this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
183 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
38229 readers
604 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What do you mean by that? Tons of organizations, groups and people publish that they have their own Discord servers.
yes, but they're still hosted by discord. Discord isn't open source or self hostable.
What do you mean, how could your own server be "hosted by discord"?
Have you ever used discord? The name server isn’t prescriptive. It’s not your own server. It’s just your own chat rooms
No, not really.
Eh, you lost me there, what's that supposed to mean? How could my own server suddenly become not my own server if I started to use Discord?
Discord calls it a server but its really just a different term for a chat room. Discord does not allow you to host on your own infrastructure its all locked down and closed source.
The term server used to refer to a computer, running something like a web page. People connect to that specific server.
In discord, a server is just a name for a community, a label for your group. You can change channels, add new voice chats, change the icon, set up rules, bots to enforce rules, roles, pings for those roles, etc.
But at the end of the day those files are stored with discord, on discord's "servers" as in traditional server infrastructure. If discord decides all servers must serve a number of "sponsored posts" in general chat, for instance, you can't just not comply. Your server is part of their infrastructure. They can do what they want when they want. If discord decides to go paid only, you can't keep your server free, as another example. You cannot self host the actual files or software that makes up your discord server.
Thank you for this very enlightening explanation!
While it doesn't make any sense at all that "a Discord server" (an online community hosted by the Discord company) is used to mean a totally different thing from "a Discord server" (a server which runs the Discord software), your explanation makes all the other comments here suddenly make sense.
I had to check that I hadn't dreamed this up on my own, but looking around now there are claims to having Discord servers all around, these were just the first handfull I now found:
"FreeBSD has a Discord server to socialize, get support, support others, learn, contribute, collaborate, and stay up to date on all things FreeBSD and Open Source."
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Discord/DiscordServer
"If you have questions that are not covered by the documentation, you can get in contact with us on our Discord server or create a post in the discourse forum."
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea
"We're transitioning to our own discord server!"
https://github.com/OpenNeptune3D/OpenNept4une/discussions/111
"We’re opening our own Discord server as a replacement for our Gitter."
https://www.crowdsec.net/blog/crowdsec-on-discord
"I'm excited to announce the launch of our Discord server, VigneshDevHub, designed to build a thriving open-source community where developers of all levels can collaborate, learn, and work on amazing projects together!"
https://dev.to/vignesh-j/join-the-open-source-community-on-discord-4h40
"Our Discord server got a makeover."
https://finchsec-1672417305892.hashnode.dev/channel-updates-in-our-discord-server
That you're now telling me that none of them actually have their own Discord server is just bizarre. I can't be the only one who took those words at face value, simply assuming that they in fact had their own Discord servers.
You did a way better job explaining it lol. That makes much more sense than my explanation did
What I mean is that it’s hosted on discord. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s not self hostable. Maybe someone else can explain better than I can
A “server” in discord is just like your own tenancy in a cloud. It’s your own little space but the infrastructure and platform is still owned and hosted by the cloud provider.
What is called a "Discord Server" isn't a server as we know it, it is more of a hub of services that all runs on Discord's systems.
They are not hosting it themselves. All infrastructure is fully controlled by Discord and they are subject to all Discord rules and decisions.