this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2023
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Privacy
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Like others have said, on Discord the data rests entirely on their servers, without E2EE (so completely visible to them). They claim not to sell any data to anyone on their privacy policy (at least last time I checked, might not be up to date), and if you believe that (which isn't entirely unreasonable, though I'd find it unlikely) the platform is probably more decent than the other giants. It also lets you browse communities without a real account (you can just open the browser app with a guest temporary account by just giving a name), which is really neat for exploring certain communities, as you were saying.
Now, I'd like to add a couple of points.
First, it's easy to dismiss this because of the general anti-privacy stance regarding Discord, but it is absolutely undeniable that they have the absolute best platform to run and manage an online community based on chats. They have, in my opinion (and I've tried nearly every platform that is remotely known), the best implementation of text and voice channels, reactions, roles, onboarding, events, statistics and bots as well. Guilded was (is?) an excellent platform in terms of features as well, but they lack the massive network effect Discord carries, which is another undeniable big factor. As much as I dislike it, the network effect is really strong and, in my experience, with exception of very close friend circles and generally privacy-oriented folks, realistically adopting other alternatives is really tough.
Second, the corporate feel you mention is a bit lost on me. Certainly they are not as down-to-earth as some community-run projects can be, however they are visibly better than similar platforms like Slack.
Why all this? Am I a Discord shill?
Quite far from it. I don't like them, nor do I hate them. Hate is a pretty strong word which unfortunately is thrown around quite a lot in topics as this one. Discord is really not ideal from a privacy perspective but let's not completely disregard its many merits. I find that more often than not, conversations in pro-privacy circles revolve around hating on companies and platforms and dealing with absolutes, but the truth is that privacy need not be dealt in absolutes. It's all relative and dependant on each person's needs, and failing to see that more often than not harms the whole cause and people trying to get in.
Anyways, went a bit offtopic, sorry for that. Rant over, I suppose.
While the network effect is a real thing and its quite hard for people to realize the need for migrating to a better project, projects like Revolt Chat set a good precedent on the fact that one can have a functioning, accessible public community without compromising browser privacy, given the open source and self-hostable nature of it (lack of federation though) and probable future e2ee for DMs. If nothing, matrix is always there.
The corporate existence on discord is visible in the constant bombarding to buy nitro or gift nitro, even going as far as including the option in the message bar itself.
Revolt is an amazing project and has a lot of great energy behind it, but one must not forget the issue that is scale. Discord is absolutely humongous, serving millions of concurrent users with pretty good performance overall. I'd love to see Revolt reach such userbase, but realistically, two 2nd year CS students are unlikely to get there. For a platform to reach such volume there needs to be money, which is likely to come with strings attached. Though what you say is true -- Revolt has strong open-source roots while Discord has always been a VC fueled company, so I'll keep my hopes hehe
Regarding Nitro, I agree it is a bit too much, but I actually think a subscription of sorts with bigger upload limits, streaming quality and so on (the original point of Nitro) is a pretty nice model to sustain a platform since it helps cover the cost of all needed infrastructure. Of course, Discord Nitro has since gained a lot of extra fluff and nothing impedes Discord from both selling a subscription and our data (which they're likely to do), but the premise is quite reasonable.
I would not disagree that a subscription model is viable for a live service.