in my Discord history.
To be clear, this is really good - so much information has moved from being accessible on the open internet in the form of public forums, to being inaccessible in the form of public discord servers. This brings back that lost information.
Seriously, the amount of times the only avenue to access information has been an expired invite link is ridiculous. Anyone who doesn’t want their privacy violated should’ve got out of discord much sooner, the writing has been on the wall for years. Besides, plenty of the shit that’s currently functionally private should actually be public.
I don’t think there’s even an expectation of privacy to be had on a public discord, in open channels. Closed channels are presumably not indexed.
From what I’ve read it is channels that the discord server owner/admins have flagged as discoverable and then users themselves have a setting to still hide their messages.
This setting seems to be defaults to hide unless you are in the USA and then it defaults to show.
It will be searchable but still inaccessible.
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The problem is as usual that they violate everybody’s expectations as they make the change…
So, they just gonna use the discord messages as fuel for train AI…
They could already do that though
Unpopular opinion: discord being inacessible from the web is a feature not a bug and I hope this is opt in on a per server basis.
The fact that you can’t read the posts from a discord community without joining the server and there is no cross-server “all” or “front-page” means you have to decide to join and decide to in that moment look at that server, so you wind up with more focused communities around specific interests.
No raiding from other platforms because no direct links, no product placement since few people will see it, no content creators posting clickbait slop trying to go viral etc. etc.
I’m not going to pretend discord is perfect, but I have had better conversations there than any other social media platform
Wow this is actually great. Still doesn’t excuse groups using Discord instead of traditional forums, because traditional forums are still browsable without an account. But the lack of indexing has been such a huge flaw with public groups using Discord. Addressing that issue goes a long way to making Discord a less shit platform for open source apps, games, etc. to run their support from.
I’m confused how this will work tho. If I click on a search result that goes to discord will it take me to somewhere I can see it? I don’t have a discord account. If it going to just take you to a login screen? I can’t click reddit results anymore since they block VPN traffic without an account. So it seems like search results are just becoming less useful.
it seems like
search results arethe internet is just becoming less useful.FTFY
If I click on a search result that goes to discord will it take me to somewhere I can see it?
I assume not, which is why I still think this is worse than using normal forums. You’ll probably get a link to join the relevant server, and will probably require a Discord account to do it.
Which is very annoying and unfortunate, but is a huge step up from all that content being entirely undiscoverable.
It’s possible that someone could write a bot that displays a mirror more exactly. Not sure how easy it’ll be to both do that and not get taken down, though.
I mean for me personally this is worse because I will not make a discord account so the content is still unusable but now my search results are full of detritus.
I think you can tell most search engines to remove results from one particular source? So it should end up the same for you? If you can’t do it natively, there are definitely extensions that’ll do that.
google couldnt rely on reddit to scrape AI data, because its been taken over by said AI slop. google needed a new source of datamining. thats why reddit is becoming increasingly aggressive into forcing logins.
You can bet they’re selling it to AI companies for training, too.
They‘re Discord. They‘re selling all their data in basically real time to anyone who wants it. If there‘s a Discord user someone wants to know more about they can just pay like 5 bucks to a service and get their entire chat history. That stuff is automated.
google needed to find a new site to scrape after thier fall out with spez.
they are trying to fill the reddit void for search ability and usability. they will reneg and disable it over profit somewhere
What else could their product be?
Discord is owned by Microsoft, a huge proponent of AI. So, yeah.
Edited to add, I was mistaken! Discord turned down Microsoft’s buyout.
This is false, Microsoft does not own Discord
Oh shit, did that buy out not happen? I don’t know how I missed that, thanks for the info!
Now lemmy servers need to do the same.
Maybe some do, but they never show up in search queries whenever I tried. I even filtered by sites.
I see Lemmy/Piefed results through DuckDuckGo.
I’m using DuckDuckGo too, which server are you seeing on the results? I’ll try to filter specifically for that in the future.
PieFed.social, but I’ve occasionally seen some lemmy.world ones as well.
For example, just try searching for: “starcitizen steamdeck guide”
And third result currently goes to PieFed (a PieFed.social account posting to a Lemmy.world community).
A lot of lemmy servers have Human Verification in front of them maybe that’s why?
Could whitelist specific search engine crawlers
The bots will pretend to be search engine crawlers. And not all have their own IP ranges.
You can’t impersonate search engine crawlers, because the server can verify that it’s really a search engine crawler
See this from google: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verify-google-requests
Here, duckduckgo: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduckbot
A lot of article websites whitelist Google’s crawler, right? Can’t that be done on a domain-basis? Or maybe have some kind of authentication-based system 🤔, I guess that would require the crawlers to be refactored though
As much as I would normally hate something like this, the way so many projects are based on discord (and how unsearchable discord messages are) make this really convenient
Probably the worst solution, but maybe it’ll also get people off discord?
maybe it’ll also get people off discord?
Quite the contrary, because it’s 1 less complaint about it.
Yayyy!! More search result pollution!
What about past comments on a server that was public before this change came into place? I have no idea if any of the servers I commented on roughly 6 years ago were public. They were free servers for people playing WoW, and some had passwords and some didn’t. I didn’t make any controversial comments, but I also didn’t (knowingly) consent to anything I typed being publicly searchable.
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Oh fuck
