Submitted 2 months ago by Dust0741@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I am trying to not use any Google services for notifications and so I’d like to make a script to send notifications via ntfy based on discord messages.
How would I get access programmatically to my own discord account? Do they even support it? They have bots, but is their api for DMs?
It is likely not worth your effort as whatever you come up with will likely result in discord deactivating your account for breaking their ToS, or them breaking their API forcing you to constantly play catch-up.
This is why open communication protocols are so important. Email is still as ubiquitous as it is because it’s a protocol, not an API.
I personally think it would be less overall effort to get your friends to switch to an open protocol like matrix, or XMPP than it would playing cat and mouse with proprietary APIs. But you do you, I wish you the best of luck!
github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord
It looks like there’s software to bridge it to Matrix. I have no idea whether that violates ToS.
you can’t access your own account. you can have a bot sit in the server and read messages, but after a certain number of joined servers you will need approval from discord to continue.
Check out Discord’s Webhooks; many applications publish notifications through them. Should be as easy as sending a message to a specific URL, I think.
Discord recently added “user installable apps”. You can configure it though the installation context. I have only implemented the usual server installable apps so far, so I don’t know what the apps in the new context are able to do. But it might be worth a look :)
Mautrix Discord (look it up)
Oh yea I forgot about matrix. Maybe setting up a bridge would work. Thanks for the reminder I’ll look into this
Self-boting is against ToS. You have to be careful when interacting with the Discord API. Maybe there is a way to run the discord website to fetch text messages.
darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Just curious: If you’re willing to use Discord, why not Google?
Dust0741@lemmy.world 2 months ago
good question. friends use discord.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 2 months ago
So do mine. I quit anyway.
tal@lemmy.today 2 months ago
I get that.
Honestly, though I’m still a little puzzled as to why people initially got into Discord; I never did.
I can understand why people wanted to use some systems. Twitter does massive-scale real-time indexing. That was a huge feature, really changed what one could do on the platform.
Reddit provided a good syntax (Markdown), had a low barrier to entry (no email verification at a time when that was common), and third-party client access. It solved the spam problem that was killing Usenet and permitted for more-reasonable moderation.
There were a whole host of services that aimed to lower the complexity bar to get a web page and some content online associated with someone’s identity; it was clear that lack of technical knowledge and the technical knowledge required to get stuff up was a real limiting factor for many people.
But I just didn’t really get where Discord provided much of a win over stuff like IRC. I mean, I guess maybe it bundled a couple services into one, which maybe lowered the bar to use a bit. IRC really seemed pretty fine to me. Reddit bundling image-hosting seems to have lowered the bar, been something that people wanted. Maybe Discord doing images and file-hosting made it more-accessible.
I have no idea why a number of people who liked Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead used Discord rather than Reddit; it seemed like a dramatically-worse system if one was aiming to create material for others to look back at and refer to.
kagis
old.reddit.com/…/can_someone_please_explain_disco…
Maybe that’s it. I never had a lot of interest in VoIP, especially group VoIP. When I was playing online games much, people used keyboards, not mics. There was definitely a period where people needed the ability to collaborate in games and games didn’t always provide that functionality. I remember people complaining about Teamspeak and Ventrilo. I briefly poked at Mumble – nice to have an open-source option – but I just had no reason to want to do VoIP with groups of people.
But I suppose for a video game clan or something, that might be important functionality. And if it’s also a one-stop shop for some other things that you might want to do anyway, it maybe makes sense to just use that rather than multiple services.