This is completely counter productive to growing Lemmy. I absolutely despise discord. Look at the network traffic it generates and tell me wtf they are doing. They won’t tell you. Their business model will leave you completely dumbfounded as to how they exist. Everything shared on the platform is lost in a black hole unavailable to the outside world and everything shared is a privacy nightmare. Posting this, pinning it here, and locking it is one of the biggest trolls possible. It pisses me off every time I log in. “Everyone else does it” is the excuse of idiots. Discord makes absolutely no sense to anyone that actually cares to look into it, read the user agreement, and ask sane questions about what they are doing.
Show me the numbers, against non paying users, infrastructure, and overhead. I don’t see this as valid. I also don’t agree with your tale on collecting and sharing data. What I read a couple of years ago was extremely vague and verbose. It also had the fuck you we can change this at any time without telling you clause. AKA, the points don’t matter so lube your butt plug because this is proprietary and you should know better clause. They are another company built on exploitation with no transparency or documentation. “Trust me” is garbage. Show me exactly what you are doing with full transparency, or you are a criminal. This is real world 21st century common sense. Discord is garbage.
They have 203 million dollars of revenue in a year from Nitro alone (the small subscription they sell): https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/discord-stats
Then they have server boosts, which is another big pot of money on top.
And revenue share with content creators.
And Discord merch.
Tons of users too, evaluation is based on their platform + potential user base, not the actual money they pull in.
https://www.datasourse.com/how-discord-makes-money/
Maybe inform yourself first.