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.

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    78·
    23 hours ago

    This isn’t even them scraping private chats and small servers, they just scraped public servers in the discovery tab. None of that information was ever private, and every user can browse the chat history there.

    • .Donuts@lemmy.worldEnglish
      35·
      23 hours ago

      Yeah, exactly. It may sound scary or like a violation of privacy, but there is no privacy when posting to public online areas.

    • micka190@lemmy.worldEnglish
      251·
      23 hours ago

      “Researchers scrape thousands of hours of news footage from their TVs!” is about as big a deal, honestly.

    • MoonRaven@feddit.nlEnglish
      42·
      23 hours ago

      It also includes deleted messages. And they refuse to delete things when someone opts out.

      • .Donuts@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        22 hours ago

        It also includes deleted messages. And they refuse to delete things when someone opts out

        Deleted messages are not included. Neither the public nor the API allows you to read deleted messages

        Upon joining a server, users gain access to all non-deleted historical content within public channels, and the same is valid for data retrieval using their API.

        • MoonRaven@feddit.nlEnglish
          1·
          20 hours ago

          Excellent point if searchcord used the api. They created unmarked bot accounts that save all the messages.