Discord is about to make parts of its biggest public servers readable by anybody with a Google search. The company announced the change Tuesday, and for adults in the US, the setting that shares your messages is on unless you go turn it off.
It only applies to what Discord calls Discoverable Servers: public communities with at least 1,000 members that anybody can join without an invite. Discord says there are more than 63,000 of them. Private servers, DMs and group DMs are not part of it, messages posted before the rollout will not be included, and usernames and avatars will not be shown next to the messages that do appear.
The rollout comes in two steps. On November 16, every Discoverable Server gets a public web page that can include automated summaries of what its public channels are talking about. From mid December, individual messages from eligible channels can start appearing on those pages and in search results.
“This has led to valuable information being locked in Discord conversations, inaccessible to the wider internet. We want to fix this.”
Discord, announcing the change on Tuesday
That is the pitch, and the guides and answers buried in big gaming servers are real. Discord already tested the feature with the NBA 2K, Rust and Dead by Daylight communities. But Discord is also where streamer communities and fan servers actually live, and public inside a server has never felt the same as public on Google.
The opt out is live now: User Settings, then Data and Privacy, then the Channel Messages setting. One catch: turning it off only protects future messages, and anything posted while it was on stays up unless you delete it yourself. Server admins can shut it off per channel under Server Settings, Web Presence. In the EU, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Korea the setting starts off instead of on, and teen accounts are excluded entirely.
So if you talk crazy in a big public server, December is when it can start following you around. Set the toggle now, not after your messages are already sitting on a web page.