I guess it depends on how feasible it is to create a crawler and search engine. If you had bots crawl discord servers, continuously index everything, and then create a search engine for it, you’d probably be breaking their TOS and they’d C&D you. But I don’t think there’d be anything preventing someone from doing that on matrix. Matrix is just as decentralized as the web.
Yeah probably, though any good search engine starts by presuming consent until the owner explicitly says otherwise (robots.txt), and discord would probably take issue with that.
I mean in this case consent is enforced by the fact they’d need permissions to add the bot (if it was done properly and not via a self bot which would break tos)
Ah right, users and bots are treated differently. So yeah, in order to crawl disc servers without first asking every single one permission, you’d have to break the ToS. I have no idea if matrix has a separate “bot” type account.
Really, I think the matrix protocol needs some kind of support for this. I mean, both discord and matrix do, but I don’t think discord would ever do it.
Every single one meaning every server owner and not every user in the server I’m guessing?
Could definitely market a bot that generates a wiki from discord (maybe manages ticket, has git integration etc) to people who run these things though it’s not like the server owners are deliberately locking away their documentation and much of them have ticketing bots already
Well I assume the original complaint was alluding to the common criticism that discord is a walled garden that makes information harder to find than if everything existed on forums on normal websites. Those forums are easy to search through because search engines have been parsing it all without the owner having to do any extra work. Yeah, each forum/website owner could take special steps to make sure their site is indexed and searchable, but the vast majority don’t or do it poorly, and that’s why the search engine has value (or did before the internet was mostly social media and listicles).
You’d want more than just a wiki, because I think the thing people want searchable are the discussions. I know on more than one occasion I’ve had to go seek out and join specific discord servers to see how Linux support for a specific new product is (not to mention needing a discord account just to do this search). It’s as though everyone moved to a centralized version of usenet, which is at least two steps backwards from how the internet was 15 years ago.
I will add “a fucking chatroom where they ban you for political reasons and there’s at least 3 accounts testing the water for how much nazism they can get away with and if you report them to the mods/admins they say they don’t see it and then ban you for wasting their time.”
A Hindutva fascist gave me death threats on Discord. I reported it to admins and they claimed they saw nothing. I understood most of Discord that tolerates rightwingers are shithole places, and it is best to stick to my own friend circles and more professional and/or leftist places.
That isn’t solved by Matrix though.
I guess it depends on how feasible it is to create a crawler and search engine. If you had bots crawl discord servers, continuously index everything, and then create a search engine for it, you’d probably be breaking their TOS and they’d C&D you. But I don’t think there’d be anything preventing someone from doing that on matrix. Matrix is just as decentralized as the web.
I don’t think that breaks their tos as long as the server owner consents, official bot API allows you to go through chat history
Yeah probably, though any good search engine starts by presuming consent until the owner explicitly says otherwise (robots.txt), and discord would probably take issue with that.
I mean in this case consent is enforced by the fact they’d need permissions to add the bot (if it was done properly and not via a self bot which would break tos)
Ah right, users and bots are treated differently. So yeah, in order to crawl disc servers without first asking every single one permission, you’d have to break the ToS. I have no idea if matrix has a separate “bot” type account.
Really, I think the matrix protocol needs some kind of support for this. I mean, both discord and matrix do, but I don’t think discord would ever do it.
Every single one meaning every server owner and not every user in the server I’m guessing?
Could definitely market a bot that generates a wiki from discord (maybe manages ticket, has git integration etc) to people who run these things though it’s not like the server owners are deliberately locking away their documentation and much of them have ticketing bots already
Yeah server owner.
Well I assume the original complaint was alluding to the common criticism that discord is a walled garden that makes information harder to find than if everything existed on forums on normal websites. Those forums are easy to search through because search engines have been parsing it all without the owner having to do any extra work. Yeah, each forum/website owner could take special steps to make sure their site is indexed and searchable, but the vast majority don’t or do it poorly, and that’s why the search engine has value (or did before the internet was mostly social media and listicles).
You’d want more than just a wiki, because I think the thing people want searchable are the discussions. I know on more than one occasion I’ve had to go seek out and join specific discord servers to see how Linux support for a specific new product is (not to mention needing a discord account just to do this search). It’s as though everyone moved to a centralized version of usenet, which is at least two steps backwards from how the internet was 15 years ago.
I will add “a fucking chatroom where they ban you for political reasons and there’s at least 3 accounts testing the water for how much nazism they can get away with and if you report them to the mods/admins they say they don’t see it and then ban you for wasting their time.”
A Hindutva fascist gave me death threats on Discord. I reported it to admins and they claimed they saw nothing. I understood most of Discord that tolerates rightwingers are shithole places, and it is best to stick to my own friend circles and more professional and/or leftist places.
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