We set up a bridge between the Lemmy.world General Matrix room and the Public-1 channel on the Lemmy World discord server yesterday. It’s not perfect as emoji reactions aren’t visible and some minor things like how it handles edited messages but other than that it seems to be working well.
Now people on both chat clients can interact with eachother!
Discord already “shares” data with third parties (has been doing it for years), has full control over your client, and doesn’t need to “corrupt” anything to already have access to read, erase, and modify everything.
Matrix servers can’t access encrypted content, no matter how “corrupted” they are. Data loss is on the user, you can keep a backup of anything… or not, your choice. System failure and lack of maintenance, are mitigated by identity servers being separate from the chat relay servers.
If you want to trade privacy, message integrity, and user non-supplantation, for some more system stability, then sure, go ahead and use Discord, WhatsApp, Messenger, or whatever (…actually, WhatsApp is slightly more secure than Discord).
It really depends of your activity.
If your country is dangerous or there is any kind of risk with what you do (journalist etc…) then I totally agree with you.
If it’s for a gaming community that just need to spam memes and a vocal channel, then you won’t convince anyone with these arguments because most people simply don’t care.
In this case there seem to be three activities: general chat, official announcements, and attack coordination.
The first makes sense to use the most popular option, the second benefits from source confirmed identities and decentralization, the third benefits from everyone’s confirmed identitites and decentralized encrypted chats.
In either case, no technical aspect makes Discord “better” (who cares if the “spam memes and vocal channel” fails and burns), at most the ability to send invite links to private channels without having to set up a bot, makes Discord a “calculated risk”.