this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 days ago by Mindwolf@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active.

Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called "Searchcord" based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.

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[–] donuts@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It also includes deleted messages. And they refuse to delete things when someone opts out

Deleted messages are not included. Neither the public nor the API allows you to read deleted messages

Upon joining a server, users gain access to all non-deleted historical content within public channels, and the same is valid for data retrieval using their API.

[–] MoonRaven@feddit.nl 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Excellent point if searchcord used the api. They created unmarked bot accounts that save all the messages.

[–] donuts@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Searchcord yes, but not the researchers from the headline