Discord Incident – Resolved

AWS makes it annoying to be resilient as AZs aren't transparent to their users, so I'm more surprised some were prepared for it.

It seems to me these day people are OK with AWS going down and just blaming it on AWS rather than on themselves for not being prepared for big outages.

"Oh, nothing we can do because AWS/Cloudflare is down"

For a while there was a joke that if us-east-2 goes down it's not as big a deal because everything is down.

The difference was it wasn't one global server for everyone. I think that's why the past feels like it was more stable.

Now, aws or cloudflare gets a hickup and half the internet is nuked.

The old internet was far more federated so doing something else meant to me "Welp, anandtech is down, let's go to pcper, digg, tomshardware, slashdot, etc"

Sure stuff would go down, but it would be just that small community rather than most of chat for the internet.

Yeah, netsplits were really common; nickserv and/or chanserv not working for long periods making popular channels a hell without ops.

I think the centralisation is the issue, I could connect to a different IRC network with a community around the same topic/game. When Discord is down there's nowhere else to go.

I never seen long-running problems in big server-federations like DALNet. Our local "big" IRC servers were generally down for 10 minutes at most. They were not empty either.

Simple services recover faster. Federated infrastructure is much more resilient. We had slower computers, more considerate coders, and simpler software; so everything was snappier, even with 56K modems.

For example, navigate to https://git.sr.ht/~bayindirh/. No scripts, pure HTML. running on a single server. Served instantly.

This is possible. We, as in the world, just ignore it for shinier stones.

Now, a small VPS in an AWS server lapses for 5 seconds, and half of internet is toast. Centralization for the PWN!

If there was a netsplit you just bunched together on one server. It was more decentralized and a bit more reliant in a way.

Netsplits, where the entire IRC network would "split" into two (or more) effectively independent networks because some a link between two servers went down, were extremely common. I don't know if daily, or weekly, but common enough to be perceived as normal and expected in any case.

In the earlier days of IRC, netsplits were sometimes used for channel takeover. If someone was on a split off part of the net where there were so few people in the channel that they could obtain op status, they could kill and ban the "legitimate" ops when the nets joined back together.

There would have been a server split, and half of the people would be chatting among themselves wondering why the some people suddenly got disconnected, while being unaware that there might be a server problem because they can still continue to chat. The other half of the people would think the same.

In the IRC days you could have been running your own server for you and friends. It would've taken something much worse, like your VPS dying or something upstream failing.

Not remotely.

IRC is distributed and federated. Not only are there countless networks, each network has countless servers, and each group of servers that are up and can see each other can operate on their own, all the way down to a single server, or up to any subset up to all.

When a peering connection goes down and the network splits, maybe some people in the group disappear, or maybe from your point of view everyone else disappears.

Maybe the remaining subset of other users is already good enough because it's enough to continue what you were tallking about and who you were talking with, or if not, you have the option to just try some other servers until you find where everyone alse is. Were "server" is an actual seperate instance of the server software operated by an independant person, hosted on whatever kind of hardware or vm they set up, connected to whatever network they are on, not what Discord calls a "server".

Even if the entire group of say freenode servers goes down somehow (even though that's not really possible) there is still undernet and 400 other nets. Even without prior coordination it would be essentially trivial for the users to all just go looking for, or create on the spot, the same channel on some other net, and basically everyone finds each other again almost effortlessly. And that's if something unbelievable actually happens, let alone the normal minor breaks that actually happen once in a while.

This is entirely different from being wholly at the mercy of the single entity Discord.

Thanks for checking it out and taking the time to give feedback. You made some good points. After staring at the site for so long, you go blind to these types of things, so you're helping a lot here.

>no video chat, no screen sharing

Screen sharing and video chat were added just a few days ago, and I wanted to get that tested more before mentioning it so prominently.

>No downloadable version isn't a feature. What's a PWA?

At the moment, we're a small team, and not all engineers. None of us know Swift or Kotlin, but aren't against learning. Usage is something we want to see before investing that much time into writing these, so in the meantime, a PWA is the best middle ground.

One key differentiator from Discord is that we're not against third party clients, so if in the meantime someone comes out with one we're not going to make any efforts to stop it.

>The name makes it sound like a Discord clone

I see what you mean, if you had a magic wand, what would you call it?

>"Live audio space" doesn't explain whether it's drop-in voice channels like discord/slack huddles or scheduled audio calls

We have video now, but to answer directly, it's similar to a Space on X.

Thank you for the feedback, I will be working this weekend to make these things better articulated on the website!

If you don't mind me asking, what country are you coming from?

Thanks Dang!

I predict in the future many will blame the poor overall quality of software and the poor uptime of services on AI, as if things weren’t terrible before AI.

You mean all the AI "slop" that's finding and writing new kernel exploits every day? And submitting hundreds of previously-unknown security bugs in critical software?