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> third-party interface tailored for the widely-used Discord messenger.

Isn't this explicitly against the Discord TOS? I'm surprised it wasn't shut down by Discord itself.




I'm surprised using the domain `discord.io` alone wasn't enough to get them shut down.


I'm guessing the British Indian Ocean Territory doesn't have a lot of administrators to handle trademark claims. According to Wikipedia, "the only inhabitants are British and United States military personnel, and associated contractors, who collectively number around 3,000 (2018 figures)."

Darn that global Internet, allowing people to use unauthorized chat clients with impunity!


.io domain is officially administrated out of the UK and is own by Ethos Capital, a private equity firm out of the US. Surely both the American and/or UK courts would be valid avenues for enforcement.


There are other ways to shut down a third-party service, from sending a cease and desist letter for trademark infringement to server-side blocking of access to their API.


> Darn that global Internet, allowing people to use unauthorized chat clients with impunity!

The use was not the problem; the name was the problem.


A sense of discord washes over me as I eat an apple in front of a computer running XWindows. A lesson about using a common English words as a trademark becomes apparent in my mind.


>Darn that global Internet, allowing people to use unauthorized chat clients with impunity!

The problem here is that people are chosing to use Disord despite the fact that it is so stupidly proprietary. If Discord actually enforced it's rules all the time there'd have been far fewer teamspeak/irc/mumble/etc people lured into it's walled garden. It is a literal bait and switch.

So it's important to point out a large fraction of the ways people do use Discord are actually very much against the TOS and could be prosecuted under the CFAA as felonies if Discord corporate thought they were rocking the boat and decided to buy a district attorney. It's the worst of both worlds.


> people are chosing to use Disord despite the fact that it is so stupidly proprietary

This has zero relevance to normal users. Does teamspeak/irc/mumble/etc even support live streaming with screen+audio capture to a group chat? That's a pretty basic feature in 2023. I'm not aware of any serious open source competitors in this space


"Does teamspeak/irc/mumble/etc even support live streaming with screen+audio capture to a group chat?"

pIRCh98 had video chat support, and back then we used some wrapper from FRAPS to do our screen captures.

Of course, back then, video chat was such a niche thing.

Everyone else is actually late to the game - IRC had this capability before the majority of known players.


> pIRCh98

Proprietary software. I guess the answer to my question is no, there are no open-source competitors in this space.


It was primarily a way for non-partner servers to have permanent, readable invite links before these became available officially (by paying users boosting a server). It wasn't actually a third party interface that recreated the discord client or anything (unless that's a recent development).




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