A Brazilian team used Discord’s API to scrape 10% of its open servers.

Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active.

Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called “Searchcord” based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    268·
    1 day ago

    So this is:

    'Uh guys, Discord chats leaked…"

    For… what, just literally everyone who used Discord between 2015 and 2017, everyone who was an early adopter?

    Dear fucking god.

    I used to say ‘someday, people will learn’, but fucking no obviously not, no they won’t, almost everyone is an idiot and/or truly doesn’t care.

    … I guess this’ll be fodder for a whole bunch of dramatubers / pedohunters for the next year or so…

    • DanWolfstone@leminal.spaceEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      It wasn’t the chats though. It was public servers that can be found through the discovery tab. I would love to be up and arms about this and convince people to switch but… Looking at it objectively, this isn’t terribly different from if they’d archived public subreddits and their posts.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
      361·
      1 day ago

      The disappearance of forum public discussion to unsearchable, unpreserved, discord semi-private discussion chambers is probably the largest informational catastrophe of the internet so far.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        102·
        1 day ago

        I potentially agree, but as a possible competitor, I submit:

        Everything DOGE has done in the last 3 months.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            3·
            1 day ago

            … No no no it all wasn’t.

            The DOGE goons made up multiple logins to multiple US Gov databases that are not open to the public… inucluding the DoD’s SIPRNet…

            … and we know at least some of these logins were also used from utterly unsecure personal devices, remotely, not onsite, and that they’ve been getting used by IP addresses from all over the place, all over the world, meaning said login creds have either outright been given away, or been compromised by other nation state’s hackers, or just total rando hackers.