Discord Shuts Down Servers for Switch Emulators Suyu & Sudachi; Disables Lead Developers Account As Well

Pra@sh.itjust.works to Games@lemmy.world – 733 points –
Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers
theverge.com

Discord👏Is👏Not👏A👏Replacement👏For👏 Websites

159

What I hate most about this is how they now moved to Rocket Chat.

Come on people. Use a forum. Get the message, finally. Do it!

I'm pretty sure most of people who mainly use discord as their main social apps probably never touched forum-based internet.

Hosting your own forum is also better as you (the owner of the site) can still retrieve the msgs as long as you still have the access to the host server (so you can back them up in case shutting down, then going to resurfacing later).

Not to mention using discord is already risking yourself because of their shitty policy.

What's a safe way to host a site without anyone being able to track it to you?

I'll explain it in layman's terms...

  • There is always a price (inconvenience) for secure-ness in online world.
  • There's 2 option to host a forum,
    1. You can use service like forum hoster or rent a VPS (so you can setup your own server although not self-hosting).
    2. Self-host yourself (this one a bit tricky if you aren't prepared).
  • Learn some good basic OpSec habit (eg. Never use same password, Never put your personal detail in your active directory especially on your site source document, use 2FA and so on).
  • Learn to spot a phising or malicious link and never to randomly click random link in an email (in times when someone tried to social engineering you).
  • Use reputable service provider if you are not going to self-host yourself.
  • If you happen to self-host, make sure to check your open ports and secure them. Bots always probing any site in the world!
  • For some reason if you're going to run sketchy stuff, never use your real credential. This point may not apply on your region as it depends on your local law.

Hm not really sure this answers what I mean. If you are hosting a site, how do you stop corps demanding your name from the hosting provider and going after you?

Sadly for that matter it is more to the legal area.

For identity they can catch you either from email or the payment info. For email you can make one easily, but for payment search a provider that accept virtual (credit) card, or get something that accept crypto wallet.

Yeah, online exposure can point you sooner or later depending how motivated the party that seek you.

try !privacy@lemmy.ml as I'm not 100% on this stuff

but basically:

some third party hosts let you sign up anonymously with an anonymous email etc.

Only ever connect to the server host via VPN

Get a domain with anonymous WHOIS protection

Stick it all behind a reverse proxy


Technically Nintendo or whoever could demand your proxy/host to stop doing business with your account, but they won't have enough personal info to go beyond that and you can just rehost it under new info.

How would you pay for the hosting without being exposed?

I make lots of use of discord. That does not mean I prefer it to forum style for communication - discord just suits well for one-off joke-y talk

Maybe in my message seems to focus solely on discord for putting the blame... The problem nowadays is that mostly these "devs" share/upload/host their releases in Discord which means you do use Discord's CDN to host their files. Another common complaint of these practices is that you need to join their server in order to just download relevant files which makes it infuriating if you stumbles across these practices often. For example I joined 8 different discord servers just to download a software/binary/release, why can't just put the release on something like Mediafire, Google Drive, Megaupload or perhaps sourceforge.

I do understand Discord is communication platform but most of time some people are too lazy to manage stuff so what happen is that everything is hosted in single place as such Discord.

Wait, wtf. People literally post helpful resources and artifacts on discord, and nowhere else? Huh. Just as I thought it is impossible to go lower

Internet is really wide and open if you know direction :)

Even libgen (Library Genesis) still provide IRC as one of option to download ebook from their catalog.

FMHY and Internet Archive is a good entry point if you want to search anything.

And it’s a million times better for people trying to troubleshoot.

1 forum post can solve many problems, rather than having to have each person ask in a support chat that’s not searchable.

Technically Discord is trying to solve this with their threads feature, but I've found either the server owners don't force it or the users don't use it. Either way, it sucks.

You still have to sign in to use discord, thus making it kinda garbage for support

The threads/forum feature on discord is just awful. Topics get buried and I think the general ethos of discord encourages people to just spam in the chat channels rather than wait in a forum for help.

Can’t find the answer via a search engine though. You first have to find out where to look for the answer, before you can ask it.

They need to be using an encrypted platform hosted in a country out of reach of Nintendo

It's so goddamn easy to set up a basic forum site for a few bucks a month, and it's not like there aren't hundreds of options for file sharing as well.

The Xbox and PSP modding forums were where I used to hang out before Reddit, a well-designed and run forum is so much better than trying to basically make a website out of a chat room.

Still not the point of a live-chat application. The use case is not the same as a forum. You want an archive where everything is well-organized and most questions have already been answered. Discord and other live chat services are more like live tech support, to fill the gap between the raw technical documentation found in GitHub, and the just getting started guide or FAQ, which are usually lightweight enough that they could be posted anywhere. Discord doesn't exist to be an archive that holds all the knowledge, discord exists so that when you open an app, you can go in, ask a couple questions, and hopefully someone will get to you in a couple minutes, at most, rather than in a couple days.

I hope Nintendo is able to make emulation illegal once and for all and end all this. People really shouldn't be allowed to run whatever software they want, they should only be allowed to run Microsoft Windows and the fun games they include on the bonus disc

Why 👏 is 👏 every 👏 word 👏 padded 👏 by 👏 emoticons 👏 ?

I💪D😉K🎉My🤔Sister🎃Showed💤Me💅A🌌TikTok🙇Like🦮This🍄One🧩Time

I misread that and thought you were d*cking your sister.

You're not alone, bud. You see what you want to see, I suppose. /j

You've never seen someone clap between every word trying to get their point across?

Never your granny clapped between words while shouting some order or rule?

1 more...

Discord is the antithesis to free web. Stop using it. I won't join any community using discord.

Oh yeah, and fuck Nintendo

I started using Discord because Skype was pissing me off. Now, Discord starts to piss me off with their bullshit. I'm just too tired to move to yet another platform that will start sucking once it's grown bigger. I hate this "social media" focus on every little fucking thing. This stupid "we are building a community" garbage should die.

Maybe it's time for me to burn everything down and go live in the woods. I don't particularly resonate with people anyway.

You've touched on the cycle of enshittification. Step 1, everything is free and wonderful. Step 2: milk those customers for money.

The solution is to favor and support services which take capitalism out of the equation. It might cost a little bit, but I think a few small donations can go a long way.

Yea, I immediately stopped using it after the CEO's horrifying speech at the "Protecting Children Online" hearing.

Could you (or someone) elaborate on that first point there?

It's a closed system owned by a single company. If you provide data or information there, the company owns the data, other people can't find the data using search engines and they would need an account to access the data. Imagine the internet is owned by a single company and they could sell, change, censor, delete restrict access to or use the information in means you cannot predict.

It's a closed ecosystem. What else is there to say?Compare Contrast with IRC, Matrix or XMPP.

So, it's the lack of admin rights? Inability to decide your own sitewide TOS, lack of privacy from Discord admins, possibility of getting shut down, that's what they meant?

(I'm not familiar with those other platforms)

None of those details really matter.

What matters for the point of this argument is the simple fact that Discord is owned by the company Discord Inc.

That includes all of the servers and everything on them.

Imagine if ALL OF THE INTERNET was owned by Google …

So the worry is of a surveillance state?

More than that. They own the content and relationships and can use them in ways you cannot predict. LLMs gobble up human produced content because we entrusted it to corporations. What hit hardest for me was when Facebook published a study where they found they could influence users attitude by prioritizing certain posts in their feeds.

Imagine it. Corporations owning your relationships and using them to get a profit out of you

Even beyond the point of "using discord". Nintendo is reaching harassment levels of assholism. Are they doing even worse that with Gaty Bowser?

They should just spin up their own Lemmy instance

Yeah, and a Matrix instance

They don't really need a chat though, do they? For their purpose of user-interfacing development and tracking, a forum would be much more useful when coupled with a code hosting system, no?

Can do bug reporting/tracking and development through the latter, while the former allows discoverable FAQ, dev-to-user and user-to-user support. With chat, the last point is just about impossible plus it's not discoverable.

I don't know man, I'm not a doctor. They just had a Discord already so I assume they wanted one.

let me just spin up a subreddit instead and ... WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?

That's the extra funny part, their subreddit is rock solid since they had it a fair while ago.

Why is this much of this a problem for them—discord shouldn't be an essential piece of the puzzle for an emulator project

Potentially completing someone's lemmy bingo card here, but it's relatively easy to self-host any tools you need

You all should have stayed on IRC

You all should have stayed on IRC

You're not wrong, but also, it's way too complicated for the regular person to use. A better UX is needed.

People downvoting you don't seem to remember the whole "messages aren't delivered while you're not online" thing

TIL that typing in a username, server address and hitting 'Connect' is a bad UX.

GUI > CL. 😇

I get the testicular fortitude that someone has to have to make that kind of comment here on Lemmy, that has very hardcore Linux tech-based audience, but still, the general electronics using public would agree with what I'm saying.

TIL that typing in a username, server address and hitting ‘Connect’ is a bad UX.

UX is more than just a single login.

I used to on irc when i was 10 fucking years old. You type.in the serve and then type #before the room you want to use.

Did they put lead back in gasoline when i wasn't looking or something?

I used to on irc when i was 10 fucking years old. You type.in the serve and then type #before the room you want to use.

Did they put lead back in gasoline when i wasn’t looking or something?

We used to fly on planes by laying stomach down on the wing. Didn't make it the best way to fly though.

The UX of any process/device gets improved over time, and adapts to the generation that is using it.

Would the newest gens even know what a command line prompt even is at this point?

If they REALLY want it to be like discord, why not use Revolt?

https://revolt.chat/

I don't understand.

One that really ticked me off was that "the legend of zelda ocarina of time" pc build "ship of harkinian".

I have never had such a tough time installing something. You have to do everything through their discord and it was a complete fucking mess.

Just use matrix. Revolt is just giving your data to someone else for no reason. Like you could technically self host it but it's not federated like matrix

Been using Matrix (Element) for a while and it’s honestly fine apart from the fact that almost no one uses it (Lemmy devs are a rare exception).

While it has many features of Discord while still being easier than IRC and encrypted to boot, I’m assuming the reason most people won’t use it is because Discord is simply more convenient. After all, that is and has been their main selling point from the beginning, aside from voice chat for gaming, which isn’t really necessary for dev communities.

I mean using matrix or any chat service is giving your data to someone else. What's the distrust with revolt?

Looking at their git repos it seems pretty above board: multiple open source clients by community members, APGL license, docker images and backend repo all pretty accessible in one place.

No hate on Matrix of course, but theres a few people who seem to have the ick for Revolt and I wonder if Ive missed something.

It's not black and white like that. Giving information to two different clients is not equal. Just like signing up with Signal and Facebook is going to be drastically different. That being said, the issue work Revolt is it's not federated and the protocol isn't anywhere near as good as the matrix protocol. It's not bad per se, just not as good.

Fair enough, the federation of platforms like lemmy is a good protection against legal trolls for sure.

I don't know why, but I can't sign up for revolt. They never sent me the verification. Now they just know 2 of my email addresses making me double fucked if a data leak ever happens.

It doesn’t work if you use iCloud or a custom domain with iCloud.

I ended up using Protonmail.

Pretty fucking authoritarian for a company that uses the OPA’s split circle as its logo

Wait. The OPA from expanse? There is some resemblance, but I'd say it more looks like a gamepad/emoji hybrid.

"We will repeat in every sentence that we are not a for-profit emulator, we'll be fine!"

Yeah.

googled Sudachi, and its GPL 3 but:

  • Contributions aren't allowed
  • Hosted on github (might be an issue tracker instead of the live repo tho)
  • Claims not to paywall features, before listing a bunch of features behind a paywall.

yeah that's gonna go real swell for them

I'm not surprised. It's not right for Discord to disable the servers and accounts, but at the same time, if you are hosting a community it shouldn't be on discord since you aren't in control of it

Wish they gave as much of a shit about shutting down pedophilia and OnlyFans leak servers as they do licking Nintendo's boots.

Discord is an inherently unsafe platform.

I thought that would happen the moment I saw suyu uses only a discord server. Shame they didn't use matrix or even IRC

They still should, it would be a great way to highlight how futile Nintendo's efforts are. Unfortunately, there's a good chance they'll just forget about doing live communication like this anymore.

Emulation is a matter of media preservation. Give us backwards compatibility or go fuck yourselves.

Side note, is there there a good open source alternative to Discord in terms of it's exact functionality? (And I don't mean as a forum alternative, but voice comms and streaming). After their app update, I'm kind of annoyed with them. Yet, my community is rather dependent on them despite their enshittification.

We got sucked in because you could simply link it to randos on MMOs and if they didn't want to download an app, could still have voice comms in browser. Before that, we had ventrillo, mumble, etc, but nothing was quite as easy access for randos. But man, they kind of suck lately so... hrm. :/

Rocket.Chat and Matrix come to mind. The latter's element client (the default) even looks extremely Discord-ish.