Cordless Project Closes Down

[vertis]

It really is time to start a push to move open communities to open source software. Running a whole bunch of open communities out of slack and discord has always surprised me.

Slack is particularly bad with making anything longer than 10k messages inaccessible. The amount of internet history being lost in these groups is boggling.

[cobbzilla]

Zulip [1] is free/open source and arguably has better usability. Bubble [2] runs our day-to-day chat on Zulip and it's worked really well.

[1] https://zulip.org/

[2] https://git.bubblev.org/bubblev/bubble

[james_pm]

The message history is all there, held hostage by Slack. Clearly it's not a burden for them to store it or they would simply delete everything past 10,000 messages rather than still storing it and reminding me frequently that they have it if I ever decide to pay.

[dmitriid]

There are very few, if any, opensource alternatives that provide the same level of convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25093106 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25093556

[himujjal]

What are the good open source alternatives out there?

DuckDuckGo'd a few ones. But not convincing ones.

[junon]

Discord bots, on multiple occassions, have DM'd me child pornography with invite links to related servers. I have no idea how these bots have found me or why they are allowed to message me, and so far any attempt to make Discord answer me about them has failed.

This earned yet another twitter DM to them telling them they fucked up. They benefit directly from the open source community so this is a huge "fuck you" to everyone involved.

Slimey, shitty tactics. I was previously going to run a company through them but now I'm going to evaluate other options.

[Sherwoodcs]

Are you aware that there is an option to disable messages from unknown users, and users you do not share a server with?

There is also a setting for discord "scanning" your messages for bad content, maybe that's something you're looking for.

[jnwatson]

I'm confused. What did Discord do wrong? Spam is a problem across all message platforms.

[swiley]

Fucking hell, I'm using finch to handle discord notifications on my pinephone from my girlfriend. If discord starts enforcing the no 3rd party client thing I'm dumping it.

[fuzzybear3965]

finch?

[bartvk]

I wonder what this means for Ripcord, https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

[polyzium]

Cordless is still using an outdated API, which is a red flag, Ripcord is up-to-date and uses the same endpoint as Discord's own client, so it's less of a risk getting banned

[dan1234]

I know modding the official client is against the rules, but how is a replacement client in breach when there’s a public API?

Does anyone know the specific rule, in the ToS, that Cordless breaks?

[spijdar]

Not the ToS, but the "guidelines" [0] states:

  You may not use self-bots or user-bots to access Discord.

The API is explicitly for bots, so this pretty clearly bans using said API for accessing user accounts.

Adherence to the "guidelines" is accepted as part of the ToS, "you agree to comply with the restrictions and rules of use set forth in these Terms and our Community Guideline"

[0] https://discord.com/guidelines

[high_priest]

Ok, but why? Is it about the "no custom clients allowed" part of ToS?

[raspyberr]

Your question is literally the first thing answered in the README...

[m-p-3]

That's sad to see a open source project closing down like this :(

[kordlessagain]

What is sad is that we have another corporate entity acting aggressively to user-centric efforts.

[cab404]

Any open-source alternatives?

I am looking for: - Voice/video chat with PTT integrated - An okayish chat with search feature

I would like to be a part (developer) of such project.

Spartial channel structure (like in spartial.chat) is a welcome thing — I would like to make some sort of distributed hackspace with that.

[iAmir]

as a contributor, this is a very sad thing to happen, there should be at least a way to submit custom clients and digitally sign them so Discord can allow using those that are accepted

[polyzium]

I'm the contributor regarding the VTxxx stuff. I agree with your idea, considering the fact that Discord uses Electron which is just sandboxed Chromium, which uses quite a lot of RAM. For a product marketed towards gamers (or at least was), this is not good. What a shitty reality. I wish I can go back to TS3 and its Qt client... oh well, we have Mumble anyway.

[melenaos]

Can't we implement an opensourced sever with the same api and let cordless be the client to the opensourced server?

Or the Api is also copyright?

[ozim]

Funny that you use "we" as in who exactly would that be?

With OSS contributors getting burned out by maintaining stuff they don't get paid for, you propose that "we" build and support something from which people participating in network will get benefits from. Then maintainers have to deal with all the requests and other stuff, it is not just writing code, you also have to run some servers and it is costing money as well.

[dasfsi]

Not really, but I presume they change it frequently (I've seen cordless's author saying they're using v6 apis)

[jbirer]

I disagree with the closure. They should fight Discord to provide an open source alternative client for a closed system who is attempting to trap their users.

[manigandham]

Fight how exactly? Discord owns the network and API; they don't have to allow anyone else.

[ozim]

You are going to donate $10k for hiring a lawyer from your own pocket? Then you are going to spend evenings and weekends on promoting that cause, tweeting, posting on forums, asking people for more donations?

[biosmarcel]

Well, what should I do in your opinion?