I hate the interface so fucking much. It’s obvious that it’s trying to keep you hooked on the site and never letting you go. People complain about IRC chatrooms not saving history but Discord conversations are a mindfuck if you don’t have the context.

Discord is an excellent case study in nonfree software, literally checks all the abuse (including ones involving children who use the site!!! Yay!) boxes.

Yeah. Really annoying so many projects migrated there.

I saw a Benn Jordan video where he mentioned buying a $1000+ comma.ai device(hardware to add driving assist features to cars). He couldn’t get it to work so the company told him to join their discord, where he was immediately flamed for being too stupid to make it work.

Discord is a terrible platform for support, especially the way it’s used. It sucks for searching and the people most likely to respond to questions are terminally online know-it-alls who’d rather feel superior by insulting you than helping. It’s like stackoverflow with memes.

I actually do use discord to chat with friends, and even I hate how discordified everything has become. No, I don’t want to join your fucking discord to get tips and tricks for a video game, just make a fucking forum post.

I got a 2nd job editing videos for a few small time streamers (will not say their names) and it annoyed me that they forced me to use discord to communicate with them.

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.

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.

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.

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

Do you have long covid?

you have organizers using Google Docs and leftists getting very defensive about ditching Windows for Linux

Oh god tell me about it. If you ever bring it up you become a “evangelist” that likes to annoy everyone or just ignored outright.

AAA slop or MOBA with kernel-level anti-cheat detection.

“You will allow me to install an always-on rootkit on my computer, to let me not do so will be infringing on my rights!!!”

I do think leftists who actually understand what libre software, gratis software, and proprietary software are have a responsibility to guide the technologically illiterate and semi-illiterate among us.

I agree, it only takes one person who’s knowledgeable about free software to educate the entire group. There should definitely be more guides but there’s simply not enough people right now to write them. I’ve personally always wanted to write a Linux Mint Deprogramming-style guide for a while now but I’ve been waiting patiently for their next major version to release before I do so (and also for various things to be resolved like Nvidia graphics support and such with NVK).

There’s still a lot that needs to be done at least.

I agree with you. The one feature that Lemmy is missing from Reddit is the Wiki. Often, on Reddit, the wiki would grow stale over time, sure. However, I think spaces like Hexbear and Lemmygrad are entirely geared towards maintaining a large repository of structured content. In this context, it would be centered on succeeding from the tech-feudalist infrastructure, but it could also be content on combating liberalism. Things like Ibis could be that repository, but development on that end is slow currently. When my parents needed a new computer, I went to a local surplus shop, bought a really dope used computer for almost nothing, and put Linux Mint on it. They’ve been using it for years at this point, and I’ve only ever needed to provide support a couple of times. So the usability, in my personal experience, is very high.

I think part of the issue, however, is hosting, support, and maintenance. There are plenty of awesome self-hosted solutions out there, but the issue is the “hosted” part. For the average person, and of no fault of their own, that is a huge hurdle for them. Suggesting something like Nextcloud as a replacement for Google Docs is the easy part. Getting them through the installing/hosting aspects of that is the hard part. I think there is a “trust” issue to tackle too. While it’s easy to point out the trust issues with things like Google, Twitter and Facebook, most people I feel view themselves as small fish in a vast ocean of users. It leads people to think, “Why would Google personally target ME?” It’s impersonal to them, and there are so many people who work at Google, so they believe there must be some kind of compartmentalization that protects them from having their personal information viewed and acted on. On the other side of that coin is convincing people that “some random group of people” can be “trusted” with your chats/docs/posts/dms etc. The DMs on Lemmy are not encrypted, and with a simple SQL command, anyone with system access can query your DMs. Lemmy makes no illusions of security within DMs though, so it’s not a huge issue. Someone who has access to the system hosting Nextcloud can access the files created by the users (to my understanding). The question of “Do I trust Google with my personal documents” vs “Do I trust Timmy with my personal documents” is obviously a very different set of questions. Naturally, this leads to having to do the compartmentalizing yourself, and having a space you control for your personal stuff and a collective space for your activism/organizing stuff. Which takes us right back to the “hosting, support, and maintenance” question.

So the guides are not simply about setting these services and softwares up and using them. It’s also about changing how you think about services generally. We would need to establish a kind of, wading into the pool, guide and on ramp. Guides that get you started with things like switching apps to FOSS alternatives (like switching to Fire Fox derivative browsers), to switching to FOSS Operating Systems, to fully “De-Googling” your Chat/Docs/Calendar/Email usage, all the way down to setting up hosted services for you, your activist groups, your family, your friends, whoever.

This is something I’d help with in whatever capacity I could. I already self-host a number of services for myself.

: “All according to plan”

Seriously though, it is really fucked how Discord is so invasive of our personal lives that even letting it go begets a form of social self sacrifice. Literally Hexbear is the only online social site that I use because I’m scared of stuff like this happening.

All I can do is to convince people not to propagate it any further, or at least stop using it for every little thing they want to do (like being a fucking marxist group at my State University)

Same. I made it known I’m reducing my discord presence though and just got used to doing more things alone. Losing me alone isn’t a big enough incentive for people to switch, but I have a Matrix server ready to go if anyone else gets sick of discord. The problem is they all play MMOs and have to use discord for raids and whatever. One day I’m going to just delete my account and what happens happens.

There’s no easy solution (which I would love to give) but I would still encourage trying to work with your group to see if there is a possibility of moving off Discord and onto something like Matrix. There are things like Matrix bridges which can pass along messages from both Discord and matrix to each other.

I’m extra afraid for queer and trans people since Discord is all but a State Department asset. I just know Discord will be first in line when Florida or any other US state starts trying to track down and ID trans people and punish them for even existing in online spaces. Deprogramming from Discord is an investment to keep people safe.

Some friends of mine are organizing their workplace, and it’s all on discord. I talked to them about it and seems like it was hard enough to get people to stop using the COMPANY SLACK, so like… fuck me I guess we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good in this case.

deleted by creator

But the fact that you can join a discord server and see the chat history to the beginning of time should be a hint that they store the logs in a way they can decrypt somewhere they can reach.

Had one of my peers tell me with a straight face that using Discord is safe because “they are a needle in a haystack of millions of people, no way they can find me.” Easy to say that I didn’t want to explain the concept of a hashmap to them let alone what a database is.

Discord is fucking everywhere and yet people have the audacity to claim AES countries are bigger tech dystopias or downplay the issue.

Hexbear was born out of being kicked out of centralized, capitalist run platforms, so the same principle should apply to other leftist sites.

there is a ProleWiki space on Matrix but it’s not exactly bursting with activity

We’re aware of the problems with Discord of course, but there’s not really a viable alternative especially for all the stuff we need (a chat we can separate into categories for members, editors, and trusted editors). Also consider that everything put on the wiki is public and anyone could scrape that if they wanted to – I’m more drawing attention to the fact that it’s very, very difficult to be fully private and anonymous online.

We were made aware of an open source alternative that I might check out, but getting people to switch to that one might be more difficult than just staying on Discord, with all its problems. Discord is also where people are and we’ve been able to recruit a lot of invested editors from our Discord members (the server is semi-public, anyone can join the members part of it after customary vetting). Switching to our own platform would close us off of that, unless we maintained both which is a whole other challenge. Basically there’s unfortunately never really an easy solution, it’s often about what we’re able to commit to, knowing that it doesn’t stop at just making the new space but also maintaining it through time.

Tell me about it. I tried to make a burner account once and Discord asked for my phone number. Fuck off Discord, I’m not giving you feds that info.

Kind of forced to use it because it seems to be replacing forums, subreddits, and wikis for a lot of mods and emulators. No idea why.

For gamers, it basically is a more convenient Teamspeak. That said, I find it ironically annoying to have in the background during gaming.

“Thoooose were the daaaays!” 🎶

Uhh please change the entire software you use to talk to internet friends becuse data or something like they don’t already have your shit on lock

This type of counter-revolutionary defeatism never got anyone anywhere. Privacy grifters will talk about OPSEC and “threat models” all day but data privacy (or the lack of it) is just one of the reasons to not use Discord. It also normalizes bad behaviors and business practices in its industry (who doesn’t love subscription services and paywalls), is filled with predators to the point it’s a whole genre and stereotype, and has quickly been replacing existing technologies as well as dominating the field so no other alternatives could exist. It’s also got a horrendous logo to top it all off.

Yes obviously state actors could overwhelm and compromise anyone with vastly superior resources, but that’s not anything notable to care about (most countries surveil their citizens including AES countries). What I do care about is people being knowledgeable about something that could spiral out of control as well as creating a counter narrative. Of course I’m not going to magically change people’s habits and lives (as people in this thread have shown, Discord has become a dependency for their lives), but I can at least show them that this is something to care about. If you couldn’t tell, I’m someone who primarily advocates for free (as in freedom) software. Data privacy is just one of my ways to introduce people to the topic as well as challenge people’s perceptions. Also not everyone is affected the same, maybe some people benefit getting off Discord and some don’t as much.

A lot of people don’t even know Matrix exists because Discord is not just a “talk to internet friends data mining app”, it is a brand forced upon people and part of a larger system of exploitation that extends beyond it. Alphabet and Meta do arguably worse shit but my goal is to help people identify why this shit is bad.

Uhh please change the entire software you use to talk to internet friends becuse data or something like they don’t already have your shit on lock

why even do anything

this has been around a while, I remember thinking it would never go anywhere back when it was like a proof of concept but here we are. I might have to try it.

Haven’t personally used it but it looks good (and libre)