cordless VS weechat-discord

There’s a lot of instances, for example the developer of one of the alternative clients https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless

The cordless project https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless is now abandoned and archived, and the maintainer has been banned for a ToS violation.

People who have been caught using third-party clients have been banned before.

The developer of the cordless Discord client got banned, presumably for using a third-party client.

The only blocking issue is that their success (and subsequent spam/abuse issues) is greater than their focus on open access, to the extent that they formally disallow 3rd party client access.

So at the one end of the spectrum with have IMAP/SMTP, in the middle we have things like Telegram (everything's GPL3! The protocol is terrible and here are all the details! Go nuts!)... and at the other end we have Discord: One Protocol, One Allowed Client™®©.

Do I use Discord? No.

Would I like to use Discord? Yes.

Why can't I use Discord? The client is too much for my older laptop.

Would I like to use Discord? Yes there are a pile of people on there I'm missing out

Can I do anything about it? Yes, I have two options:

1) use https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ until it suffers the same fate as https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless

2) throw the whole thing to the wind until I have better hardware

Hmm. You know come to think about it the chances are people with similar interests are probably also stuck on older hardware too and probably won't be using Discord either...

> There are alternate Discord clients, and — unlike Slack — Discord doesn't try to actively prevent people from writing alternate clients against their API.

Yes, they do.

https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless:

> Hey, so I know this is somewhat of a bummer, but I got banned because of ToS violation today. This seemed to be connected to creating a new PM channel via the /users/@me endpoint. As that's basically a confirmation for what we've believed would never be enforced, I decided to not work on the cordless project anymore. I'll be taking down cordless in package managers in hope that no new users will install it anymore without knowing the risks. I believe that if you manage to build it yourself, you've probably read the README and are aware of the risks. I'll keep the repository up, but might archive it at some point. And yes, you'll still be able to use existing binaries for as long as discord doesn't introduce any more breaking changes. However, be aware that the risk of getting a ban will only get higher with time!

https://github.com/atlx/discord-term:

> Disclaimer: So-called "self-bots" are against Discord's Terms of Service and therefore discouraged. I am not responsible for any loss or restriction whatsoever caused by using self-bots or this software. That being said, there's no one stopping you from risking using an account, so go head!

Worth noting the developer of another third party client, Cordless, recently had their account disabled, which ended with the project sadly being abandoned.

To be honest, I am a fan of the excellent cordless application. Unfortunately, the creator was banned from the service for violating the terms of service. So it is not recommended anymore.

Sadly no, but its more privacy respecting than the regular client for sure. FOSS options include: https://github.com/diamondburned/gtkcord4 https://github.com/uowuo/abaddon https://github.com/terminal-discord/weechat-discord (weechat plugin to use Discord within weechat) https://github.com/evelyneee/accord (seems to be for M1 macs) https://github.com/ArmCord/ArmCord (seems to support AMD64, not just Arm64) https://github.com/khlam/discord-sandboxed (sandboxing for standard discord client) There are others I'm sure. One easier option is to run the Discord code in a newer version of Electron. This still isn't open source, but it provides better security and performance. Arch users can use the AUR package discord_arch_electron, other users can just follow the commands in the PKGBUILD for said package and figure it out. Hope that helps. Keep in mind even if your client is open source, Discord's servers aren't, and while there will be some mitigation of data collected, it'll still be quite a bit.

An alternative however to this is a WeeChat plugin. Once more, you will need to obtain a login token. You can either use a python script to find the tokens or try and grab them manually.