What does HackerNews think of cordless?

There’s a lot of instances, for example the developer of one of the alternative clients https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless

The only blocking issue is that their success (and subsequent spam/abuse issues) is greater than their focus on open access, to the extent that they formally disallow 3rd party client access.

So at the one end of the spectrum with have IMAP/SMTP, in the middle we have things like Telegram (everything's GPL3! The protocol is terrible and here are all the details! Go nuts!)... and at the other end we have Discord: One Protocol, One Allowed Client™®©.

Do I use Discord? No.

Would I like to use Discord? Yes.

Why can't I use Discord? The client is too much for my older laptop.

Would I like to use Discord? Yes there are a pile of people on there I'm missing out

Can I do anything about it? Yes, I have two options:

1) use https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ until it suffers the same fate as https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless

2) throw the whole thing to the wind until I have better hardware

Hmm. You know come to think about it the chances are people with similar interests to myself are probably also stuck on older hardware too and probably won't be using Discord either...

> There are alternate Discord clients, and — unlike Slack — Discord doesn't try to actively prevent people from writing alternate clients against their API.

Yes, they do.

https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless:

> Hey, so I know this is somewhat of a bummer, but I got banned because of ToS violation today. This seemed to be connected to creating a new PM channel via the /users/@me endpoint. As that's basically a confirmation for what we've believed would never be enforced, I decided to not work on the cordless project anymore. I'll be taking down cordless in package managers in hope that no new users will install it anymore without knowing the risks. I believe that if you manage to build it yourself, you've probably read the README and are aware of the risks. I'll keep the repository up, but might archive it at some point. And yes, you'll still be able to use existing binaries for as long as discord doesn't introduce any more breaking changes. However, be aware that the risk of getting a ban will only get higher with time!

https://github.com/atlx/discord-term:

> Disclaimer: So-called "self-bots" are against Discord's Terms of Service and therefore discouraged. I am not responsible for any loss or restriction whatsoever caused by using self-bots or this software. That being said, there's no one stopping you from risking using an account, so go head!

Well, sadly there's the fact that Discord has finally pulled out the official laser beams for the alternative client scene, such that Cordless recently called it quits: https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless

Ripcord (https://cancel.fm/ripcord/) doesn't seem to be giving any indications that it no longer works, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (and probably for fairly large values of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ too)

My computer is generally only able to handle one Chromium-based HI I EAT ALL YOUR RAM AND GPU, so I basically treat Discord like email as a result of the no-3rd-party-app policy. Given that the Discord "app" is just Electron, it'll get in a fight with the poor thermal design of my laptop in exactly the same way on the website does.

This being said, it's very difficult for me to argue loudly against the position they're, because it's complicated.

Discord has scaled to the point where "13 year old skiddies who like pulling legs off spiders will use any alternate clients they find [which don't include anti-spam protection] to send a {server,reputation}-destroying level of spam" is having a more measurable impact than "we need to maintain equality of access". I suspect that extremely strong management vision+competence would be necessary to prioritize this - as things stand right now, it's incredibly easy to deprioritize because the vast majority of people using Discord either have minimally-viably decent machines appropriate for playing games or completing actual day jobs.