Making Content from Discoverable Servers Easier to Discover
discord.com
Starting on November 16, 2026, conversations in Discoverable Servers will be easier to find for people searching the web. Admins can choose which channels are surfaced on the web. Private servers, DMs, and GDMs are not included.
    • CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      18 days ago

      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.

    • Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      19 days ago

      they are trying to fill the reddit void for search ability and usability. they will reneg and disable it over profit somewhere

    • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
      2·
      18 days ago

      Discord is owned by Microsoft, a huge proponent of AI. So, yeah.

      Edited to add, I was mistaken! Discord turned down Microsoft’s buyout.

  • VibeSurgeon@piefed.socialEnglish
    34·
    18 days ago

    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.

    • new_world_odor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      18 days ago

      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.

      • VibeSurgeon@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        18 days ago

        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.

        • Ithi@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          18 days ago

          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.

    • Natanael@infosec.pubEnglish
      1·
      18 days ago

      The problem is as usual that they violate everybody’s expectations as they make the change…

  • dogslayeggs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish
    14·
    18 days ago

    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.

  • AppleMango@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    18 days ago

    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.

  • Djehngo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    18 days ago

    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

  • bss03@infosec.pubEnglish
    3·
    17 days ago

    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.