Why Discord will (probably) never get a self-hosted server option.

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1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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.

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6. 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

Minecraft servers work with self-hosting, why shouldn't Discord? I agree with @databoose and @yawnston.

I disagree. Among those the only really valid reasons I see are the version-related and the one about the reputation of discord itself in case of bad behaviour of server owners, or the security through obscuracy tipical argument (although I totally disagree with it, but thts not the point of this post).

I think the primary reason in their minds is monetization. They make money from discord nitro and server boosts, and hey, it is their bussiness, it is totaly fine. People should respect their decision.

I'm totally sure I've installed far more complex environments that the one that a discord server would need, and I'm nothing near a sysadmin pro, so that would not be a problem, and if discord really wanted that, with frequent package releases the update of the server-ends would be straight-forward for minor daily updates like those you mention. The key here is that this require an aditional development and documentaton effort that discord owners don't consider profitable enough (eiter in money, features or reputation of the service overall).

There's no need to excuse theirselves by saying that the average gamer will not be able to set up a discord server in his Windows machine: I don't think that people demanding self-hosted servers are that specific user segment. There's still people reluctant to relay on cloud for everything (some have good reasons, other don't, let's not get into that), and those people are usually capable enough of setting their own complex on premise server environments.

TL;DR:
I think your angle is wrong. You're giving some valid core reason, but you focus on the problem it would be for the user, when the real problem here is the money that discord would have to invest to get this done properly and the money they would stop earning from some server boosts that would set their private servers and get the features for free. The only point I fully agree with you is that the bad behaviour of private server owners COULD affect discord reputation. But adding an "this is a private UNSECURE self-hosted server (...) are you sure?" warning would do the trick in that case.

while I would love to see a self hosted discord alternative, they are a closed source proprietary software company and it wouldn't benefit them to develop a selfhosted server and they wouldn't be able to harvest as much data as they are when they are hosting it themselves

As you may know, some organizations are using Discord for work, rather than play. The fact that such organizations cannot self-host to ensure the privacy of their communications makes it impossible to use Discord for anything that has to do with legally sensitive information. The same goes for Slack.

we have mattermost, rocket.chat, maybe even matrix. there's probably more software people can host themselves that i haven't mentioned.

I am becoming more and more interested in internet chat freedom and the arguments motivating free speech (even if I do not want to leverage some of the things that appear as a result) I think we are in a time when we need to be investing in technologies and platforms that are 1) not open to being manipulated by money / advertising 2) do not count on a government or situation to tell them what to do, they are self-healing thru innovation and their users wanting to help 3) doesn't choose a side on religion, porn, sex workers, smut or other various election issues :p and finally.... doesn't selectively enforce a ToS, doesn't hijack your account when they decide to delete you. I had many followers on T and basically my account was closed because I wrongly used the same SMS number to verify myself on 2 accounts. They refused to discuss and people wondered where I went. I lost out on some revenue even as a result but they don't care... they don't have to.

So.... what I can't get over is simply something I can't get over. The transparency that comes with Open Source. I have watched too many go down the tube because they are bought out.

First they came for Tumblr and they were too big to listen,
then they came for Yahoo Messenger they were too big to listen,
then they came for Google Groups, then Yahoo Groups, then Facebook blocking logins that were not Facebook for existing Oculus users, then Telegram NSFW content being censored for iOS users.

I am ready to start an onion server now because I think we are at a point where if we do not do something we will find ourselves blocked and without solutions. Also DNS via HTTPS sounds like a good thing now too for privacy. Lately the trolling has increased significantly. It makes me wonder; if we could ensure the age of users how much of these problems would simply not be an issue. I met some of my best friends online when I was under age. Was it appropriate all the time? No. But it wasn't worth everyone having to click "Ï accept cookies"on every site, every day forever until the end of the world... which... is long overdue and I'll end on that note.

We are in fact working on an free open source self-hostable discord clone https://fosscord.com/