Discord defends itself against efforts to stop piracy on its platform by saying no to more invasive data collection. Even though Discord isn’t exactly known for privacy, this is a great move for its users. What are your thoughts?
Discord still sells your information for advertising so it’s meaningless posturing.
I know the feeling. Similar thing happened in a discord I’m in. Rate limit ban on a leader account, no response from support even via burner, then jumped ship to a new one that could actually be managed.
At least discord has to foot the storage costs of a dead server pestered with bots because of their own incompetence.
I had a server with a respectable size.
Did a hard cutoff due to some stupid discord thing.
I managed to get a total of 50 people of about 3k to switch and out of those like 7 actually stayed.Yet I had to get a burner account again to get in touch with certain people.
Its all be man.
Sad am forced on this app, I love matrix more.
If they did not collect any information, they would not have any information to give when they are served a subpoena.
How else would they store and sync the information?
Sync from another online user. If each message is signed by the author, there’s a built-in protection against tampering.
It’s really not hard, they just have to care enough to build it that way.
Can’t feds also sync them from other users?
Sure, if they’re granted access to the channel. But that access would come from users of the channel, not the service itself, and if the service doesn’t store the keys (i.e. you need at least one user online to get access), the service can’t really help the feds.
And whether to provide access to history for new users can absolutely be a setting on the channel. I’m just saying that having the messages only on the clients doesn’t preclude sharing those messages with a newcomer.
Encrypt it end to end with them not having the keys
They do have to retrieve old messages when new users join though. I’m sure the government can force them to lett them in a server and unlock the roles
Keep the data but encrypted. Let users send links that contain the pki info to decrypt the messages. Have that pki info generated client side.
Discord would only need to shuffle data, provide authentication, and provide the web app data down to the client. But every bit of user shared and generated content would be encrypted to them.
Like I said, Discord can still be compelled to let feds join the server, thus receiving the PKIs.
Why?
Why is channel history needed for new users?
Back in the IRC days you joined a channel that was just empty, if you wanted the history you had to run an IRC client continously, I remember running screen irssi on a separate computer and sshing into the server, reconnecting the screen with irssi in it.
If you want the history automatically, you can’t expect privacy.
At the same time, expecting privacy in a room where a bunch of strangers hang out is already unreasonable. If everyone already in the channel can log the chats, for example by idling in the channel, then adding E2E on top of that is probably a false sense of security.
I have an issue with something I’m using and there is a discord server I will join it. I then search my issue and its usually been adressed in the past. Without history I would be forced to ask the question that has probably been answered many times in the past.
I had no idea you could do that, sweet!
If you want the history automatically, you can’t expect privacy.
That’s not true, you can pull the history from other users who happen to be online.
The feds can also pull such history when they join the server
Sure, and the users of the channel could decide whether to share that history with new users or not. My point is that if you don’t have messages on the server, the service can’t help here, and it’s up to the users of the channel to set their own policies. If the data is stored on the server, the service could be legally obligated to provide that data.
Because a lot of people go to discord servers to access existing information?
Far more than should tbh. Too many little game mods will have a Discord for questions and reporting issues rather than using their GitHub or a forum.
Oh I agree, it’s very much a “forcing a round peg into a square hole” situation, but I doubt discord will make any changes to push back against it
That is a good point, I have never done that, and to me it is just a chat system…
90% of the reason I even have discord is because people much smarter than me use it to share information. Nobody uses other areas suited for sharing information anymore. It’s either Reddit or discord.
I remember running screen irssi on a separate computer and sshing into the server, reconnecting the screen with irssi in it.
I still do that today.
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Insults, very compelling argument!
Go back to Reddit with that shit!
Discord sucks and nobody should use it.
There is no alternative that can do the same
Good.
Discord sucks at such a fundamental level that the lack of any competing apps for this particularly awful niche actually restores some of my faith in humanity.
Okay you’re just trolling.
This is my genuine opinion and I don’t appreciate the condescension.
You don’t have to like it, but trying to dismiss it as mere trolling is, at best, intellectually dishonest.
pretty certain their just confused why someone would say there’s not a niche for a chat client. chat clients always have, and always will exist.
The only thing that really sucks about it is that knowledge that was openly searchable is now locked away behind logins.
no, you’re also effectively locked out of any participation unless you provide an email address and phone number, which they won’t even tell you about in advance but use dark patterns and gaslighting that they noticed “suspicious activity” to step by step first ask you for an email and then once that is validated they prompt you for a phone number. the only thing they don’t do yet is ask for ID.
Validation level is set by server owners, you are unlikely to need to verify a phone number except in the biggest (and therefore spammiest) servers
Yeah, I’ve never needed to add a phone number.
it doesn’t seem to be server specific because once prompted there is no way to use the account again, even if you decided to just not use a server that may have these settings set.
Odd, I’ve never had that experience. Maybe you’re using a VPN or something that makes your IP look more suspicious.
I keep trying to take out my phone number because I don’t want strangers seeing that shit, but… then “suspicious activity” gets detyected seconds later…
I say we return to IRC
Discord is a fantastic IRC replacement.
The issue is that people try to use it to replace forums, wikis, personal websites, issue trackers, git, and the kitchen sink, and it does none of these.Exactly. It’s like IRC w/ audio (and probably video now?) chat, and you can post gifs and whatnot. It should be used for discussion, and it’s perfectly okay for that. I would prefer something a bit more privacy focused (again, IRC is decent here, just needs some cryptography), but it’s okay.
But yeah, not a fan of it being a resource for anything beyond meeting like-minded people to have discussions with.
While this is true, Discord has a massive user base, so it’s somewhat a privacy win for the common person
its still the old chicken&egg problem: if you dont have communities you dont have users, and if you dont have users you dont have communities
thats why everyone sticks to discord
Well, you are on Lemmy aren’t you
Well yeah, cuz there are quite a lot of communities and users already
And he’s the only one.
We are all Estebiu alts.
Social inertia and an extra helping of users hate having to learn things.
Matrix is promising, but I think it still could use a bit more polish. That said, I run a discord community, and soon one of these days I’m going to make a Matrix version of it and encourage users to try it out. Though very few probably will.
What’s a good alternative that allows easy instant message, voice and video calls, and makes it easy to group my friends by game?
Matrix?
I only put ? Because I don’t know what you mean of grouping your friends by game.
Like a server/channel where everyone in it is both your friend and a player of that game or a contact group that manage so you can see who is that.
There really isn’t one, that’s why Discord is so widely used.
I have been using revolt, going to setup my own server once I get better lol, last 3 times have been a cluster fuck to get it working. I got mattermost working the first try but it’s a slack replacement not discord.
I get that they have different target user base, but honestly, what’s the difference?
Roles and permissions. Slack and mattermost is just allowed and disallowed to each channel.
Steam group chat? It’s structured in the same way.
You can create channels for people to join with Steam?
Yeah, if you open the friends window on the bottom it should have a group chats bar with a button to create a server and then it works like discord where you can add additional text and voice channels
Steam has voice channels? 🤯
Your phone.
Not really no. SMS is nowhere near as versatile as a service like Discord in terms of being able to meet new people or have conversations that don’t overload unrelated but potentially interested people with notifications.
Discord is on my phone 😭
Life has gotten better since I dropped it. Moved a dozen or so people over to Signal and have been running with that ever since.
I do miss the ability to easily stream games, though.
The attorney called Nexon’s demands “improper and overly burdensome”
They will give you up in a heartbeat as long as they don’t have to do the extra work of finding you.
Discord isn’t protecting anyone’s privacy just their bottom dollar
Discord is committed to fulfilling its obligations under the law
Of course it’s Nexon.
I’ve never played a Nexus game, and I’m definitely not going to start now. People who are pirating a game aren’t usually doing it bcz they hate the company, or have a vendetta of any kind. It’s usually a money issue. People are more than happy to pay for games when they have money, and you’re not a shit company.
No, it’s a convenience/service issue. Last time i’ve seen a third-party launcher was Mirrors Edge on Steam proton, and that thing failed to run since it wanted to open more than my security limit of 50k files, which no game hit before.
Well, I have no First Amendment rights, so there’s that.
I’m not exactly clear on the legal structure for digital platforms, but if you’re physically in the US, you have first amendment protections, regardless of citizenship or residency status. So as long as your group has some US persons in it, you should benefit from their first amendment protections. That said, the first amendment (and fourth, which is about unlawful searches) only applies to governments, so the service you use needs to refuse to hand over data for it to matter at all.
It’s kind of like people in the US (e.g. me) benefiting from European GDPR protections. Some sites I use now have the option of demanding my deata be deleted, and many sites have cookie preferences, none of which are required in my area.
That said, I definitely trust technological measures more than legal ones. So I don’t use Discord, because I don’t trust their technological protections. Ideally, Discord wouldn’t have any data to give up, and therefore there wouldn’t be a choice here, they would have no data to give up.
That’s exactly what I’d say if I wanted to catch the bigger fishes.
