- It's not a lot of times when Discord has a major outage. Most of the months have 100% uptime, and most of the outages are minor, and don't affect a lot of users. With self-hosted servers, it's unlikely you'll ever reach that high uptimes. Also, the Discord team can't guarantee the stability of the whole service if there are lurking self-hosted servers.
- You will lose a lot of the versatility of having a cloud-hosted server. You won't be able to change the region in less than a second if something goes wrong, you'll have to fix it yourself.
- Discord works on the rolling release model, which means they push a lot of code daily to make the service better. This means that, if you had a self-hosted servers, you'd have to upgrade the server pretty much daily, which will get annoying really quickly, and a lot of fragmentation between server versions will occur.
- By self-hosting servers, there is the possibility of a security breach. Some unscrupulous server owners could get their users' IPs and sell them, DDoS the users or worse. That would make bad reputation for the owner, the Discord team and everyone inbetween
- Even if you could possibly self-host your own server, what would be the point. Most of the times, it's the gateway/API that go down. And when that is down, well, your self-hosted server won't do much, since you are required to go through the gateway to authenticate and use the program. The only reason I could think of for having a self-hosted server would be for LAN parties and other things like that, and even then, it would only be useful for voice, not text.
-- Revision 2 --
- Discord (probably) has a very large and complex infrastructure that is not easy to maintain. It probably wouldn't be easy to make a binary that would be easy enough for normal users to run on their computers and be compatible with the existing infrastructure. Even if it was possible, it would cost an enormous amount of time and money which could be spent on expanding the platform and fixing bugs for everyone instead.
This is my opinion on why Discord will probably never get a self-hosted server binary. Feel free to contact me over on Discord (DoNotSpamPls#8787) if you think I can improve this, if I was wrong somewhere, or you just want to rant. idc
This is pretty old but it still shows up in google index and i found myself disagreeing with a lot of these points. And i don't respect how you replied to nooitaf who brought up a pretty good point.
Okay? And? They will still most likely be online when discord is offline, it would be essentially a decentralized platform that doesn't have one service that can fail at any time.
Why does that matter? Those would be external servers completely separate from official discord servers, they don't need to care about other external servers.
This feature is only exclusive to voice calls and even in the instances of me disconnecting from a voice call ive never had an instance where swapping the servers helped.
This is the year 2020, servers can update on a daily (although discord does not update daily) basis, that's not an issue for the grand majority of potential external servers.
Absolutely not, this can all be resolved simply by warning and notifying the user that their IP can be viewed by the host of the custom server anytime a user wants to join one, that would have nothing to do with discords reputation as anything done with access to that IP address would be done by the owner of that external server which has nothing to do with discord.
Mainly stability and privacy, the auth servers have nothing to do with the main servers which are separate, so if the main servers are down but auth servers still are up then external servers and (possible) consensual P2P DM communication could still happen.
Discord has been pretty shifty about how they handle data and to be quite honest with you i think it speaks volumes how quiet they like to be about it, it's a good service dont get me wrong but i'd like external servers for private communication.
Another unintentional benefit would be a pretty drastic weight off of discords shoulder in terms of traffic and computational stress, the very grand majority of users would use official servers sure, but external services would be handling traffic that official servers wouldn't have to deal with if it weren't for external servers.
You sound like you have very little experience when it comes to the field of programming or are just being intentionally disingenuous here, no, adding external server support would not require "an enormous amount of time and money which could be spent on expanding the platform and fixing bugs for everyone instead.", you're making it sound like it is some massive investment, it is not, it would be a major new feature, but nothing on the scale you try to make it out to be.