Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online
A Brazilian team used Discord’s API to scrape 10% of its open servers.
Nice. Looks like it's time for a GDPR complaint against Discord for not protecting my data.
Things like this are why I hope that Spacebar, a FOSS self hosted Discord alternative looking to reach feature parity with Discord, takes off in similar fashion to Mastodon and Lemmy.
There is also https://revolt.chat/
Data Availability The dataset presented in this study has been made publicly available and can be accessed via DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.146585059. The data is provided in a compressed format, which can be decompressed for analysis. Detailed instructions for accessing and utilizing the dataset are provided in this article and the platform
Ok, and in regular english?
Well the DOI is a digital identifier for papers and other data references for sciency stuff. But that DOI just points to the actual paper https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00627
Link to where the archive is https://zenodo.org/records/15170676 but its been restricted from downloading
Note: Download access has been temporarily suspended at the request of the ICWSM program chairs.
EDIT: lol I love the Internet Archive Its 120GiB if anyone wants to try download it and see if it works.
The only error I can see is "the data is" should be "the data are". Stylistically I would also change utilizing to using, which conveys exactly the same meaning and is more accessible.
Otherwise I believe this is regular English. It's ok to have difficulty comprehending language, but it's more productive to ask questions about the parts you don't understand.
Can I help with any specific questions?
For anyone who cares about great journalism, I love 404media. I'm in the middle of their latest podcast. They rock.
Public means public.
