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How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

blog.discord.com

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Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#41

Post by Scaless »

dvt wrote: post #10
tester756 wrote: post #2

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.

> ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak To be fair, Mumble is FOSS, and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005. Discord is pretty mediocre software (remember when they accidentally allowed iframe XSS RCE attacks? A very amateurish mistake), but the incumbents were an absolute dumpster fire.

For Mumble in particular, the devs had their heads in the clouds for so long that it is no surprise that it is no longer relevant.

If you had a mic that had issues in any way (buzzing, volume, balance), "The Wizard" and "AGC" were supposed to fix it for you. Do not fret little one, for you do not need nor want to manually fiddle with settings, The Wizard will make everything right [1]!

The pivotal feature that was the reason so many people I know stopped using it is the ability to change the volume of an individual person [2]. It has been a requested feature since the beginning of time, yet it took until 2016 to implement in dev branch and didn't actually make it into a release version until 2020! Too little, too late.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200223143654/https://wiki.mumb...

[2] https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/1156

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#42

Post by vxNsr »

kccqzy wrote: post #30
tester756 wrote: post #2

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.

I've also noticed that in a lot of tech-related social circles people are increasingly choosing Discord over Slack. That's a trend I totally didn't expect: at least until a few years ago it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work and everyone else. That changed quickly. Impressive indeed!

The free discord tier is better than the free slack tier. That’s honestly why 90% of ppl use discord over slack.

Also paid discord is 100x cheaper than paid slack, for non-corporate entities. You can get top tier discord for like $100/m while slack price goes up with each user. Not to mention that discord allows users to easily assist in upgrading your server while slack doesn’t have that functionality at all.

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#44

Post by tester756 »

sascha_sl wrote: post #39
tester756 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These days? Well, most server providers have some sort of basic flood mitigations in place now, and even more advanced protection has become affordable. Hmm I didn't meant your server being DDoSd, but you being DDoS (but probably that's what you meant with Skype P2P example?)

Well yeah. Though Vent, Teamspeak and Mumble never had these issues (if you could trust the server admin). Skype (at the time, no idea now) was a very shoddily written piece of software. It was trivial to query the IP of any online user, even if they were not on your contact list or appearing offline. You had to use a VPN or carefully conceal your Skype ID, I did work with a somewhat popular live streamer back then (…

>Though Vent, Teamspeak and Mumble never had these issues (if you could trust the server admin).

In some games where people were often switching teams, you couldnt.

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#45

Post by PeterCorless »

Sikul wrote: post #17
typon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they make the move to ScyllaDB, as mentioned in their "Future work" section?

We've moved quite a few datasets from Cassandra to Scylla, but not messages. I think we're planning to make a blog post about our experience with Scylla at some point.

Definitely lemme know when you are going to do that! (peter@scylladb.com here).

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#46

Post by Xavdidtheshadow »

kccqzy wrote: post #30
tester756 wrote: post #2

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.

I've also noticed that in a lot of tech-related social circles people are increasingly choosing Discord over Slack. That's a trend I totally didn't expect: at least until a few years ago it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work and everyone else. That changed quickly. Impressive indeed!

I think which fits your community is really dependent on your use case.

Discord has great tools around moderation and membership tiers; it's designed for users you don't trust.

Slack is much more for a community where everyone knows each other (or at least trusts each other a bit, like you'd trust a coworker).

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#47

Post by nnncdrj »

yelnatz wrote: post #14
tester756 wrote: post #2

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.

Well it solved a lot of pain points with the target market. I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical. Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.

I don't get it, you can run mumble on any random Linux box in your house, you don't need to pay to have it hosted somewhere. Works find running on any box on your desk.

Discord makes you the product. It's gratis in exchange for letting them spy on you. If you don't know why that's bad...

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#48

Post by [deleted] »

kccqzy wrote: post #30
tester756 wrote: post #2

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.

I've also noticed that in a lot of tech-related social circles people are increasingly choosing Discord over Slack. That's a trend I totally didn't expect: at least until a few years ago it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work and everyone else. That changed quickly. Impressive indeed!

[deleted]

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#49

Post by SaltyBackendGuy »

m4rtink wrote: post #37
yelnatz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it solved a lot of pain points with the target market. I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical. Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.

It works nice and is free, but for how long? How long can they keep paying for that bandwidth and message data storage while keeping the thing essentially free?

> It works nice and is free, but for how long?

I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#50

Post by craftinator »

kccqzy wrote: post #30
tester756 wrote: post #2

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.

I've also noticed that in a lot of tech-related social circles people are increasingly choosing Discord over Slack. That's a trend I totally didn't expect: at least until a few years ago it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work and everyone else. That changed quickly. Impressive indeed!

> it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work

One of the best hammers I own is a screwdriver.

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