How does Discord show what the user is doing

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When I am on Discord and I hover over my friends’ profiles, I see that sometimes there is a little blurb which shows something like “Listening to spotify…” and then it specifies what song they are listening to etc… and how far they are into that song and so on. Sometimes Discord can even show when a person is in VSCode and how long they have been working in VSCode.

How does Discord do this? I’m seeking an explanation of what’s going on behind the scenes at a conceptual level.

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It uses a thing called Rich Presence API.

Conceptually, the user of Discord is asked for permission to display status/usage-details of other apps that are compatible with this api.

So, other apps participate in this integration and the user can opt to allow these apps to broadcast certain information about the usage to Discord.

It is entirely consensual and shouldn’t happen without the user’s agreement.

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