- 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
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.