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For the greater part of my three or so years on Discord, I was inclined to believe it was the former. Only in the last couple months have I begun wondering if it really is worth remaining on the app. The part of me that wants to stay because of friends grows smaller every day and finally, yesterday evening, I started looking into how to leave the platform. Spoiler, it's a nightmare!
Discord gives every account a unique identifier that does not get deleted even when you disable or completely delete your account. A really great article that actually sparked my curiousity about what goes on under Discord's hood explained the deletion predicament very well:
Tracr/Discool won't remove your information, and neither will Discord, actually. Here's what deleting your account does:
* Removes your profile picture
* Sets your display name to "Deleted User XXXXXX".
* ...
Yeah, that's it. It doesn't delete any of your messages. It doesn't remove or replace the permanent user identifier that your account has. All of your data remains on Discord, and can still be read by anyone.
You've actually just screwed yourself over, because now you can't log in to delete your messages.
No, Discord staff will not delete all of your messages on request. You'll have to go through and manually delete them one by one.
You could try using a selfbot or a script, but if you trigger their automatic detection systems, which mass deleting messages does, then you could be locked out of your account without the ability to delete anything more.
If you're in a server, it's okay to use bots to bulk delete your messages, but of course this doesn't work in direct messages.
Even if you have never used -- let alone attempted to completely abandon -- Discord, I hope you're beginning to see the issues here.
This little post isn't really meant to be a tutorial or anything meaningful like that 😅. Rather, it's more of a rant about how difficult Discord and it's staff make dereliction. I will, however, link a couple of the scripts that helped me get through this process as far as I have (I still need to remove several thousand more messages throughout different servers I'm sure).
This script (and the comments) for basic deletion
A GUI(ish) version that theoretically updates the delay as well
One note if you have an Discord-Matrix bridges set up: it is (from my experience) impossible to target messages sent by the bot on the Discord side which, in turn, makes the scripts useless (assuming you even had admin priveleges to delete messages sent by other users in the first place). In an attempt to get around manually deleting thousands of messages sent in this way, I opened Element (I generally use gomuks but it is lacking in the moderation department which is obviously quite important for this task) and clicked "Remove recent messages" under my name in the sidebar as shown in the screenshot.
I have yet to discern how foolproof this method is but I know at least some of the messages have disappeared on Discord's side. Time will tell if all of them end up being removed but, even if I only have to do a couple hundred by hand, I suppose I can manage that :)
Edit: I did end up having to delete several hundred manually but holding shift on each message made it go by pretty quickly.
That's all I've got for now. I should be all but completely off the platform in a day or two and I already feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.
Now for XMPP!
