No More Discord!

July 25th, 2023

If you've been living under a rock for almost a decade now, Discord is what the world decided to replace Skype with after Microsoft got their grubby little hands on it. Unfortunately, not everything is happiness and rainbows on this side, and it really begs the question of how in the world did we let this happen to begin with?

The Internet always wants an easy-to-use chat program to chat with buddies or hang out, and the programs we most often use changes from time to time. From the days of using IRC, AOL, MSN, and ICQ, to using things such as Skype and Discord, we humans are very social creatures, and communication is a very enticing thing on the Internet. It's not without flaws though, as most people often strive to the platform that is easy-to-use and easily available, not changing over to something else out of habit when that starts to fail. It takes a really hard fall to warrant a change, something that happened to the previous kings, and something that should happen to Discord soon.

Discord was convenient, because it popped up around a time where people really wanted to move away from Skype. Microsoft had tainted its waters after acquiring Skype in 2011, and times were changing, so a change was warranted. Discord offered the ability to create "servers" or "communities" that could house way more people than Skype could dream of, complete with multiple voice channels and text. While it wasn't amazing, it definitely had a good start compared to Skype, and it ended up winning. Now, it's difficult to be anywhere on the net without somebody asking for your tag, or giving out invite links, or anything of the sorts.

Despite it coming when needed the most, Discord was no angel. The CEO Jason Citron had previously been apart of a project known as OpenFeint that ended up in a class-action lawsuit for "allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations", things that never seemed to have left Jasons' work. Discords' Terms of Service has users agree to things that should throw up red flags immediately if anybody actually read these damn things, from collecting information on a users systems and open programs, to recording private conversations and voice calls. Discord claims they do not sell this information for targetted advertising, but other uses are not disclosed. Knowing the issues with Jasons' previous project, it's hard to trust their word when the service doesn't even provide basic encryption.

Privacy concerns are not the only reason to stay wary of Discord. There was a time not long ago in which their entire Help & Safety team was entirely furries that banned and deleted anybody they didn't like. A comedy Youtuber known as "Quackity" had a rough experience with them after making a video which poked fun and jokes at furries, and having his entire Discord community deleted and his account terminated without a word. When his appeals weren't accepted, he took note and looked at the employees socials and learned that they were all apart of the furry community. While this situation was slowly rectified, the issue with poor moderation and sappy employees has not gone away. Discord currently has a huge pedophile ring with plenty of grooming, redistrubiting, and stalking of young children that it has every ability to take care of with it's non-encrypted logs and conversations, but fails to. Several known problematic Discords remain up, and Discord had huge issues with cub-porn for the longest time.

Even looking past the previous concerns, the software itself is nothing to be impressed by. Discord is built almost entirely using existing open-source libraries and utilities, which means hardly any work has actually been done to make Discord. The client doesn't even work right, being highly unoptimized considering it's use, running rampant with security issues, constant connection issues, and crashing all the time. It surely doesn't help that the client is just a giant web browser tab on Chrome. That's right, Discord is ran entirely on a web browser, regardless of if you are using the client or not. It's missing so many useful chat features and customizations and it has the audacity to lock special color schemes behind a paywall. You could get a better experience using existing FOSS without having to pay a DIME.

Discord is nothing but a glorified honey-pot that steals its users' data, protects pedophiles, and crashes all the time, and it's a mystery why they didn't bother getting bought by Microsoft considering how impossible it would be for them to actually fuck it up even worse, but I'm sure they won't miss that $10B in a couple of years.

So, what are the alternatives?

XMPP/Jabber: XMPP is an open protocol that has been around for years, with most of the 2000s chat services being implemented in it. It is decentralized, supports encryption, file transfers, groups, and much more with it's extendable and flexible protocol standard. Find a client you like and a server to sign-up on and start talking to buddies.
Mumble: Mumble is a free and open-source VoIP protocol similar to TeamSpeak or Ventrillo that offers high quality voice chat without clogging up bandwidth or degrading performance. It features positional audio and an easy-to-use permissions system for server administrators, all without requiring an account.
Telegram: Telegram is a free messaging service uses your phone number to sign up. It's encrypted, protective, and supports voice/video calls, stickers, and media sharing all in a very user-friendly interface.