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TL;DR Discord loves to present itself as a company run by a few gamers just like you. The service aggressively advertises itself as "for gamers" with the hope that this "reputation" alone will propel Discord to the top. This has worked really well. The Discord team has refused, however, on multiple occasions to take certain steps to protect their userbase, described in more detail above such as adoption of E2E encryption or going open source. Instead, the Discord team states clearly in their privacy policy that they will gladly hoard a plethora of data about their users indefinitely, loosely claiming to only delete it when its no longer needed. The data they collect and store includes (but is not limited to) full chat logs, all chat media, a list of who you chat with, email address, IP address, device ID, behavioral analysis, activity tracking on the service, pulling info from social media accounts you link, and much more as stated above and in their Privacy Policy. Discord shares this same data with all of its partners, affiliates, agents, and "Related Companies" while lazily instructing you to check their privacy policy to find out what happened to your information, as its no longer any concern to Discord. In addition, Discord goes further to say "Developers using our SDK or API will have access to their end users’ information, including message content, message metadata, and voice metadata". Their very vague "information" wording allows Discord to send whatever they please while, of course, leaving it up to you to go check their privacy policy and figure out just where and to who Discord sloppily throws your data around. Discord continues to show little to no progress or effort in considering open source code, strong end-to-end encryption adoption, or even something as simple as allowing the deletion of an old account. It is important to note that while Discord allows the "deactivation" of an account, their support team will happily inform you that they do not delete your data and your account cannot be deleted. This data is again stored for an indefinite period of time.

Discord is proprietary spyware. Using it means endorsing and legitimizing it.

Discord relies on its reputation to lure its victims. Despite just starting out as a way for freeze-gamer to mingle in chatrooms and VoIP rooms, Discord has now expanded to any sort of purpose, even extending to schools where students will use Discord for clubs as well as online projects where communication is done over the platform.

The reliance on Discord is dangerous. Any thing you type or do in this program is recorded for the highest bidder (that be your government or private data brokers). The interface and UX is designed to keep you in the app for as long as possible.

There's no way to "smartly" or "responsibly" use Discord. One way or another, Discord will extract value from you. It's not just about you, but about everyone who uses the platform.

Solutions

There are no "alternatives" to Discord. I'm not going to try to fool you by saying there's a magic bullet to defeat Discord's presence in western society (other than socialism and gamer-gulag). But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to help.

  • Matrix: A decentralized messaging protocol. It supports video conferencing on its main instance as well as support for the Discord "Server" functionality. Easiest solution for a drop-in replacement.

  • IRC: The one that came before Discord, community networks can be used if you need to communicate and is just as secure as Discord (public chat rooms with zero end-to-end encryption besides TLS)

  • GNU Jami: If there was a magic bullet, this would be it. Completely decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging network that is device based. It is a GNU package, possibly the most guarantee for freedom you can get in this world. The team is small, but if you need somewhere to host your leftist activities that will require more than a court order (or a simple bribe) to de-anonymize by state and non-state (those funded by other states) actors then this is it.

Conclusion

This is a post for self crit. If the service is free of charge, then you're the product. Any leftist should take steps to eliminate their dependency on Discord and proprietary messaging programs. Also any leftist should spread this message and inform others about the risks of using proprietary software.

We should also take Discord as a lesson in how to identify the dangers of proprietary programs and why it could make us vulnerable to abuse (which as we know in a capitalist society, is coming one way or the other). Discord isn't the lone offender, but an example of how nonfree software will always pose a threat to a free and democratic society and only benefits the bourgeoisie.

Let this be the last thing I have to say about this accursed program

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Huh. Original post is gone and original poster has deleted their account? Odd

    Show

    This is a shame because I wanted to respond to the person who wrote it on this point in particular:

    While I am not saying it's flat out impossible to run a worldwide online service solely on an optional subscription and selling chat stickers, I'm pretty confident in saying that IMHO Discord would be struggling without that huge capital cushion to fall back on. This begs the question as to what Discord will do when they no longer have millions of dollars to rely on. If Discord indeed cannot make enough off of its premium service or its sticker sales, should the user expect to be flooded with ads?

    I happened to work in the industry that Discord disrupted. A major product of one of the companies I worked for in the past was VoIP servers.

    We charged $10-15 for these servers.

    We ran them on a few dedicated racks of our own in 2 countries and then sublet the rest out to a bunch of different companies, mostly OVH. 1000 instances would fit on a single server rack just fine, sometimes up to 5000, your mumble, Teamspeak etc servers? They were sharing the same hardware thousands of other people were on. It was particularly easy because activity on VoIP servers is actually quite low, they go unused most of the time, with a daily peak activity time when people are off school or work. You wanna know why your server crashed? Usually because the system didn't anticipate load correctly and used too much resources for the server to handle, you and thousands of other servers on the same hardware probably crashed at the same time.

    The profit per instance was close to 99%

    Discord killed that entire industry by giving away VoIP for free. Dead. The whole industry is basically gone.

    I am pretty sure it is not costing Discord very much at all to run these servers. And they are making at least enough to pay for them with the money people are spending on subs and server boosts. If a well used server is getting 30 boosts that represents $150 in paid subscriptions. I am telling you that their costs are not that high, these well used servers are not costing that much money, not even close.

    Just a small industry perspective. I was in marketing at one of those companies. 70% of the entire profit of the company was coming from their VoIP sales and this was not a small company without other products or huge B2B deals. It was making a fucking fortune and discord stole everyone's money in a matter of months.

    • CarbonScored [any]
      ·
      4 months ago

      People forget that before everything was monetized, servers for doing everything still existed.

      A person with a spare computer would host something, organic communities would form, and those communities would maintain (and fund through donations, if necessary) their own servers. This happened for basically every hostable service ever. Even small company hosting wasn't a huge stretch from that, because they were often personally invested in the people on their platforms.

      Moving away from the community model to the monetized big company model that doesn't care about you does not mean that hosting stuff is now impossible without paying for it at point of use. It just means we decided someone should be profiting instead and they consequently want ever more money.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        4 months ago

        organic communities would form, and those communities would maintain (and fund through donations, if necessary) their own servers

        I miss this. There was significantly more choice of servers to play on and you could go play the same server every day in the same community. Once you found a server you vibed with you made an instant group of friends.

        You only get this now with guilds in mmos.

        • CarbonScored [any]
          ·
          4 months ago

          Yep :( I probably spend too much of my life complaining about the disappearance of that online dynamic.

    • hello_hello [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 months ago

      God damn, I knew it was bad but I didn't know it was that bad. Discord seems to have a ginormous enough user base that it doesn't need to care about overhead. Also literally all their technology is about database engineering and how to retain so many users. Too bad it's all proprietary so nobody else can benefit! Just like the free market wanted.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        4 months ago

        Yeah they're probably making a fortune. I don't think they're having money problems and don't think this industry costs much to run.

        That aside - Speaking of databases, one thing I've always wanted but never seen is for a service to exist that enables you to deep dive the contents of a server more easily.

        I want to be able to look at the images ONLY that are posted to a server.

        I want to be able to filter images by the channel they're posted to and the users that posted them.

        There is really good content in discord servers that should be pulled out into a viewing page. This probably flies in the face of the privacy concerns you're highlighting right now but I really want that functionality. There are old dead guilds that posted all their screenshots and relationship interactions in discord servers and it's buried amid text chats spread out over months and months making it much too difficult to search for. All that kind of stuff could be yeeted out into a special page for it. This is probably something that could be done with a bot and special webpage but I'm not aware of anything existing that does it.

    • TheDoctor [they/them]
      ·
      4 months ago

      This is wild. I know Discord’s migration story for storing messages has been more ops-heavy, but it’s odd to think that drop-in audio has such a low overhead.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        4 months ago

        I don't know the technical details but my guess would be that the bottleneck for it is probably data transfer rather than other resources which is what enables the absolutely massive number of instances that care share the same server.

    • Hello_Kitty_enjoyer [none/use name]
      ·
      4 months ago

      Huh. Original post is gone and original poster has deleted their account? Odd

      https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8mbh9a/discord_and_privacy/

      the thread and user were likely deleted years ago for the record

      link is another thread by same user, 6 years old