Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email

Re:Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email by unethical_ban on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:48PM (#50373557)

For people who were used to Ventrilo and mumble and teamspeak, the concept of "server" is well understood and Discord is essentially a voice/chat server as a service with unified identity.

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Re:Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email by SahAssar on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @08:05PM (#50373703)

But in those cases people actually hosted a server, right?

In discord it's more like a slack workspace, right?

The people "hosting" a discord "server" are not actually running hardware anywhere that runs the server?

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Re:Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email by anonymous908213 on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @08:19PM (#50373806)

98% of the people hosting "servers" of any kind in the world are not actually running hardware, everything is timesharing compute on a hyperscaler's computer now.

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Re:Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email by bluefirebrand on Thursday November 05, 2026 @12:19AM (#50375507)

My understanding is a lot of residential isps would be angry at you for running servers of a substantial size out of your house anyways?

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Re:Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email by cowlevel on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @08:39PM (#50373979)

That's correct. Discord co-opted established terminology for its own ends and it was very successful.

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Re:Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email by voxic11 on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @09:30PM (#50374367)

For what it's worth I never actually hosted a ventrilo server either, I always just paid a service to do it. Pretty much the same experience as discord is today.

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Re:Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email by unethical_ban on Thursday November 05, 2026 @02:46PM (#50383522)

Correct, they are not hosting. It's a service. Still, an admin of a Discord "server" has complete control over the server - access, permissions, roles, etc.

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Re:Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email by vfosnar on Thursday November 05, 2026 @06:08AM (#50377768)

i think it sorta comes from user slang, they call it, or at least used to call it "guilds" instead of servers

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