It says information used for age checks will not be stored by Discord or the verification company.
Bullshit. Every time some bitch-ass company says this, 4-5 years later they’re like “we were hacked, someone took everyone’s photo IDs!”
It won’t… it really won’t. It will be on Donald’s DOGE server, run by Space X.
I find absurd that many political groups including the Pirate Party moved to Discord. People who that claim to be fighting for the rights of user privacy then invite you to join Discord. Looks like they have been assimilated by big tech.
In all fairness, I think the FOSS community lacks good messaging tools so people end up using:
- for personal messaging: WhatsApp (very popular in Europe), iMessage (in the US), Telegram (Brazil and Asia)
- for communities: Discord and Telegram
- for businesses: Slack (popular in tech) and Teams (~all the rest)
Signal has been gaining momentum for personal messaging but its unrelenting focus on privacy comes with some significant usability tradeoffs: (1) it doesn’t have a web-app that I can use from other computers that I don’t control (eg a work laptop), (2) it doesn’t sync well between my phone (primary) and desktop apps (secondary), (3) it doesn’t have a “bots” API like Telegram does so its creative uses are very limited, (4) third-party clients are officially disallowed.
Matrix might be a good fit for communities and businesses (which have very distinct moderation needs as in a business you can just report users to HR hehe), but in my experience it (or its flagship client Element) has lots of performance issues that makes it unpleasant to use. It also reminds me of XMPP with its different extensions and not knowing which clients supported which extensions; for example, go to https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ and click around to discover that many clients don’t support threads yet. All that being said, I think Matrix is still the one that’s best positioned to win the communities.
For businesses, I think the “open core” model is pretty competitive: you have Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip. In fairness I think they made significant strides so I’d consider them pretty successful in their own regard, despite Teams dominating the market by abusing Microsoft’s monopoly and Slack’s popularity + coupling with Salesforce. Now, the issue is that those three “open core” software aren’t very useful for communities because again, their moderation models are very different. Moderation is a ~non-issue in a business setting where you have HR and other functions to enforce the rules and penalise accordingly.
Long story short, what’s your FOSS alternative to Discord for communities? Revolt maybe?
See I still remember when I didn’t have to scan my face to get a machine to do something. And that’s the way it will always be. For me.
I tried out matrix recently, it’s pretty good.
I mean… there ARE privacy respecting options, but guess what they chose to do so.
Like, to protect the children UNPROTECT the children by uploading the face to a thirdparty company, so not even directly to discord. I didnt read their TOS or Privacy Policy, but i bet they save the images for “improving” their model and selling it to other AI / ML companies.
Actually look at the way Discord works in your network, like all the raw IP addresses and and connections with no clear ownership or human readable name, with dozens of changing connections to get any of it to work. Then go try to ask questions about what is going on and who you’re connecting to. Discover that none of it is documented or described anywhere. Then realize that this means no one running Discord is doing so on a fully audited and logged host. You simply cannot be without a bunch of effort. I made it to the 6th layer of whitelisted raw IP addresses, and still nothing worked while trying to connect to Discord in a fully logged and documented network. I am simply unwilling to write a script to annotate that many connections so that all of my logs make sense. I seriously doubt anyone on Discord is doing so, and they certainly lack any understanding of what they are connecting to, why, or the protocols. So the Discord user is telling me “my opsec and privacy awareness is as nonexistent as a pig in a herd running off a cliff, and my system should be assumed compromised with no idea of what might be connected.” Everyone else doing it is a garbage excuse. That no one appears to have gotten hurt – has tissue thin merit, but also reveals that the user runs blind in herds while hoping for the best. Such information infers a lot about a person, their depth, accountability, and ethics – in certain scopes.
