Bye Bye Discord
Discord has decided to attack privacy. This is not a real surprise to anybody, and perhaps you could even defend them saying that “governments forced their hands”. Either way, the platform has to go.
The What
Discord just leaked 70,000 IDs and has decided the only logical solution is to prevent users from being able to sue them. And then that the next, next logical step was to force all of it’s users to undergo invasive age verification.
Why Is This A Bad Thing?
- Discord doesn’t need this information (We live in the USA, no age verification is needed.)
- They will most likely loose this information, which can lead to very bad IRL things (identity theft, etc.) (The best way to not loose something is to never have it in the first place.)
- This will pave the way for police to come knocking on your door if you say the wrong thing. (Not a conspiracy, already happening in the UK.)
What Can We Do?
We can move to platforms like Matrix (Clients/Servers), Stoat, XMPP, Zulip, Signal, etc.
Personally, I use signal for all my 1:1 messaging and Matrix for all my 1:* messaging, and I highly suggest you do as well. I’ve had very good luck getting friends & family to use Signal instead of texting. This just takes slightly different approaches depending on their temperament. But something along the lines of “Illegal in France”, “Used by USA officials to make war plans”, “Was subpoenaed by the US for info an they returned a timestamp” will get you there. I’m in the middle of trying to get a friend group off of Discord and into a Matrix server so I don’t have advice on that plan yet.