Frequently Asked Questions
Is Harmony still in development? Production Ready?
Yes, Harmony is still in development. Our unpaid team of volunteers is very small though, so progress is very dependent on our motivation and outside life.
The Harmony server program has been in development since at least 28/11/2020, and has most core features implemented. API compatibility is reasonable, although not quite perfect; some third party clients may not function, although the official Discord.com client which we test against functions correctly for the most part.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are:
- Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
- Activities
- OAuth2 scopes and other applications (Bot applications work by are left unscoped)
- Pomelo (new username system without discriminators)
- Auto moderation
For a more complete overview of what is left unimplemented, please refer to the missing routes viewer.
Voice/Video when?
Currently there is experimental voice/video WebRTC support in Harmony. UDP connections are not currently supported.
This is a very difficult feature to get working, especially given that we must implement it the exact same way as Discord.com for client compatibility, so if you find any bugs please open an issue in Harmony server.
Free Nitro?
Please do not use Discord trademarks to refer to anything regarding Harmony. As an instance owner, you can grant yourself or others premium features which may be used to determine your abilities client-side. However, Harmony-server currently does not have any distinction between premium and free users. All users can access all features, given they have the rights to do so.
You cannot give yourself premium features on Discord.com using a Harmony instance.
How do I boost my guild? Or, how do I buy premium?
You cannot buy premium features through Harmony as Harmony does not support any payment backend.
Additionally, Harmony does not currently have any distinction between premium and free users or guilds. All users and guilds have access to all features server-side.
In the case of users, you may run into issues with the client preventing you from using certain features
if the user's premium_type or premium values are not set correctly. By default, Harmony will do this for you, however.
Can I log in with my Discord account?
No. Harmony and Discord are entirely separate services, with their own separate databases and authentication. Harmony cannot access any private data from Discord.com. As always, you should not provide login credentials for Discord.com, or any other service, to others.
Does Harmony use the same servers as Discord?
No. Discord servers, as in the bare-metal running the service, are completely inaccessible to people, outside of course the Discord.com service provided. It is impossible for us to use their infrastructure. Harmony instances are hosted entirely by their owner(s).
If you mean Discord 'server' as in a guild, also no. Harmony is not a proxy for Discord guilds. Harmony does not create Discord.com accounts or ask for your own at any time (outside of OAuth features provided by the instance such as account connections or 'login with' buttons) If Harmony was to try this, Discord's automated spam filters would surely block your instance, and ban any offending accounts.
Lastly, you can simply view our codebase. A simple proxy would not need to be this complex or large. We implement the entire Discord.com API, Gateway, among others. None of this would be necessary if we were simply abusing Discord.com.
Do you use Discord.com code?
Absolutely not. If a potential contributor makes any indication of being a Discord employee, or to have access to leaked Discord.com code, we take measures in line with our Code of Conduct to ensure the Harmony codebase is free of any proprietary code. We want absolutely nothing to do with it.
Is this illegal?
The Harmony maintainers do not believe it to be, no. See: Oracle v. Google.
Why are you doing this, anyway?
- We love free, open source software.
- There are many existing bots, applications, users, features, and ideas surrounding Discord.com.
- Harmony allows these users and developers to maintain a familiar ecosystem with minimal friction.
- Reimplementing allows us to extend the Discord protocol in ways Discord.com may not deem feasible, economical, whateverical.
- This includes privacy features, such as end to end encryption for example.
- The reverse engineering effort by our team may be useful to outside developers looking to understand how similar services work.
- The Discord protocol, despite its API complexity, is quite simple and linear. No complex conflict resolution like Matrix, for example.
Editing the database is annoying, is there a graphical interface for this?
Currently no, there is no graphical interface for managing your Harmony instance. An admin dashboard is planned, but we currently have higher priorities.
When will this feature be available?
We do not provide ETAs. Users tend to take them as deadlines, and for a small team of <5 maintainers who do not get payment for their work, this is unreasonable.
It's pretty funny how you have a Discord.com guild for support.
We know. Also that's not a question.