Our stance on Discord adding advertisements
Last updated
Last updated
At UnifierHQ and its community, we heavily rely on Discord to communicate with out friends and acquaintances. A large proportion of our community only uses Discord, even when Unifier supports Revolt and Guilded. So when we heard the news that , we were heavily disappointed.
Discord has once advertised themselves as an ad-free alternative to Teamspeak and Skype, however it appears that the days of "ad-free" are coming to an end.
If you open Settings, then go to Privacy & Safety, then scroll down to the bottom, you'll see some data privacy controls. In the personalization section, you'll see something called "In-game rewards (aka Quests)". If you ever wondered what Quests are, they're the ads we're talking about. .
The semi-good news is, that there's a chance that we may be able to disable them entirely by turning the setting we mentioned earlier off. However, we aren't certain of this, and there's a chance that we cannot disable them entirely, instead we can only disable them individually, so we can only hide the Quests we don't want and get different Quests instead.
After discussing with the developers and moderators at UnifierHQ, we all agreed to one stance: "If Discord does roll out ads, and they don't make it completely blockable by the end-user, we will open-source Unifier and its extensions."
We understand that our products can help people by a lot in these scenarios, especially since we have support for Revolt and Guilded, and you can link multiple servers and not just one. Besides, Unifier's cross-server and cross-platform bridging speeds are probably among the best, and we style our messages to be near identical to a regular message on the platform, which makes the experience almost completely native. This would greatly support the transition of communities from Discord to Revolt and Guilded.
It's been a while since I wrote this article. So I'd like to go over what we actually did so far.
Originally, we planned to open source Unifier under the condition that Discord ads are unblockable by the end user. These are (thankfully) actually blockable in Discord's UI, except that they'll still show in your "Gift Inventory" page in your Discord settings. Although this makes Quests sort of partially blockable, we'd still like to say that it's blockable by the end user, since you can block the part that actually would interfere with the core UX.
We admit, we didn't follow this plan. Instead, we decided to open source our code anyways, because we felt like it would be much better to let everyone use it to connect their communities without a condition. UnifierHQ is about connecting people, not gatekeeping our technologies that allow us to get record speeds.
But that aside, we've also introduced Unifier Micro - a lightweight version of Unifier. Although this version does not support Revolt and Guilded, it is much easier to install, so this will help communities easily test Unifier to see if it is a good fit for them.
As usual, just because we can address the core of one problem doesn't mean it's enough. We want to also address other related problems, so if a community were to transition away from Discord, the process would be as smooth as possible.
For example, we're working on something called Native Universal Platform Support (NUPS), which lets Plugin developers bring native support to external platforms without modifying Unifier's source code. This expands Unifier's external platform support from just Revolt and Guilded to virtually any platform.
But for unsupported platforms, we've introduced External Bridge support. So if you're using a bridge bot like matrix-t2bot (the same bot that inspired us to start Unifier) to bridge your messages from Matrix to Discord, you can have Unifier bridge the bridged messages to the rest of the servers, meaning you'll be able to use Unifier even on Matrix via matrix-t2bot.
There's a lot more things we want to work on, like bringing
Our mission is to create a free, safe, and open chatting space for everyone, not create products that will earn us profit. We want to build something we can view as something useful we could use even if we weren't the developers, and it will stay this way for the foreseeable future. We heavily encourage you to call us out for it if we ever deviate from this course.
We open source our code in hopes that our product will be responsibly used by communities in need that don't want to be stuck in the Discord rabbit hole anymore. We don't want Unifier to be used to create a space for hate speech or whatever vile things there are, so if you do end up using Unifier for your own community, please use it in a responsible manner so that you help us fulfill our mission by fostering safe and civil conversations.
Instead of going down the corpa route where we force our users into paying a premium for a Unifier license, we want to help everyone, regardless of if they want to pay us or not. In fact, we've been preparing to open source our code from the beginning, we just had to work out how we could address some concerns such as malicious actors taking advantage of our code (trust me, , and we hate it).
We'd like to thank the Community for guiding us when we were preparing to open source our projects.
