Wow this is actually great. Still doesn't excuse groups using Discord instead of traditional forums, because traditional forums are still browsable without an account. But the lack of indexing has been such a huge flaw with public groups using Discord. Addressing that issue goes a long way to making Discord a less shit platform for open source apps, games, etc. to run their support from.

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.

You can bet they're selling it to AI companies for training, too.

As much as I would normally hate something like this, the way so many projects are based on discord (and how unsearchable discord messages are) make this really convenient

Probably the worst solution, but maybe it'll also get people off discord?

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.

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.

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.

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

Oh fuck

So, they just gonna use the discord messages as fuel for train AI...

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.

Yayyy!! More search result pollution!