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What the FUCK.
I immediately went to settings and, I guess at some point I’d already given these swine my phone number? Went to remove it and I’ve greeted by this wonderful toast message=
God I wish something was fully suitable as an easy discord replacement 😭 spacebar seems rad if it wasn’t super alpha. And as cool as element is, it just doesn’t have the same low bar to entry that discord has (not to mention group calls are jank as hell, when they work, and there’s no screen share yet tragically)…
Just change your number to something like 07777777777. That will work for the UK.
It doesn’t work for me because it asks for a code ):
We should do code swaps.
They also sell that number, all your chat logs, voice calls and media to AI training companies.
Dont be a loser, dont use discord.
Source? The only record of data being sold I remember is some 3rd-party that scraped public servers.
Per their privacy policy they collect
Content you create. This includes any content that you upload to the service. For example, you may write messages or posts (including drafts), send voice messages, create custom emojis, or post other content that you create with features that we develop. You may also upload and share files through the services.
Thats what they collect(so not the calls apparently my bad). In regards to how they use it, they mention advertisement stuff and the usual vague language of “improve our services” and “personalization”. The AI stuff is supposedly opt in, but they collect the data and they are subject to US subpoenas so all bets are off anyways.
Of course they collect content you upload. How else do you think they maintain a chat history so people can see what was said while they were offline?
I see nothing in the privacy policy that says they can sell the data. There is, however, things that allow them to share the data with 3rd parties, including bot developers. Having developed Discord bots, I can tell you that you can get pretty unrestricted access (with the server owners cooperation) until you have been added to a bunch of servers (at which point you need Discord approval to get things like message content)
Policy doesn’t count for anything. So what if they claim they won’t sell data about you? They still can, and companies do.
Or they sell the entire company, like 23AndMe just did.
Not saying this makes up for it but discord recently introduced e2ee calls. This means if you have to communicate with your discord friends securely you have to call them.
How else do you think they maintain a chat history
e2ee is not so hard that the biggest player in the game couldnt pull it off my guy. they just want that sweet sweet data.
Signal, Wire, and Jami all support group chats that are E2EE. Discord’s reasons for not doing it might not be sinister, but they don’t need that level of access to your content in order to provide their core service.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect service, I’d rather all private messages be E2E encrypted, but there’s no evidence Discord themselves have ever sold any data, so I don’t understand why we are making crazy claims when them collecting data is a privacy issue enough on it’s own.
Calls recently got encryption, so while Discord is as popular as it is, we can only hope they keep expanding encryption into other areas.
As much as I would love it I don’t think we are gonna see more encryption in the discord ecosystem. I am convinced that discord was not recording calls prior to introducing e2ee since they were peer to peer so they are not giving up any data in adding it
It would be absurd to record calls, the expense of it isnt worth it.
I doubt it too, but it’s okay, I mostly use it for calls anyway. The messages are just organising times.
there’s no evidence Discord themselves have ever sold any data
Even if that were true, thats not how things work in the real world. If you cant mathematically prove that you dont have access to the data, then you arent trustworthy.
Calls recently got encryption
Says who? Discord themselves? Did the publish the code?
Can you provide a source then if it isn’t true? I am genuinely curious.
And yes, they did publish the code for their e2ee protocol.
The whole internet is the same, unless you are running all your own built software that you can vet, you are just putting faith in what a company/individual is telling you. If you want to use the internet, there’s always the inherent risk your data is being collected and sold without you knowing.
The data collected sounds like a nothing-burger. Of course they collect the data you upload, and of course they store data (like messages) that need to continue to be networked to clients.
How they use the data does sound like corporate trash though.
Sadly there are a lot of communities that are only on Discord.
And it’s so annoying! Bring back forums!
Can’t Lemmy be like Forums?
Kinda. But this “comment” system is more set up to encourage replying to others rather than the original subject.
That would be an easy fix though.
I feel like we can’t use services anymore at all. We need protocols and clients to connect to each other using those protocols and stop using centralized anything at all.
99% of what I’ve done in discord is a private server with like 5 or 6 regulars just to use voice coms in game.
But we already had that with TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble. The UIs were fucking ugly as dog shit, but they worked.
Discord just came along and and combined a global (to a set of members) chat room and a voice service, where before those were separate.
Now if something is “just” a website then no one under like 25 will be able to hear of it, much less figure out how to use it. They need apps to be able to communicate.
The problem is that bigger services obviously have a problem of scale with that setup, so they start simple and get a bigger audience, then start the spying with some tiny change no one will check patch notes for.
These days we’re all guilty of that.
Capitalism is again the bad guy here. Monetizing everyone’s actions and identities is the particular issue. No one would feel a need to do this if it didn’t lead to more profits. I’ll bet there are a bunch of companies that started off good and fell to the dark side when they couldn’t control their monetary appetite. (Or when younger employees took on promoted positions and saw opportunity- all they had to do was (cough cough) stop not being evil (cough cough)).
I would love to if all of the most helpful specialized communities didn’t all use it.
I can’t even get my friends or family to use Matrix/Element, let alone the masses.
Trust me, I want to make the full switch, but if I’m hanging out on my fancy open source server with no one on it, what’s the point?
I will agree that anything akin to Facebook or Xitter isn’t helping achieve anything, since they don’t provide communication that can’t be found elsewhere (social updates, memes, event invitations, etc), but for communities like this specifically, there’s just not many other places to go.
having a hard time finding a good alternative for screen sharing in a voice call. recently deleted discord and me and my buddy moved to matrix (element) but the screen sharing is very laggy and it needs a more aggressive mic noise removal. we speedrun a singleplayer game together and use screen sharing for that. steam can do all this but the delay is unacceptable.
honestly I’m this close to going back to discord 🤏
Im following matrix dev work very closely so im wondering if you have been trying the old call system (jitsi or 1:1 calls) or the new one (element call). the new one should work well for screensharing video but ofcourse you do have some level of compression artifacts. the element-desktop client should have it enabled by default since a few version ago. You can quickly test it out here without an account too https://call.element.io/
For noise removal it just uses the standard webrtc noise filtering stack afaik which does suck, but i have it disabled and do that kind of audio filtering systemwide on my linux machine with easyeffects.
I’m not seeing an option for element call, there’s just p2p for 1:1 calls option which I have enabled. easyeffects mutes my audio completely and I have to timeshift to get it back 😅
Maybe you have to enable something for the video calls in the “Labs” section of the settings but i dont think so. Its just an embedded version of the instance hosted by element.io so it should be functionally the same if you try that one in the browser.
This is how i have it set up
EasyEffects works well for me on debian but on a different distro with different audio setup it might not be such a smooth experience. 🤷
didn’t realize it was under video call. we tried it, and it works perfectly! now I won’t have to go back to asscord 👍 thanks!
Nice :) glad i could help
I don’t actually know how good it is but another software that does screen sharing you might try is Jitsi
Matrix sucks
I don’t really know what else to use
Year of Elements/Matrix when?
I really like using Element, but there are so many issues besides the not so intuitive account system, that deters the average user
So many niche games servers tho.
FTL: Faster Than Light - Multiverse (mod community) for example, like there is literally no replacement community.
It’s a shame that spacebar and revolt did not really take off so far.
this is the first time I’ve heard of spacebar
Yeah, that’s the problem - none has. Sadly I also only read about it here in a previous post about discord a few months ago.
This is or was part of their anti-spam/flooding protection. In the server admin dashboard, you can require a phone number on the account or you can disable it and allow users without verified phone numbers to participate.
They do not require this just for a discord account last I checked. It’s likely due to whatever discord server you’re trying to join.
Same for Twitch. Same for a Microsoft account. It’s become the new normal.
I work in the cybersecurity field and I hate that the official discord server of one of the international orgs I’m involved in requires a phone number to participate. The irony.
I don’t think many people know about sim-swap attacks, so they think people knowing their phone number is fine.
Honestly I wish people would just fucking get rid of phone-number-based OTP anyways. TOTP is where it’s at.
Discord definitely does have phone number verification on selected accounts if it thinks you are doing something suspicious. Just try making a discord account with protonmail and on a VPN and you should get a similar message.
This is or was part of their anti-spam/flooding protection.
That’s the official explanation. A phone number is a nice way to attach a real world identity to the data (which of course is sold to advertisers/data brokers etc).
Again - which isn’t required. You don’t have to supply your phone number.
They do not require this just for a discord account last I checked. It’s likely due to whatever discord server you’re trying to join.
This has changed, it gives you this popup whenever you make a new account, even if you haven’t joined any servers. I tried making an account for my brother a few months ago, and I saw this as well.
It’s because your data is orders of magnitude more valuable if it has enough information to identify you as a person.
They can’t sell it to data brokers for a lot of money if those data brokers can’t find any information to link that data with their existing profiles.
Surveillance capitalism 101, companies obtain the most value by enabling other corporations to spy on every detail of your life.
If you can’t use a service anonymously, without it being linked to your actual person, then you can either be okay with living with the panopticon, or don’t use the service.
Discord has been slowing rolling this out over the years. It started being offered as a “spam protection” feature and eventually it’ll be a requirement to have an account.
They depend on the masses of people who will trade all of their privacy in exchange for not having to learn how to use VoIP software, video streaming software or IM software.
It is a trade off vs scammers
discord’s been doing this for a while, it’s really scummy
other companies that do this (that I’ve found):
- twitter (even before muskrat bought it)
- probably a lot more
Which is the reason I don’t have a discord account. I just can’t be bothered.
I get discord mail sometimes telling me I have to log on urgently as accounts get deleted after a few years of inactivity.
for me it wanted one after i added too many friends at once
it some agressive anti spam “ai” that more or less randomly decides if it wants a phone number or not
Can we just go back to irc already?
If we had ircv3 specs that included reactions. etc we might be. I rolled a small group of IRC servers with a few selfhost people a year back and it was quite fun. Tbh IRC itself is still alive and well, it’s just not user friendly enough to get non-tech people over easily
Stop using trash service
What are some alternatives for discord??
Spacebar.chat (or github here) is meant to be a drop-in replacement with support for discord bots, but it has been super alpha the few times I’ve tried it. Haven’t checked in for a few months though!
(Edit: yeah I just checked and spacebar is still very much a work in progress. Looks extremely promising though!! It seems there are devs posting updates on the main spacebar instance, which is cool)
Rocket.chat also has a self hostable option, but I don’t recall that one being super great either.
Matrix is the main one I think
Matrix is great but it’s got the same problem as every other communication service, it’s only useful when other people are on it.
I use it and encourage my friends to but they just look at me like I’m crazy
Matrix also isn’t great, tbh. Way to much complexity baked into the protocol which makes the UX horrid
This 100%. Calling is also super iffy in my experience (element / schildichat), and group calls are a non-starter, since it outsources them to a separate service, jitsi, embedded inside the element client.
Team speak but that shit wont fly with Genz
It does the job though.
If group is private ie people you actually know, then just use signal it works fine enough
Look, the lesson here is not to be bullied by corporate asshats, and they always do this.
So might as well pick an open source service like mumble/murmur.
(i never understood why there was this big migration from teamspeak to discord…)
TeamSpeak required paying for a server. Discord worked out of the box
I checked their site and it looks like you can download the teamspeak server binary for free, even TS6 beta! Or did I miss something here?
Yea the part where Discord blew up 10 years ago because you don’t need to host a server
It is (or has already?) Going to receive a face-lift. That might help out a little bit honestly.
It has had one, TeamSpeak 5 and now they are adding screen-sharing with TeamSpeak 6. I think they would have held a good market if they worked on an upgrade sooner, they only released a beta for TS5 once Discord had gotten super popular. If they were more proactive I think most of us would be using TeamSpeak instead now. It’s just borderline impossible to convince people to move service.
Id swap but it’s not comparable yet sadly. Hopefully ts6server is released soon. Sadly I won’t get to use it as my friends won’t swap unless the mobile app works well. If the ts3 app works together with a ts6 server. Maybe.
Their site has a download page for the ts6 beta, client and server! There’s even a Linux client!
There was a server I poked around in once that required members to provide phone number just to join. Seems very unethical considering all the bad things that can happen from identity theft or stalking… it’s not like mods are employees for Discord. They’re just random mofos. Why would I trust a stranger on the Internet of all places?
The server owners can’t see your phone number. Discord allows you to set a minimum verification level for users in your server. The lowest is simply having a verified email on their account. The highest is a verified email, a few minutes old (so no brand new accounts), been in the server for a few minutes, and a verified phone number. It’s just a bot prevention thing, because spammers/scammers are a big issue on large Discord servers. Especially early in Discord’s history, it was a big issue where bots would raid a server and just totally shut it down with spam links. So Discord started allowing server owners to set minimum verification levels before users could interact and send messages.
The server owners cannot see your phone number. It’s just a way to keep bots and assholes out most of the time.
What’s really annoying as well, is that if you try to remove your phone number from your account, your account will get blocked for “suspicious activity”, after doing the required captchas it will get unlocked but your phone number is still there, trying to remove it again will just lock your account again, how is that legal?
Because legal people get the protection of the law, shiti organics are there to be abused by legal people.
For what it’s worth I literally just removed my phone number from my account after reading your comment and it did it no problem. Haven’t gotten any suspicious account alerts yet but if I get one I’ll come back and update.
Just after Elon Musk’s twitter (𝕏) made it a norm~
Say the word!
