this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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I've lost a lot of my rose tint for discord, right around the arbitration clause thing, but I can't deny that it's convenient. Chat, streaming to friends, popping up a new server for whatever project or group, VC for playing games together. There's platforms that do all of these things better, but few that do all of them decently well.
Of course, it's a privacy nightmare and I stick to IRC for anything I wouldn't feel comfortable having linked to my identity, but I wouldn't call people stupid for using it.
Mostly I think its fine for all that.
But there's a special circle of hell for projects that rely on it for "documentation".
I get the temptation, I really do. But once you're taking money or have more than a couple people involved and semi-organized you really need at least a small wiki/git-hub landing page with the basics.
I know documentation is a separate skillset and a lot of work in its own right but projects can also stagnate and die because there isn't any.
Oh 1000% agree, having a discord for support is nice and all, but using it as a crutch in place of good documentation is a sin worthy of eternal damnation.
Heck, even support is a bit of a pain since projects also like to use it as their issue tracker and want you to search for your issue before posting (which it's awful for). GitHub is free or at least cheap depending on what you need and is way more searchable, as well as giving a place for wiki and a basic website
Direct chat support, discord is fine, but beyond that, please use something actually designed for it
I haven't used irc for years but isn't it all plaintext unencrypted? And isnt your ip tied to it?
I've never looked into any of that for irc so maybe I'm way off base.
I do remember making my own fvwm config where an irssi irc terminal would slide out of the top of my screen with a hotkey and roll back up again. I was pretty proud of that.
How is Discord a privacy nightmare?
Closed source software without end to end encryption and has access to all chats, voice and video calls. How can it not be a privacy nightmare. You have no idea what they collect and what they don't.
Don't they claim that they can't access your chat logs unless they get like reports and stuff?
Edit: This question needs an answer, not a downvote
I doubt that. If you do a gdpr request for your data, you'll see how much they log about your activities. Obviously chats and VC activity, but also all the timestamps of what you play, session data over all time, etc.
They told me it was encrypted unless you got reported
Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.
IRC clients don't have loads of telemetry like Discord does. And IRC is a protocol instead of a platform, so there isn't a single set of servers hosting and logging ALL conversations.
That’s fair, but IRC also tends to leak information about users to everybody. They’re maybe bad in slightly different ways, but frankly if you care about privacy that much you probably shouldn’t use either, at least not with additional protections.
IRC doesn't even see that much info about each user to begin with, especially compared to Discord, and if you're talking about public IPs - hiding them from other users is now a common thing on servers.