Cordless

~ the last words ~

Cordless was Discord in a terminal. Written in Go and driven entirely from the keyboard, it collected around 1,700 stars from people unwilling to run an Electron window that spends a gigabyte of memory displaying text. It used the official Discord API and sent nothing to any third party, which the README stated plainly, directly above the part where it warned you that running it at all could get your account deleted.

Marcel Schramm opened the repository on 10 January 2019 and shipped the first release on 16 February. Twenty-four releases followed over the next twenty-one months, roughly one a month, each tagged with its own date rather than a version number. In August 2020 he deleted the donations section from the README, with the commit message "Remove donation information. I don't want money anymore :P".

Third-party clients have always been against Discord's terms. Everyone building one knew it, Cordless said so in bold in its own documentation, and the working assumption across that whole corner of the internet was that the rule existed to be pointed at rather than used.

I never installed this, and in 2020 I had no use for Discord at all, let alone a terminal client for it. The posture is familiar enough: you write software against somebody else's network, you read their terms, you quietly decide the clause is there for lawyers, and then one morning it is not. The ban in that story normally lands on a user. This one landed on the author.

~ the record ~

~ the ban ~

On 22 November 2020 the first line of the README became a heading in capitals: "I AM CLOSING DOWN THE CORDLESS PROJECT". Underneath it: "Hey, so I know this is somewhat of a bummer, but I got banned because of ToS violation today. This seemed to be connected to creating a new PM channel via the /users/@me endpoint. As that's basically a confirmation for what we've believed would never be enforced, I decided to not work on the cordless project anymore."

He committed that at 21:29 UTC. The last release went out at 21:55, twenty-six minutes later, carrying no release notes at all, and it is the most downloaded build the project ever produced at 9,068. He also said he would pull Cordless out of the package managers so that nobody new would install it without having read the warning. The next day somebody opened an issue called "Appeal to Discord Trust and Safety, not mentioning cordless as a possible reason". The day after that, somebody opened one called "This project cannot die. Not like this." It is still open.

~ vendored, read-only ~

The repository stayed up. He vendored every dependency into the tree first, so the thing still compiles today from source with nothing but a Go toolchain, and only then archived it read-only, on 16 December 2021. Most write-ups date Cordless to that archive flag, thirteen months late. The death was the ban.

A fork called gord picked the code up in April 2021, collected four months of commits, and was archived itself that August, four months before the original it had set out to rescue. The warning Schramm left in the README is still there and still accurate: third-party clients are against the terms, people have been banned for using them, "including me (Bios-Marcel, the maker and maintainer)".

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