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Comment by DrillShopper | Hacker News Reader

Cool, how about you let me use this with an open source client so I know the client isn't phoning the decrypted data home now.

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No, because half their premium features are dependent on them controlling the client. Even excluding relatively new things like client theming, a custom client could enable custom emojis everywhere, or make it easy to offload storage to another site to avoid paying for nitro. As long as a service is free(-to-play), there will always be a somewhat adversarial relationship between the user and the company.

Ah yes, the selling of emojis and simple file storage.

I miss the GameSurge IRC and caleague with Mumble days.

What do you want them to sell? Personally I’m glad the paid features are trivial rather than core functionality.

Did you read the article ?

> To that end, the protocol is detailed in our whitepaper[0] and open-source library[1]

[0] https://github.com/discord/dave-protocol

[1] https://github.com/discord/libdave

That doesn't mean much when the discord TOS forbids use of anything but the official client to connect to their services. They seem to turn a blind eye to the various unofficial clients mostly, but also do occasionally ban a subset of their users occasionally despite no other TOS violations.

How can I possibly trust the Discord client is actually using that library and not a modified version that calls home? The whole point of using open source is being able to see the entire code of the program, and compile it yourself

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