Treat anything on Discord as media that will be lost
Do not use Discord to host your files. Do not rely on Discord to preserve your text. DO NOT RELY ON DISCORD FOR ANY KIND OF PRESERVATION OR HOSTING!!
It CAN be lost, it WILL be lost! You must consider Discord as a part of the Core Internet, controlled by one company that hosts the servers.
I thought it was impressive at first that it replaced IRC, but now I am horrified. If the company behind Discord went under today, how many friends would you lose?
How many relationships? How much writing?
You may think this won’t happen, but I remember when AIM went down and along with it, entire novels worth of interaction with my oldest friend.
IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. NO COMPANY IS INFALLIBLE.
Back up your files! Download anything you’ve saved to Discord NOW, before the API changes go into effect! And DO NOT RELY ON THEM FOR HOLDING IMPORTANT FILES!
Here is a program that lets you download any and all of your discord DMs, your servers, everything. You can set the format (raw text, html (dark and light), and others. You can even download the uploaded files not just the text, though that may be just for the command-line version not the GUI window version.
GitHub – Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter: Exports Discord chat logs to a file
Please back up your conversations, your stories. I have a backup of everything I care about that runs once a week, with full attachment backups every several months. I write stories on discord, and would be devastated if someone happened to them. You have to have your own local copies of every file you care about.
Tags:
#Discord #amnesia cw #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #PSA #recs #DiscordChatExporter is amazing #highly‚ highly recommended #though note that due to limitations on Discord’s end‚ it can’t preserve info on *who* used reaction emojis #if you’re extremely stubborn like me‚ you can open up the raw HTML and manually edit that into the hovertext #if not‚ don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good #even an unmodded export is incredibly valuable #(from my perspective‚ here on the other side of the queue‚ I reblogged that post on offline-first smartphones less than an hour ago) #(and I will note that the *text* of DiscordChatExporter HTML exports is visible on mobile‚ but not the images) #(even if you turned media downloads on (and do make sure to turn media downloads on)) #(not sure if there’s some tinkering I could do to make that work: I *mostly* re-read chat logs on a laptop) #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 