21 ms·

Discord is not an acceptable choice for free software projects

532 points by rauhl 7y ago

rvz 7y ago
I was about to mention Keybase, but since there is no self-hosting option, I'm afraid I can't recommend them as a communication tool for free software projects. IRC is still suitable and used by some but it is viewed as an prehistoric option. So are there any modern alternatives? Sort of, there's Jami [0] (formely GNU/Ring) which is actually free software and looks nice, but I haven't tried it yet. Another option is the Matrix protocol [1] and some of its clients like Riot.im [2] fit this free software criteria. [0] https://jami.net/ https://jami.net/ [1] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ [2] https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/
- chatmasta 7y ago
  Mattermost is high-quality, privacy-respecting software that is easy to self host.
  - remir 7y ago
    How is their mobile app?
    - ishbits 7y ago
      Pretty nice, but only supports one server.
      - magicalhippo 7y ago
        I'm on five different Discord servers that deal with open source projects, and I'm not really that active.
      - Goronmon 7y ago
        That seems like a pretty significant limitation.
      - chatmasta 7y ago
        This is annoying especially if you want a setup where you have an internal company server and an external open source community. But Mattermost is aware of it and working on fixing it, apparently. If it's really important to you, as a stopgap measure, you could sideload a second copy onto your phone.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  Zulip is open source, can be self-hosted, and offers free hosting on their servers to any open-source projects.
  - nikisweeting 7y ago
    The threading model is also just generally better for async communication than slack/discord style channels.
nottorp 7y ago
I would have certainly taken this guy more seriously if I hadn't got a "won't you subscribe to my newsletter" popup in the middle of the article...
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  Apparently ublock origin blocks this.
- xibalba 7y ago
  Why? So this author wants to promote a newsletter. Is it so onerous to click an "X" that you would discredit the information in this article?
  - dave_sullivan 7y ago
    Onerous? Meh. An annoying interruption and a dark pattern? Absolutely.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    Yes. If you want me to read your content, stop blocking me from reading your content while I am in the middle of reading your content.
  - trevyn 7y ago
    It shows that the author is incentivized by drawing traffic, which increases the likelihood of hyperbolized articles.
    - tomnipotent 7y ago
      > author is incentivized by drawing traffic Of course he is, that's the whole point of writing.
      - mwfunk 7y ago
        No, that’s the whole point of advertising. Writing is about communicating ideas in good faith, otherwise I’m not interested.
kick 7y ago
It took so long for the CSS to load I thought, "Wow, what a beautiful minimalist site!" and then came...everything else. I agree with part of one of 'sneak's points, though, if not the way it's presented and some of the way it's worded. Discord isn't a good choice for Free Software.
- jshevek 7y ago
  Viewed with Brave, I see a rather minimalist version which loaded quickly. Also, no annoying pop-up.
  - kick 7y ago
    It looks minimalist, but it's not. I was talking about it without CSS. Turning CSS-blocking on for it with uMatrix makes it look fantastic once more. No one with sensible browser settings/extensions will see a pop-up, it's certainly not exclusive to Brave.
    - jshevek 7y ago
      I agree, and the point of my previous comment was to agree with you, while also implying one of the benefits of increasing the usage of Brave among non-technophiles. Blocking these anti-features comes automatically with Brave, no effort or setup. As more of us block this nonsense, whether with extensions or with Brave, the less incentive to write excessive CSS and annoying pop-ups.
zzo38computer 7y ago
I tried to tell them that, but they didn't believe me. (I also tried to tell them that NNTP should be better than using a web forum. They did believe me about that, but nevertheless failed to set it up.) I think IRC is better. (I think you can also bridge Matrix with IRC, in case you want to have both. Or maybe you can also bridge IRC with Mattermost; I don't know. But they recommend Mattermost, so if you can bridge it in this way, then it can be helpful.)
paxys 7y ago
Not making a judgement call on Discord, but I'd argue that all communication for free software projects should be public and unencrypted.
- stkdump 7y ago
  What about security bugs? Don't you need at least a secure way to discuss them?
  - paxys 7y ago
    Expecially security bugs. Communication can be hidden during the remediation period, but there's no reason for them to not be made public immediately after.
    - t-writescode 7y ago
      So then there is a reason to have communication be private, as you said.
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    I would argue that even then it should be public. Forks exist and everyone can have one (even if it is for private use). For all we know the maintainer of the "original" could be a hostile actor.
- chungy 7y ago
  Encryption is kind of moot. Every IRC server has been behind SSL/TLS for a very long time and it doesn't prevent usage nor archives.
  - paxys 7y ago
    The core argument in the article is that such systems aren't E2E encrypted.
    - cooljacob204 7y ago
ehutch79 7y ago
What's the recommended alternative? Don't IRC servers face the same issues of someone being able to read whatever you put through the service?
- williamxd3 7y ago
  Telegram?
  - buovjaga 7y ago
    Proprietary & closed source
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Not end-to-end. Telegram servers see (and log, this is in Russia!) plaintext.
    - duskwuff 7y ago
      1) In the context of a public discussion channel, end-to-end encryption and plaintext logging are features. Their presence means that a person is able to join and see context. This is good. 2) Telegram is not based in Russia. In fact, it's been intermittently blocked in the country.
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        I am corrected.
- Leo_Verto 7y ago
  Matrix offers the best of both world: federated self-hostable servers, decent UX and the option to E2E-encrypt entire channels.
  - jdashg 7y ago
    Notably, Mozilla has switched from IRC to Matrix.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops. >Regardless of whether or not you are the kind of person who mocks or ridicules people—you should be able to use your communications tools to mock and ridicule people, if you so wish. These are normal, acceptable things to do in society. Fuck censorship. I would guess that for the vast majority of Free Software projects, not having illegal topics discussed on the chat and not having people who mock and ridicule people are features not bugs.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  And for many not being dictated too about what is acceptable might be another feature. I wish the folks saying things were not acceptable would work on options that had the benefits they wanted. Steve jobs didn't say - locked down phones with no access to the web in unacceptable, he built a better phone (and was rewarded very well). He didn't say the way digital music is sold is stupid - he built a better music buying experience that let you authorize multiple devices to play your music etc.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Surveillance is always, ultimately, about extortion. People are forced to do what they would not for many reasons besides risk of criminal prosecution.
- superkuh 7y ago
  Discord is a bad decision for security reasons, for privacy reasons, reliability, and for ethical reasons. it's not just illegal things that are kicked off. If you violate a third party company's terms of service, say making bots for Team Fortress 2 (a valve video game) then you'll be banned suddenly as well. And Discord is no stranger to banning things that are not illegal but just controversial like, https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_discord_banned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_dis... In terms of privacy: they send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response). Their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).
falcolas 7y ago
I agree that Discord is not a good choice, perhaps not even an acceptable choice. But. Discord (not to mention Slack) will simply continue to be the lowest friction choice until a FOSS alternative comes along that is free to use, comes with rich moderation tools, supports fine-grained notification settings, supports offline history without additional effort, supports rich bots, has a mobile client that shares state with the desktop clients, and already exists on most people's desktops. So to impact the open source communication landscape, the standard that needs to be exceeded is Slack and Discord, not IRC.
- jayfk 7y ago
  There is Mattermost, Rocketchat and Zulip.
  - dmead 7y ago
    all of which are high friction yes?
    - aphextim 7y ago
      https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/
    - levesque 7y ago
      I wouldn't say high friction, but clearly not as convenient/low-friction as signing up for slack/discord.
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    No mention of Riot/Matrix?
    - falcolas 7y ago
      Does the matrix spec offer moderation tools? I don't see anything off the top of my head. It's also a bit of a chore to even identify how to get a server. Matrix.org points you towards other implementers, Riot.im pushes you back to matrix.org for a login, and to "Modular" for a server. This is kind of the opposite of low friction and ease of use. It seems pretty slick from a technological point of view, but a bit of a mess from an implementation point of view.
Jonnax 7y ago
So there was a software project that I wanted to ask some questions about on their IRC. So I clicked a link on their GitHub page for some online IRC client. I had a conversation it was great. Except for the part where I wanted to paste some code and it didn't format. And then I was recommended to use pastebin and paste a link. Then I went away for a bit. Came back later and my computer had rebooted while in standby. (It's an old laptop and is a bit flaky with resume from standby) I returned and click the link for the IRC chat. And I couldn't see the previous messages. And they had a link to a log but it wasn't working. And apparently the server doesn't log by default. Look, no offence to IRC. But this is some crazy bullshit. Like Discord, Slack, Gitter, Teams. Whatever. Isn't going have this issue. At the end of the day people want to communicate and get their stuff done. For a free software project, sure, using opensource tools is a great idea. But sometimes faffing around with none core things just wastes everyone's time. Especially with they could instead be working on features and bug fixes.
- dmead 7y ago
  IRC is just a relay. it's not storage and never will be.
  - Jonnax 7y ago
    I know. I've used mIRC lots 10+ years ago. But the expectations for chat today has changed a lot
  - zzo38computer 7y ago
    A IRC server can log. I have once programmed a IRC server to do this for a predefined set of channels, and the MOTD mentions where to find the logs. (This way, everyone is aware of the logs.) Whether or not it logs has nothing to do with the protocol; it can be a feature of the implementation.
    - hprotagonist 7y ago
      and most channels have a valid and longstanding rule against public logs. because if you were raised as i was in the internet of the mid-90s, logs and real names are weapons, and we don’t do that to our friends.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dangus 7y ago
Not your project, not your choice. “Free” refers to the software license of the source code. That is it. The maintainers of a free software project don’t even have to accept contributions outside of their organization or club. Private companies that use all kinds of proprietary communication tools regularly contribute to free software. Are all of Red Hat’s internal conversations about Fedora guaranteed to make it into the public? People are also perfectly capable of having private conversations about contributions to free software projects. These conversations don’t ever have to be made public. Again, only the code license is what makes a piece of software free. So if you don’t like a project’s method of communication, my advice would be to not contribute to it. It’s the project’s own risk of deterring potential contributors, not yours. I find it hilarious that someone would find themselves feeling entitled enough to tell a bunch of unpaid open source developers how to communicate with one another as if that someone were their boss at a company. The only place where I’m told what communication tools to use is at work, where I’m paid to comply.
- orblivion 7y ago
  If you're working on a project and just happen to choose a free software license, then fair enough. (perhaps you'd call yourself more of an "open source" contributor). If however you are acting due to the free software ethos, I think it's fair for others who share the ethos to chime in with their opinion on how well you're doing it. It doesn't have to be a witch hunt, but these things matter more than a zero amount.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dangus 7y ago
    What’s the difference between “just happening” to choose a free license and “acting due to the free software ethos?” Hopefully the free software ethos police doesn’t come knocking on my door because I used GPL 3.0 without having the right mindset.
    - orblivion 7y ago
caymanjim 7y ago
By this standard, no free software project should use the Internet at all. Unless you jump through the kind of hoops that even smart, tech-savvy, security-minded people don't, someone is tracking most of what you do. Your ISP can track your DNS requests unless you use DNS-over-TLS (no on does); they can track every IP you connect to unless you use a VPN (in which case your VPN or upstream provider can); in most cases your email isn't secure (no one encrypts email, and eventually it's unencrypted somewhere); communication via alternate mechanisms suffers from the same problems as Discord (IRC, Slack, and other services can also be monitored); every search engine can track you. I could go on. The bottom line is that Discord doesn't stand out as a particular offender here, and the steps required to alleviate the author's concerns are inconvenient. Most projects have more important things to worry about with their limited resources. Communication secrecy simply isn't a priority for most open source projects. In fact it's antithetical to the majority of open source goals. Someone pointed out that users might want to discuss security issues privately, and while there's a little bit of merit to that, it's a contrived example. It's not one of the author's concerns, and it's not an issue that arises with most projects. Open source development benefits from being done openly, and secure communication isn't a priority. I'm in favor of using open source, private, self-hosted tools whenever and wherever practical. I'm not defending Discord specifically, nor encouraging its use. This author is just hung up on something that most people don't care about, especially in the context of software that's meant to be open and public. There's something about this sort of obsessive fixation on a non-issue that makes people roll their eyes and not want to work with you. People who are using their limited free time to work on some random small project don't want to be lectured at over principles they don't share.
- softwarejosh 7y ago
  your argument here seems really defeatist, people don’t use dns over tls because its easier to just grab a vpn, throwing encrypted traffic through a vpn and acting like because the vpns isp can resolve domain names is just as identifying or non free as isp resolving somains straight from your network is just nonsense
Shank 7y ago
I help maintain a pretty popular open source game mod. One of the features the mod provides server owners is anticheat, and one of the consequences of that is needing cheats in order to make sure the anticheat system works, to test exploits, and to make the game safer. Discord permanently banned the server and my account because we were breaking terms of service violations, even though we had blessing from the game developer themselves. They later reversed the ban on my account, but kept the server deleted because they maintained that we advocated cheating. Again, we develop anti-cheat moderation software. In my last contact with them, I was told that that it was up to us to moderate the server better too. If any user posted cheating related material, they would of course ban the server for terms of service violations anyway (this essentially inverts the typical idea of "safe harbor" protection that traditional websites have). The problem with not using Discord is that they successfully captured the gamer and game market. As a game related tool, all of our users are on Discord. It's a shame that one company was able to do this.
- dariusj18 7y ago
  This is a greater problem to solve than Discord. How do a group of people publicly and responsibly disseminate blackhat information to whitehats?
  - mcpeepants 7y ago
    It's a good question, though I think the "publicly" and "responsibly" aspects may be inherently at odds.
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  Even only hearing your side of this, I think Discord is being reasonable. It sounds like anyone could grab a cheat from your server and go wreak havoc on an unmodded server for this game... surely your mod isn't universally used?
  - krilly 7y ago
    Yeah, I'm sure that kind of thing could be shared privately by email between the relevant parties
h2odragon 7y ago
> I’m not going to tell you to go use IRC like some cranky old Thinkpad-toting unixbeard good, we get crankier when young punks repeat our advice without understanding why it was given. "There’s no single free/self-hostable alternative that has all of the features of Discord," ... so, just maybe, someone who's got a project to do might want to keep with discord, despite its flaws, instead of fucking around with recreating the same thing only more philosophically pure?
- Lunatic666 7y ago
  Reading this article makes we want to adopt Discord to make sure the author won't be part of the community.
zzo38computer 7y ago
"Replacement for Threaded, Asynchronous Discussion: Discourse" I suggest NNTP instead, please.
beigeoak 7y ago
I am in complete and utter awe of this website. I simply cannot believe the level of typography that I am seeing. I cannot imagine the number of incorrect decisions or accidents that would have had to have occurred to reach this monstrosity.
nwsm 7y ago
The author mentions 4 times that privacy is a basic human right, I guess to guilt us into agreeing with them. But the article's actual argument is that contributing to a specific FOSS project is a basic human right, which it is not.
dependenttypes 7y ago
Last time I tried to use discord my account was automatically flagged as suspicious and it forced me to enter a mobile phone - even though I did solve a captcha. It also insisted that my firefox was outdated even though it was not. It kept being laggy and glitchy, lacks e2ee/e2ea, bans 3rd party clients, is not accessible to people with disabilities, etc. So yeah, Discord is one of the worst choices, and not only for free software projects.
- dheera 7y ago
  I use virtual numbers for all of these services. They don't need to or have a right to my mobile phone number.
- perryprog 7y ago
  I couldn’t agree more. I also really want to emphasize a less mentioned issue with Discord, which is its accessibility (or lack thereof). It’s effectively impossible for anyone with visual impairment that use a screen-reader to use Discord. I could go into (/very/) great length into this, but that’s the gist. What makes this even better is that there’s no getting around this limitation: third-party clients or client modifications are disallowed in the TOS and will cause your account to be banned.
say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
That's like, your opinion-- free software anarchist. I don't care what you find acceptable, nor do hundreds of thousands of other people. Please, stick with Usenet.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  Well, the article they seem they don't like Usenet either, even though I do like Usenet (and NNTP in general). (Still, you have the right to your opinion either way, please.)
Comevius 7y ago
> Discord is spyware, silently logging and tracking every action performed within their app, without once asking the user if they consent or not You have to read and agree to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to use their services. https://discordapp.com/terms https://discordapp.com/terms https://discordapp.com/privacy https://discordapp.com/privacy
- gsich 7y ago
  And? It's still spyware. I'm not sure what some legal stuff has to do with that.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    They explicitly ask the user to consent to the TOS during the signup flow. Yes, we all know nobody reads the TOS. It's still extremely inaccurate to claim Discord has these behaviors without asking consent, when they ask for exactly that.
    - gsich 7y ago
      That doesn't mean anything. You have not consented to anything by clicking accept without reading it. Sure, everyone will act like they have it. It can still be spyware, even with "consent". The original statement still stands, "silently logging, tracking every action performed". They could just add some text that will be shown when something is recorded.
r618 7y ago
> A few minutes after publishing this post, I solved the requisite 60 CAPTCHAs, created a new Discord account with a disposable phone number that cost me €5, and joined a Discord chat for a project I participate in. I sent the link to this post, via DM only, to three of the admins with a short note. Not 10, not 100, not a random project: three of the admins of a project in which I am already a participant. Within 60 seconds of linking these users to my own webpage, Discord deleted my account. wow
vorpalhex 7y ago
While I think this is extremely hyperbolic, yeah the author isn't wrong. Discord is, for all intents and purposes, a privately owned public space. What you say and do there is public, is publically viewable effectively, and that extends to DMs. Likewise, Discord wants to maintain their public space with their rules. I disagree with these rules, but Discord is free to moderate their space as they see fit. Just like the owner of a private campground can kick you out for cursing, despite using curse words not being a crime, so can Discord ban you for posting nipples or cheat software. I think the only malfeasance here is that Discord looks and feels like a private space. It feels like a space where you can talk privately or share things privately, and so people are upset when that expectation turns out to be wrong. For some FOSS projects, I think Discord is a fine choice. It's low friction and it works well. I use it for my social groups. For many projects that might touch on software or topics that Discord dislikes, or that strongly disagree with Discords moderation, they should use an alternative (whether that's still public like IRC or potentially private like Riot)
- chapium 7y ago
  I support the conclusion, but I feel many of the arguments author makes are highly debatable.
Causality1 7y ago
>you are choosing to hard-exclude all of these types of people from your group, whether you realize it or not. I agree with the article. That said, both being a ruthless bastard and to play devil's advocate, those people also tend to be drama lightning rods and I would happily exclude them given the option.
mixologic 7y ago
"You can self-host Mattermost in a very straightforward fashion." There's a very long chasm between "You can get the software running, and have it respond on a port to requests" and "Providing a mission critical service that your project relies on". The key word here is service. It is often drastically underestimated how much effort is required to have a service available, especially at any sort of scale. Free/Open Source software is irrelevant as soon as you are providing a service, because by design, the only people who have control over the service, are the service operators, and the only people who really know whats running in production are the people who deployed the code. Given that, the only choice a user has is whether or not to trust whomever is providing the service, regardless of whether or not the software they are running is free/open source, or proprietary/in house software.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
diebeforei485 7y ago
Asking for a non-voip phone number is a great way to (numerically) reduce spam a lot. E2E does have a legitimate downside of letting low-quality content run wild.
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
Another toxic part of the FOSS movement. Ill use whatever I want, thank you very much.
bcheung 7y ago
Really wish Slack did not require a backend service just to auto-invite people. Makes it more difficult to allow anyone to communicate with you on your project.
whenanother 7y ago
discord’s business model is to obfuscate the spyware portion from games or whatever application. this is necessary to protect or factor out the valuable ip of a program from the possibility of it being placed under scrutiny by a government or whatever organization. i suggest people look up the owners of discord.
MrGando 7y ago
It's a bit sad to read so many "I don't discuss anything illegal, so this doesn't affect me" arguments here. That's not really how it works, and if we take history as an example, most of what you say can be used for profiling and targeting potentially. So no, the above argument misses the point, completely. We can do better as educated folks. A good starting point to learn bout privacy would be to read -at least a bit- of Daniel J. Solove's "The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age". Also, learning more about history and what happened with PII (personable identifiable information) in WW2 is important.
- jaredklewis 7y ago
  I'm not seeing those arguments. Whose argument are you referring to? Despite being a strong privacy advocate, I didn't find the post particularly compelling. For the vast majority of open source projects, discussion of anything illegal would be considered off topic, and there is no expectation of privacy since all discussion is public record. Having those discussions being public and searchable is a valuable feature. Does that mean I am against good tools that enable private discourse (like Signal)? Of course not! Some open source projects probably have a need for private discussion channels. I'm all for them using them. But to then extrapolate from that: "don't use Discord to discuss your open source JS widget library" doesn't make sense to me.
  - MrGando 7y ago
    I was just reading the discussion happening around the post and where people are going with this. I agree with you Jared, and I didn't find the post particularly compelling as well. I should have been more clear. I just read through the comments here in HN and tried to make an observation about the level of the conversation that the HN community (is it a community?) seems to be having. Mainly wanted to express that I hoped that we could all learn more about privacy in this day and age, given that it's (or should be) a fundamental matter that relates to most of what we work on these days (at least as people working in tech).
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >We can do better as educated folks. There's nothing uneducated about having a differentiated view on privacy, which this blog post has not, it's mostly just an incoherent rant. There's nothing wrong with not having any expectation of privacy for discourse that is supposed to be public. I don't care if my open source development discussions are public because they're intended for a public audience. Same goes for any discussion I have on a discord. People with an educated mindset are able to discern what information deserves what level of privacy, rather than larping as privacy advocates to stick it to the man or whatever the motivation is.
el_cujo 7y ago
>There are some great alternatives. I’m not going to tell you to go use IRC like some cranky old Thinkpad-toting unixbeard who doesn’t recognize that mobile apps are a hard requirement for meaningful social collaboration these days. IRC is a total nonstarter for this use case for many reasons which have been written about before. I'm not really a heavy IRC user, but is it really that hard for somebody to make a slick IRC frontend with a mobile app as well? I would think that IRC already existing takes away the hardest part for making a chat system like this.
- gpanders 7y ago
  Riot[1] can communicate with Freenode IRC channels and has a decent mobile app. [1]: https://riot.im https://riot.im
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  IRC's protocol actually makes that challenging; it's chatty and wants a persistent network connection. Mobile devices minimize battery life by minimizing messages per second and only keeping network connections live when necessary.
null4bl3 7y ago
Use a protocol, not a service
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Protocols tend to be a good first step, but they're extremely vulnerable to abuse without something larger working atop them. Email is a protocol. Implementation is a practical nightmare because of bad actors. Something to control bad actors is vital to any communications system, regardless of whether you classify it as "service" or "protocol."
dvasdekis 7y ago
I'm amazed that nobody's recommended Aether[1] as an alternative yet. It's fully distributed, privacy-centric and FOSS, with no infrastructure hosting required. The downside is a heavy client, with slower posts (think 1-5 minutes before you see a reply), as posts are distributed on a DHT (like bittorrent). It won't replace Discord for gamer chat, but for FOSS projects with small communities and privacy-minded proponents, it should fit needs nicely. [1] https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/
- beders 7y ago
  "with no infrastructure hosting required." " as posts are distributed on a DHT (like bittorrent)." Someone's gotta run the trackers.
  - dvasdekis 7y ago
    Nope, DHT functions as a distributed tracker here
wackget 7y ago
30 captchas just because you're browsing via Tor, a VPN, or a proxy? How is that remotely acceptable? There really should be some kind of law against ludicrous shit like that. People will say "Discord is a private service and nobody's forcing you to use it" but reality is not as black and white as that. For example, what if your employer invites you to a meeting using a privacy-abusing service like Discord or Google Hangouts? Are you going to risk telling your employer that you're not joining an important meeting because you don't want to use a service without your VPN? What if some important club/charity/etc. has its members in a Discord group? These services blur the lines between private enterprise and social utility. Like Facebook, services offering "mass interaction" or whatever should be subject to much stronger privacy laws. The current state of things can't continue.
- soapboxrocket 7y ago
  > Are you going to risk telling your employer that you're not joining an important meeting because you don't want to use a service without your VPN? What if some important club/charity/etc. has its members in a Discord group? I'm not going to risk losing my employment, but I'm going to tell them I have a problem using the service without a VPN. If they are willing to fire you for raising privacy concerns then you should have concerns over the culture. Plus most companies I've worked for always want the VPN connected when you are off their network.
- beders 7y ago
  I hate to break it to you: You don't have privacy on the internet. If Discord was chosen by your employer, running on employer-provided laptops, yes, you need to use it. You can certainly call out their questionable ToS to your IT department. It's not a public "social utility". It is a service run by a private company with their specific ToS. I'm getting so frustrated about people not understanding that YOU ARE THE PRODUCT - in many cases like Discord. You will be monitored, your clicks will be recorded, heck you have NO guarantee that the Open Source version they might have is the code RUNNING on their servers. Even if a company claims they can't read your messages or never will: You can't trust it. Ever. Someone's gotta pay the Ramen.
nemild 7y ago
This last came up for OSS and Slack (e.g., "Please don't use Slack for FOSS")[1][2]. I took some time to reflect on why OSS wasn't the default for these messaging tools, rather than proprietary alternatives — and what it would take to make more users use OSS alternatives: > As Slack has continued to grow, open source developers have had lengthy debates about using it rather than IRC. For some, the fact that Slack is closed source and a walled garden makes it unsuitable when building projects that are open. > I’ll take a different approach: in the age of software, why is open software not more competitive for many products used by non-engineers and what can be done? What Open Source Can Learn From Slack https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html ------- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136
- hitpointdrew 7y ago
  There are other choices besides Slack and IRC. Setting up Mattermost on a VPS isn't hard. https://mattermost.org/licensing/ https://mattermost.org/licensing/
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Or just Matrix.
  - FalconSensei 7y ago
    Still harder than Slack, right?
    - andrewzah 7y ago
      How is slack any better than discord? Both roll out stupid (and forced) updates, and slack doesn't even let me browse kinda old history if the owner doesn't pay for it. [*4] Not to mention the search is relatively terrible anyway. The main thing that worries me about is discord is their revenue model... I just don't see how they're making money, and they keep on raising money. There are a few good alternatives like zulip [0], matrix [1], discourse [2], Rocket Chat [3], or just plain old irc. Although discourse isn't really a chat application but more of a open source forum software. [0]: https://github.com/zulip https://github.com/zulip [1]: https://www.matrix.org/ https://www.matrix.org/ [2]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse [3]: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ [4]: You can get around this by messaging relevant information to yourself. Or just saving things locally, like a weirdo.
matsemann 7y ago
I agree that Discord and Slack has some bad sides, but for kinda opposite reasons than the author. There are so many discussions, QAs, tips&tricks etc. shared on these chat rooms, that are impossible to find for those not a part of it. If it was discussed in a public forum somewhere, it would pop up in a search engine. I may have a problem with tool X and google for a solution, but since the discussion happened in some closed Discord server I will never find the solution someone else there has posted. So kinda the opposite of the author's point about privacy: I prefer everything to be open and accessible. Hiding this stuff hampers the adoption without people realizing. I don't join a discord for everything I use, and often I'm not even aware that it exists. An example I had a few weeks ago: Elm package repo died so I got some weird errors when building my project. Apparently lots of people were aware and knew about the problem and the status. But it was discussed in some Elm slack (I think), so for me not a member there I had no idea what was going on and couldn't find anything about it.
- sneak 7y ago
  Private things, like DMs and user IP/location, should remain private. Teams using Discord force their team participants to share this information with Discord to participate, who can then share it with whomever they want, with no legal recourse if they harm you as a result. Public things, like discussion and documentation, should be open and available. Teams using Discord have outsourced to Discord the decision of who is allowed to even read information that should be public. People who don’t ID themselves to Discord and agree to not sue them are prohibited from reading. It fails on both counts.
anonsivalley652 7y ago
Exactly. Popularity means nothing. Options: - Signal, Wire (maybe) - e2e cloud - XMPP-based server - Aenigma[0] - e2e self-hosted XMPP based on ejabberd, preferably in Iceland, Greenland or someplace out-of-reach of regimes unfriendly to human rights client - Jitsi - multiplatform SIP and XMPP app includes OTR for e2e - riot.im - e2e Discord-like replacement (of unknown-to-me construction) - i2p - decentralized garlic routing with multiple services additionally: VPN - self-hosted WireGuard on an anonymous cryptoc-paid VPS [0] https://github.com/openspace42/aenigma https://github.com/openspace42/aenigma
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
drummer 7y ago
This article was excellent. Best quote: "John Gilmore, one of the founders of the EFF, once famously wrote, “The ‘net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”" HN should take that to heart.
- krapp 7y ago
  >HN should take that to heart. Why? It's nonsense. If the `net really worked that way, no one would even be concerned about censorship on social media or Discord, because it wouldn't exist.
  - samatman 7y ago
    This is somewhat like saying that, if the Net interpreted damage as damage and routed around it, there would never be service outages when undersea cables are accidentally cut. There's a lot of malicious damage out there, and the Internet has been steadily centralizing, de facto, for a couple decades now. It's an arms race, basically. I support the defensive side here, but victory is by no means assured.
shadowgovt 7y ago
This particular paragraph is strangely under-informed in an otherwise-good article. """ Many people in the free software movement find censorship in general to be abhorrent. (That’s one very good reason, for example, why emails you receive that might be spam go into a special folder, instead of being silently deleted without you having a option to choose to see them if you wish. Your email server could just delete them! The fact that it doesn’t was a deliberate design choice to avoid censorship.) """ Lots of people's email servers do, in fact, silently delete quite a bit of email, because the signal-noise ratio in the world of email spam is so bad it swamped the attention budget of users (and in some cases the storage budget of service providers) ages ago, even with a spam folder attached. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_(email) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_(email) https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/hotmail-silently-dropping-emails-from-work-domain/5c8d927c-533c-4c2a-8a61-28c4ce0cf600 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/ho... https://blog.paranoidpenguin.net/2015/01/outlook-com-is-silently-discarding-email-messages/ https://blog.paranoidpenguin.net/2015/01/outlook-com-is-sile... http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsp/article.php/3511691/Spam-Fighting-To-Bounce-or-Not-to-Bounce.htm http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsp/article.php/...
- lwb 7y ago
  Yeah I don't understand that argument -- how could silently deleting emails enable censorship? I guess the email server could censor emails by silently deleting them? If so the fact that it's not in the protocol certainly wouldn't stop the censor...
  - FalconSensei 7y ago
    If there's no way for people to access those emails (as they were silently deleted), it's basically censorship, or am I wrong?
    - sneak 7y ago
      Correct. Censorship is a tool, it is not inherently good or bad. You want your email server to censor all entirely-obviously-over-the-top spam messages, for example (e.g. SA score >20). Most people want Facebook and Discord et al to censor spam postings. However, when censorship veers from basic utility into editorializing (e.g. Facebook and Instagram's algorithmic prioritization/deprioritization in user feeds, Discord banning the legal and regulation-compliant /r/guns subreddit's Discord, or Facebook banning posts with male nipples, or Youtube banning instructional/educational videos about computer security, or Apple and the Taiwanese flag, or Gmail spam-foldering emails from smaller email providers not part of the deliverability cartel, or a million other examples), then it becomes a social issue and a potential problem that we need to address. Email that is not 100% not-a-false-positive should never be silently trashed.
shadowgovt 7y ago
I very much appreciate the author's intellectual honesty at the end of the article, where they note that one won't be able to find a drop-in replacement for Discord (but they do note one can build a solution from several not-quite-there alternatives).
shadowgovt 7y ago
It's weird that the author is surprised that the system kicked them off for signing up for a new Discord account and immediately sending the same message to three people via DM. That's the base vanilla behavior template for a pornbot.
- sneak 7y ago
  Yeah, which indicates what a terrible false-positive this is. It's like their spam detection is just pattern/behavior based, and entirely unintelligent, censoring even authorized users doing normal things in projects they participate in.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    I wouldn't call it a terrible false-positive. The Bayesian estimate on this behavior is that it's far more likely to come from a porn-bot than a legitimate use case. (Arguably, the use-case in question isn't even what the service would consider "legitimate;" user was trying to tickle the tiger's tail on purpose. If one doesn't want to get kicked off like a porn-bot, it's not hard to avoid acting like a porn-bot).
tbyehl 7y ago
Author misses two important points: 1. I'm not going to self-host any of that stuff for my own projects, nor am I willing to pay for an alternative SaaS that a privacy-extremist finds less objectionable. 2. Few projects are important enough to me to sign up to use their weird self-hosted or non-mainstream-SaaS solutions. Discord wins for the same reasons that GitHub wins, that Sourceforge used to win, and for the same reasons that no upstart projects are standing up their own Trac or Bugzilla servers any more. Insert "Old Man Yelling at Clouds" meme.
beders 7y ago
"Their spying extends to every single message sent and received by anyone, including direct messages betweeen users." It's not spying if it is in their Terms of Service. Full of hyperbole. Yes, common sense SHOULD tell you: If you are using a free service such as this that is not free to operate, then YOU are the product. And you will be marketed to and you will not have privacy. Get over it.
paulcarroty 7y ago
https://sneak.berlin/s/2020/20200218.discord/tracking.png https://sneak.berlin/s/2020/20200218.discord/tracking.png Remembered me the Win10 installer settings :)
Razengan 7y ago
We need an improved IRC protocol and modern open-source clients, now more than ever. Just make a cute, free client and people won't care about the underlying tech. Most of the better IRC clients throughout history have been paid, but when Microsoft Comic Chat was bundled with Windows, IRC got an influx of tons of new users, in an era with generally fewer computer-literate people than today. That kind of resurgence can be repeated today if somebody can make a free IRC client on par with Discord's functionality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
rs23296008n1 7y ago
I'm not even sure its suitable for gaming based on the criteria from the article. We've set the bar lower each year for what is acceptable service operator behavior. Why should gaming throw away privacy and other basics? Is it impossible to respect simple privacy while providing gaming communications? I don't think so. Why is discord so delighting in logging everything? Who knows? One low effort answer is: To sell it. Privacy is a commodity that can be sold. And yes, I use discord for all sorts of purposes. Hmmm. Might need to rethink things. What alternatives exist? Signal? The big problem is the ability to create a group chat for text, voice, multimedia sharing, eg images, as part of that chat.
kazinator 7y ago
This repeats a lot of what Stallman has already written is "bad about" Discord: https://stallman.org/discord.html https://stallman.org/discord.html
numpad0 7y ago
Value Discord had over Slack was single account rather than per-instance in Slack(you register a new account over and over for each project admin you work with with Slack), and one fact people be skeptical of competitor is "friction" as discussed here of account creation. Identity is also a problem for lots of Twitter users who rely online identities to it because Twitter the company loves to destructively refresh userbases. So for civil rights perspective there should be single account database, THE Civil Registry of Internet that let you tie, link-unlink, manage accounts. A face-book in modern term but not necessarily in your real name or for always fully disclosing your genitals. What OAuth realized for a brief moment. One of the oldest core function of a nation, and we need it. Well that used to be my billionaire dream idea for this quarter and there it goes...
unicornporn 7y ago
It amazes me that there's not a single word about Matrix/Riot.im in this submission or the blog post itself. If you want to resist control over your communications medium, a federated system seems like a no-brainier. And yes, the E2EE is there if/when you need it.

532 points by rauhl 7y ago

rvz 7y ago

I was about to mention Keybase, but since there is no self-hosting option, I'm afraid I can't recommend them as a communication tool for free software projects. IRC is still suitable and used by some but it is viewed as an prehistoric option. So are there any modern alternatives? Sort of, there's Jami [0] (formely GNU/Ring) which is actually free software and looks nice, but I haven't tried it yet. Another option is the Matrix protocol [1] and some of its clients like Riot.im [2] fit this free software criteria. [0] https://jami.net/ https://jami.net/ [1] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ [2] https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/

chatmasta 7y ago
Mattermost is high-quality, privacy-respecting software that is easy to self host.
- remir 7y ago
  How is their mobile app?
  - ishbits 7y ago
    Pretty nice, but only supports one server.
    - magicalhippo 7y ago
      I'm on five different Discord servers that deal with open source projects, and I'm not really that active.
    - Goronmon 7y ago
      That seems like a pretty significant limitation.
    - chatmasta 7y ago
      This is annoying especially if you want a setup where you have an internal company server and an external open source community. But Mattermost is aware of it and working on fixing it, apparently. If it's really important to you, as a stopgap measure, you could sideload a second copy onto your phone.
aidenn0 7y ago
Zulip is open source, can be self-hosted, and offers free hosting on their servers to any open-source projects.
- nikisweeting 7y ago
  The threading model is also just generally better for async communication than slack/discord style channels.

nottorp 7y ago

I would have certainly taken this guy more seriously if I hadn't got a "won't you subscribe to my newsletter" popup in the middle of the article...

dependenttypes 7y ago
Apparently ublock origin blocks this.
xibalba 7y ago
Why? So this author wants to promote a newsletter. Is it so onerous to click an "X" that you would discredit the information in this article?
- dave_sullivan 7y ago
  Onerous? Meh. An annoying interruption and a dark pattern? Absolutely.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Yes. If you want me to read your content, stop blocking me from reading your content while I am in the middle of reading your content.
- trevyn 7y ago
  It shows that the author is incentivized by drawing traffic, which increases the likelihood of hyperbolized articles.
  - tomnipotent 7y ago
    > author is incentivized by drawing traffic Of course he is, that's the whole point of writing.
    - mwfunk 7y ago
      No, that’s the whole point of advertising. Writing is about communicating ideas in good faith, otherwise I’m not interested.

kick 7y ago

It took so long for the CSS to load I thought, "Wow, what a beautiful minimalist site!" and then came...everything else. I agree with part of one of 'sneak's points, though, if not the way it's presented and some of the way it's worded. Discord isn't a good choice for Free Software.

jshevek 7y ago
Viewed with Brave, I see a rather minimalist version which loaded quickly. Also, no annoying pop-up.
- kick 7y ago
  It looks minimalist, but it's not. I was talking about it without CSS. Turning CSS-blocking on for it with uMatrix makes it look fantastic once more. No one with sensible browser settings/extensions will see a pop-up, it's certainly not exclusive to Brave.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    I agree, and the point of my previous comment was to agree with you, while also implying one of the benefits of increasing the usage of Brave among non-technophiles. Blocking these anti-features comes automatically with Brave, no effort or setup. As more of us block this nonsense, whether with extensions or with Brave, the less incentive to write excessive CSS and annoying pop-ups.

zzo38computer 7y ago

I tried to tell them that, but they didn't believe me. (I also tried to tell them that NNTP should be better than using a web forum. They did believe me about that, but nevertheless failed to set it up.) I think IRC is better. (I think you can also bridge Matrix with IRC, in case you want to have both. Or maybe you can also bridge IRC with Mattermost; I don't know. But they recommend Mattermost, so if you can bridge it in this way, then it can be helpful.)

paxys 7y ago

Not making a judgement call on Discord, but I'd argue that all communication for free software projects should be public and unencrypted.

stkdump 7y ago
What about security bugs? Don't you need at least a secure way to discuss them?
- paxys 7y ago
  Expecially security bugs. Communication can be hidden during the remediation period, but there's no reason for them to not be made public immediately after.
  - t-writescode 7y ago
    So then there is a reason to have communication be private, as you said.
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  I would argue that even then it should be public. Forks exist and everyone can have one (even if it is for private use). For all we know the maintainer of the "original" could be a hostile actor.
chungy 7y ago
Encryption is kind of moot. Every IRC server has been behind SSL/TLS for a very long time and it doesn't prevent usage nor archives.
- paxys 7y ago
  The core argument in the article is that such systems aren't E2E encrypted.
  - cooljacob204 7y ago

ehutch79 7y ago

What's the recommended alternative? Don't IRC servers face the same issues of someone being able to read whatever you put through the service?

williamxd3 7y ago
Telegram?
- buovjaga 7y ago
  Proprietary & closed source
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Not end-to-end. Telegram servers see (and log, this is in Russia!) plaintext.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    1) In the context of a public discussion channel, end-to-end encryption and plaintext logging are features. Their presence means that a person is able to join and see context. This is good. 2) Telegram is not based in Russia. In fact, it's been intermittently blocked in the country.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      I am corrected.
Leo_Verto 7y ago
Matrix offers the best of both world: federated self-hostable servers, decent UX and the option to E2E-encrypt entire channels.
- jdashg 7y ago
  Notably, Mozilla has switched from IRC to Matrix.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops. >Regardless of whether or not you are the kind of person who mocks or ridicules people—you should be able to use your communications tools to mock and ridicule people, if you so wish. These are normal, acceptable things to do in society. Fuck censorship. I would guess that for the vast majority of Free Software projects, not having illegal topics discussed on the chat and not having people who mock and ridicule people are features not bugs.

privateSFacct 7y ago
And for many not being dictated too about what is acceptable might be another feature. I wish the folks saying things were not acceptable would work on options that had the benefits they wanted. Steve jobs didn't say - locked down phones with no access to the web in unacceptable, he built a better phone (and was rewarded very well). He didn't say the way digital music is sold is stupid - he built a better music buying experience that let you authorize multiple devices to play your music etc.
ncmncm 7y ago
Surveillance is always, ultimately, about extortion. People are forced to do what they would not for many reasons besides risk of criminal prosecution.
superkuh 7y ago
Discord is a bad decision for security reasons, for privacy reasons, reliability, and for ethical reasons. it's not just illegal things that are kicked off. If you violate a third party company's terms of service, say making bots for Team Fortress 2 (a valve video game) then you'll be banned suddenly as well. And Discord is no stranger to banning things that are not illegal but just controversial like, https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_discord_banned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_dis... In terms of privacy: they send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response). Their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).

falcolas 7y ago

I agree that Discord is not a good choice, perhaps not even an acceptable choice. But. Discord (not to mention Slack) will simply continue to be the lowest friction choice until a FOSS alternative comes along that is free to use, comes with rich moderation tools, supports fine-grained notification settings, supports offline history without additional effort, supports rich bots, has a mobile client that shares state with the desktop clients, and already exists on most people's desktops. So to impact the open source communication landscape, the standard that needs to be exceeded is Slack and Discord, not IRC.

jayfk 7y ago
There is Mattermost, Rocketchat and Zulip.
- dmead 7y ago
  all of which are high friction yes?
  - aphextim 7y ago
    https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/
  - levesque 7y ago
    I wouldn't say high friction, but clearly not as convenient/low-friction as signing up for slack/discord.
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  No mention of Riot/Matrix?
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Does the matrix spec offer moderation tools? I don't see anything off the top of my head. It's also a bit of a chore to even identify how to get a server. Matrix.org points you towards other implementers, Riot.im pushes you back to matrix.org for a login, and to "Modular" for a server. This is kind of the opposite of low friction and ease of use. It seems pretty slick from a technological point of view, but a bit of a mess from an implementation point of view.

Jonnax 7y ago

So there was a software project that I wanted to ask some questions about on their IRC. So I clicked a link on their GitHub page for some online IRC client. I had a conversation it was great. Except for the part where I wanted to paste some code and it didn't format. And then I was recommended to use pastebin and paste a link. Then I went away for a bit. Came back later and my computer had rebooted while in standby. (It's an old laptop and is a bit flaky with resume from standby) I returned and click the link for the IRC chat. And I couldn't see the previous messages. And they had a link to a log but it wasn't working. And apparently the server doesn't log by default. Look, no offence to IRC. But this is some crazy bullshit. Like Discord, Slack, Gitter, Teams. Whatever. Isn't going have this issue. At the end of the day people want to communicate and get their stuff done. For a free software project, sure, using opensource tools is a great idea. But sometimes faffing around with none core things just wastes everyone's time. Especially with they could instead be working on features and bug fixes.

dmead 7y ago
IRC is just a relay. it's not storage and never will be.
- Jonnax 7y ago
  I know. I've used mIRC lots 10+ years ago. But the expectations for chat today has changed a lot
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  A IRC server can log. I have once programmed a IRC server to do this for a predefined set of channels, and the MOTD mentions where to find the logs. (This way, everyone is aware of the logs.) Whether or not it logs has nothing to do with the protocol; it can be a feature of the implementation.
  - hprotagonist 7y ago
    and most channels have a valid and longstanding rule against public logs. because if you were raised as i was in the internet of the mid-90s, logs and real names are weapons, and we don’t do that to our friends.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dangus 7y ago

Not your project, not your choice. “Free” refers to the software license of the source code. That is it. The maintainers of a free software project don’t even have to accept contributions outside of their organization or club. Private companies that use all kinds of proprietary communication tools regularly contribute to free software. Are all of Red Hat’s internal conversations about Fedora guaranteed to make it into the public? People are also perfectly capable of having private conversations about contributions to free software projects. These conversations don’t ever have to be made public. Again, only the code license is what makes a piece of software free. So if you don’t like a project’s method of communication, my advice would be to not contribute to it. It’s the project’s own risk of deterring potential contributors, not yours. I find it hilarious that someone would find themselves feeling entitled enough to tell a bunch of unpaid open source developers how to communicate with one another as if that someone were their boss at a company. The only place where I’m told what communication tools to use is at work, where I’m paid to comply.

orblivion 7y ago
If you're working on a project and just happen to choose a free software license, then fair enough. (perhaps you'd call yourself more of an "open source" contributor). If however you are acting due to the free software ethos, I think it's fair for others who share the ethos to chime in with their opinion on how well you're doing it. It doesn't have to be a witch hunt, but these things matter more than a zero amount.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dangus 7y ago
  What’s the difference between “just happening” to choose a free license and “acting due to the free software ethos?” Hopefully the free software ethos police doesn’t come knocking on my door because I used GPL 3.0 without having the right mindset.
  - orblivion 7y ago

caymanjim 7y ago

By this standard, no free software project should use the Internet at all. Unless you jump through the kind of hoops that even smart, tech-savvy, security-minded people don't, someone is tracking most of what you do. Your ISP can track your DNS requests unless you use DNS-over-TLS (no on does); they can track every IP you connect to unless you use a VPN (in which case your VPN or upstream provider can); in most cases your email isn't secure (no one encrypts email, and eventually it's unencrypted somewhere); communication via alternate mechanisms suffers from the same problems as Discord (IRC, Slack, and other services can also be monitored); every search engine can track you. I could go on. The bottom line is that Discord doesn't stand out as a particular offender here, and the steps required to alleviate the author's concerns are inconvenient. Most projects have more important things to worry about with their limited resources. Communication secrecy simply isn't a priority for most open source projects. In fact it's antithetical to the majority of open source goals. Someone pointed out that users might want to discuss security issues privately, and while there's a little bit of merit to that, it's a contrived example. It's not one of the author's concerns, and it's not an issue that arises with most projects. Open source development benefits from being done openly, and secure communication isn't a priority. I'm in favor of using open source, private, self-hosted tools whenever and wherever practical. I'm not defending Discord specifically, nor encouraging its use. This author is just hung up on something that most people don't care about, especially in the context of software that's meant to be open and public. There's something about this sort of obsessive fixation on a non-issue that makes people roll their eyes and not want to work with you. People who are using their limited free time to work on some random small project don't want to be lectured at over principles they don't share.

softwarejosh 7y ago
your argument here seems really defeatist, people don’t use dns over tls because its easier to just grab a vpn, throwing encrypted traffic through a vpn and acting like because the vpns isp can resolve domain names is just as identifying or non free as isp resolving somains straight from your network is just nonsense

Shank 7y ago

I help maintain a pretty popular open source game mod. One of the features the mod provides server owners is anticheat, and one of the consequences of that is needing cheats in order to make sure the anticheat system works, to test exploits, and to make the game safer. Discord permanently banned the server and my account because we were breaking terms of service violations, even though we had blessing from the game developer themselves. They later reversed the ban on my account, but kept the server deleted because they maintained that we advocated cheating. Again, we develop anti-cheat moderation software. In my last contact with them, I was told that that it was up to us to moderate the server better too. If any user posted cheating related material, they would of course ban the server for terms of service violations anyway (this essentially inverts the typical idea of "safe harbor" protection that traditional websites have). The problem with not using Discord is that they successfully captured the gamer and game market. As a game related tool, all of our users are on Discord. It's a shame that one company was able to do this.

dariusj18 7y ago
This is a greater problem to solve than Discord. How do a group of people publicly and responsibly disseminate blackhat information to whitehats?
- mcpeepants 7y ago
  It's a good question, though I think the "publicly" and "responsibly" aspects may be inherently at odds.
NoodleIncident 7y ago
Even only hearing your side of this, I think Discord is being reasonable. It sounds like anyone could grab a cheat from your server and go wreak havoc on an unmodded server for this game... surely your mod isn't universally used?
- krilly 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure that kind of thing could be shared privately by email between the relevant parties

h2odragon 7y ago

> I’m not going to tell you to go use IRC like some cranky old Thinkpad-toting unixbeard good, we get crankier when young punks repeat our advice without understanding why it was given. "There’s no single free/self-hostable alternative that has all of the features of Discord," ... so, just maybe, someone who's got a project to do might want to keep with discord, despite its flaws, instead of fucking around with recreating the same thing only more philosophically pure?

Lunatic666 7y ago
Reading this article makes we want to adopt Discord to make sure the author won't be part of the community.

zzo38computer 7y ago

"Replacement for Threaded, Asynchronous Discussion: Discourse" I suggest NNTP instead, please.

beigeoak 7y ago

I am in complete and utter awe of this website. I simply cannot believe the level of typography that I am seeing. I cannot imagine the number of incorrect decisions or accidents that would have had to have occurred to reach this monstrosity.

nwsm 7y ago

The author mentions 4 times that privacy is a basic human right, I guess to guilt us into agreeing with them. But the article's actual argument is that contributing to a specific FOSS project is a basic human right, which it is not.

dependenttypes 7y ago

Last time I tried to use discord my account was automatically flagged as suspicious and it forced me to enter a mobile phone - even though I did solve a captcha. It also insisted that my firefox was outdated even though it was not. It kept being laggy and glitchy, lacks e2ee/e2ea, bans 3rd party clients, is not accessible to people with disabilities, etc. So yeah, Discord is one of the worst choices, and not only for free software projects.

dheera 7y ago
I use virtual numbers for all of these services. They don't need to or have a right to my mobile phone number.
perryprog 7y ago
I couldn’t agree more. I also really want to emphasize a less mentioned issue with Discord, which is its accessibility (or lack thereof). It’s effectively impossible for anyone with visual impairment that use a screen-reader to use Discord. I could go into (/very/) great length into this, but that’s the gist. What makes this even better is that there’s no getting around this limitation: third-party clients or client modifications are disallowed in the TOS and will cause your account to be banned.

say_it_as_it_is 7y ago

That's like, your opinion-- free software anarchist. I don't care what you find acceptable, nor do hundreds of thousands of other people. Please, stick with Usenet.

zzo38computer 7y ago
Well, the article they seem they don't like Usenet either, even though I do like Usenet (and NNTP in general). (Still, you have the right to your opinion either way, please.)

Comevius 7y ago

> Discord is spyware, silently logging and tracking every action performed within their app, without once asking the user if they consent or not You have to read and agree to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to use their services. https://discordapp.com/terms https://discordapp.com/terms https://discordapp.com/privacy https://discordapp.com/privacy

gsich 7y ago
And? It's still spyware. I'm not sure what some legal stuff has to do with that.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  They explicitly ask the user to consent to the TOS during the signup flow. Yes, we all know nobody reads the TOS. It's still extremely inaccurate to claim Discord has these behaviors without asking consent, when they ask for exactly that.
  - gsich 7y ago
    That doesn't mean anything. You have not consented to anything by clicking accept without reading it. Sure, everyone will act like they have it. It can still be spyware, even with "consent". The original statement still stands, "silently logging, tracking every action performed". They could just add some text that will be shown when something is recorded.

r618 7y ago

> A few minutes after publishing this post, I solved the requisite 60 CAPTCHAs, created a new Discord account with a disposable phone number that cost me €5, and joined a Discord chat for a project I participate in. I sent the link to this post, via DM only, to three of the admins with a short note. Not 10, not 100, not a random project: three of the admins of a project in which I am already a participant. Within 60 seconds of linking these users to my own webpage, Discord deleted my account. wow

vorpalhex 7y ago

While I think this is extremely hyperbolic, yeah the author isn't wrong. Discord is, for all intents and purposes, a privately owned public space. What you say and do there is public, is publically viewable effectively, and that extends to DMs. Likewise, Discord wants to maintain their public space with their rules. I disagree with these rules, but Discord is free to moderate their space as they see fit. Just like the owner of a private campground can kick you out for cursing, despite using curse words not being a crime, so can Discord ban you for posting nipples or cheat software. I think the only malfeasance here is that Discord looks and feels like a private space. It feels like a space where you can talk privately or share things privately, and so people are upset when that expectation turns out to be wrong. For some FOSS projects, I think Discord is a fine choice. It's low friction and it works well. I use it for my social groups. For many projects that might touch on software or topics that Discord dislikes, or that strongly disagree with Discords moderation, they should use an alternative (whether that's still public like IRC or potentially private like Riot)

chapium 7y ago
I support the conclusion, but I feel many of the arguments author makes are highly debatable.

Causality1 7y ago

>you are choosing to hard-exclude all of these types of people from your group, whether you realize it or not. I agree with the article. That said, both being a ruthless bastard and to play devil's advocate, those people also tend to be drama lightning rods and I would happily exclude them given the option.

mixologic 7y ago

"You can self-host Mattermost in a very straightforward fashion." There's a very long chasm between "You can get the software running, and have it respond on a port to requests" and "Providing a mission critical service that your project relies on". The key word here is service. It is often drastically underestimated how much effort is required to have a service available, especially at any sort of scale. Free/Open Source software is irrelevant as soon as you are providing a service, because by design, the only people who have control over the service, are the service operators, and the only people who really know whats running in production are the people who deployed the code. Given that, the only choice a user has is whether or not to trust whomever is providing the service, regardless of whether or not the software they are running is free/open source, or proprietary/in house software.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

diebeforei485 7y ago

Asking for a non-voip phone number is a great way to (numerically) reduce spam a lot. E2E does have a legitimate downside of letting low-quality content run wild.

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

Another toxic part of the FOSS movement. Ill use whatever I want, thank you very much.

bcheung 7y ago

Really wish Slack did not require a backend service just to auto-invite people. Makes it more difficult to allow anyone to communicate with you on your project.

whenanother 7y ago

discord’s business model is to obfuscate the spyware portion from games or whatever application. this is necessary to protect or factor out the valuable ip of a program from the possibility of it being placed under scrutiny by a government or whatever organization. i suggest people look up the owners of discord.

MrGando 7y ago

It's a bit sad to read so many "I don't discuss anything illegal, so this doesn't affect me" arguments here. That's not really how it works, and if we take history as an example, most of what you say can be used for profiling and targeting potentially. So no, the above argument misses the point, completely. We can do better as educated folks. A good starting point to learn bout privacy would be to read -at least a bit- of Daniel J. Solove's "The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age". Also, learning more about history and what happened with PII (personable identifiable information) in WW2 is important.

jaredklewis 7y ago
I'm not seeing those arguments. Whose argument are you referring to? Despite being a strong privacy advocate, I didn't find the post particularly compelling. For the vast majority of open source projects, discussion of anything illegal would be considered off topic, and there is no expectation of privacy since all discussion is public record. Having those discussions being public and searchable is a valuable feature. Does that mean I am against good tools that enable private discourse (like Signal)? Of course not! Some open source projects probably have a need for private discussion channels. I'm all for them using them. But to then extrapolate from that: "don't use Discord to discuss your open source JS widget library" doesn't make sense to me.
- MrGando 7y ago
  I was just reading the discussion happening around the post and where people are going with this. I agree with you Jared, and I didn't find the post particularly compelling as well. I should have been more clear. I just read through the comments here in HN and tried to make an observation about the level of the conversation that the HN community (is it a community?) seems to be having. Mainly wanted to express that I hoped that we could all learn more about privacy in this day and age, given that it's (or should be) a fundamental matter that relates to most of what we work on these days (at least as people working in tech).
Barrin92 7y ago
>We can do better as educated folks. There's nothing uneducated about having a differentiated view on privacy, which this blog post has not, it's mostly just an incoherent rant. There's nothing wrong with not having any expectation of privacy for discourse that is supposed to be public. I don't care if my open source development discussions are public because they're intended for a public audience. Same goes for any discussion I have on a discord. People with an educated mindset are able to discern what information deserves what level of privacy, rather than larping as privacy advocates to stick it to the man or whatever the motivation is.

el_cujo 7y ago

>There are some great alternatives. I’m not going to tell you to go use IRC like some cranky old Thinkpad-toting unixbeard who doesn’t recognize that mobile apps are a hard requirement for meaningful social collaboration these days. IRC is a total nonstarter for this use case for many reasons which have been written about before. I'm not really a heavy IRC user, but is it really that hard for somebody to make a slick IRC frontend with a mobile app as well? I would think that IRC already existing takes away the hardest part for making a chat system like this.

gpanders 7y ago
Riot[1] can communicate with Freenode IRC channels and has a decent mobile app. [1]: https://riot.im https://riot.im
shadowgovt 7y ago
IRC's protocol actually makes that challenging; it's chatty and wants a persistent network connection. Mobile devices minimize battery life by minimizing messages per second and only keeping network connections live when necessary.

null4bl3 7y ago

Use a protocol, not a service

shadowgovt 7y ago
Protocols tend to be a good first step, but they're extremely vulnerable to abuse without something larger working atop them. Email is a protocol. Implementation is a practical nightmare because of bad actors. Something to control bad actors is vital to any communications system, regardless of whether you classify it as "service" or "protocol."

dvasdekis 7y ago

I'm amazed that nobody's recommended Aether[1] as an alternative yet. It's fully distributed, privacy-centric and FOSS, with no infrastructure hosting required. The downside is a heavy client, with slower posts (think 1-5 minutes before you see a reply), as posts are distributed on a DHT (like bittorrent). It won't replace Discord for gamer chat, but for FOSS projects with small communities and privacy-minded proponents, it should fit needs nicely. [1] https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/

beders 7y ago
"with no infrastructure hosting required." " as posts are distributed on a DHT (like bittorrent)." Someone's gotta run the trackers.
- dvasdekis 7y ago
  Nope, DHT functions as a distributed tracker here

wackget 7y ago

30 captchas just because you're browsing via Tor, a VPN, or a proxy? How is that remotely acceptable? There really should be some kind of law against ludicrous shit like that. People will say "Discord is a private service and nobody's forcing you to use it" but reality is not as black and white as that. For example, what if your employer invites you to a meeting using a privacy-abusing service like Discord or Google Hangouts? Are you going to risk telling your employer that you're not joining an important meeting because you don't want to use a service without your VPN? What if some important club/charity/etc. has its members in a Discord group? These services blur the lines between private enterprise and social utility. Like Facebook, services offering "mass interaction" or whatever should be subject to much stronger privacy laws. The current state of things can't continue.

soapboxrocket 7y ago
> Are you going to risk telling your employer that you're not joining an important meeting because you don't want to use a service without your VPN? What if some important club/charity/etc. has its members in a Discord group? I'm not going to risk losing my employment, but I'm going to tell them I have a problem using the service without a VPN. If they are willing to fire you for raising privacy concerns then you should have concerns over the culture. Plus most companies I've worked for always want the VPN connected when you are off their network.
beders 7y ago
I hate to break it to you: You don't have privacy on the internet. If Discord was chosen by your employer, running on employer-provided laptops, yes, you need to use it. You can certainly call out their questionable ToS to your IT department. It's not a public "social utility". It is a service run by a private company with their specific ToS. I'm getting so frustrated about people not understanding that YOU ARE THE PRODUCT - in many cases like Discord. You will be monitored, your clicks will be recorded, heck you have NO guarantee that the Open Source version they might have is the code RUNNING on their servers. Even if a company claims they can't read your messages or never will: You can't trust it. Ever. Someone's gotta pay the Ramen.

nemild 7y ago

This last came up for OSS and Slack (e.g., "Please don't use Slack for FOSS")[1][2]. I took some time to reflect on why OSS wasn't the default for these messaging tools, rather than proprietary alternatives — and what it would take to make more users use OSS alternatives: > As Slack has continued to grow, open source developers have had lengthy debates about using it rather than IRC. For some, the fact that Slack is closed source and a walled garden makes it unsuitable when building projects that are open. > I’ll take a different approach: in the age of software, why is open software not more competitive for many products used by non-engineers and what can be done? What Open Source Can Learn From Slack https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html ------- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136

hitpointdrew 7y ago
There are other choices besides Slack and IRC. Setting up Mattermost on a VPS isn't hard. https://mattermost.org/licensing/ https://mattermost.org/licensing/
- Avamander 7y ago
  Or just Matrix.
- FalconSensei 7y ago
  Still harder than Slack, right?
  - andrewzah 7y ago
    How is slack any better than discord? Both roll out stupid (and forced) updates, and slack doesn't even let me browse kinda old history if the owner doesn't pay for it. [*4] Not to mention the search is relatively terrible anyway. The main thing that worries me about is discord is their revenue model... I just don't see how they're making money, and they keep on raising money. There are a few good alternatives like zulip [0], matrix [1], discourse [2], Rocket Chat [3], or just plain old irc. Although discourse isn't really a chat application but more of a open source forum software. [0]: https://github.com/zulip https://github.com/zulip [1]: https://www.matrix.org/ https://www.matrix.org/ [2]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse [3]: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ [4]: You can get around this by messaging relevant information to yourself. Or just saving things locally, like a weirdo.

matsemann 7y ago

I agree that Discord and Slack has some bad sides, but for kinda opposite reasons than the author. There are so many discussions, QAs, tips&tricks etc. shared on these chat rooms, that are impossible to find for those not a part of it. If it was discussed in a public forum somewhere, it would pop up in a search engine. I may have a problem with tool X and google for a solution, but since the discussion happened in some closed Discord server I will never find the solution someone else there has posted. So kinda the opposite of the author's point about privacy: I prefer everything to be open and accessible. Hiding this stuff hampers the adoption without people realizing. I don't join a discord for everything I use, and often I'm not even aware that it exists. An example I had a few weeks ago: Elm package repo died so I got some weird errors when building my project. Apparently lots of people were aware and knew about the problem and the status. But it was discussed in some Elm slack (I think), so for me not a member there I had no idea what was going on and couldn't find anything about it.

sneak 7y ago
Private things, like DMs and user IP/location, should remain private. Teams using Discord force their team participants to share this information with Discord to participate, who can then share it with whomever they want, with no legal recourse if they harm you as a result. Public things, like discussion and documentation, should be open and available. Teams using Discord have outsourced to Discord the decision of who is allowed to even read information that should be public. People who don’t ID themselves to Discord and agree to not sue them are prohibited from reading. It fails on both counts.

anonsivalley652 7y ago

Exactly. Popularity means nothing. Options: - Signal, Wire (maybe) - e2e cloud - XMPP-based server - Aenigma[0] - e2e self-hosted XMPP based on ejabberd, preferably in Iceland, Greenland or someplace out-of-reach of regimes unfriendly to human rights client - Jitsi - multiplatform SIP and XMPP app includes OTR for e2e - riot.im - e2e Discord-like replacement (of unknown-to-me construction) - i2p - decentralized garlic routing with multiple services additionally: VPN - self-hosted WireGuard on an anonymous cryptoc-paid VPS [0] https://github.com/openspace42/aenigma https://github.com/openspace42/aenigma

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

drummer 7y ago

This article was excellent. Best quote: "John Gilmore, one of the founders of the EFF, once famously wrote, “The ‘net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”" HN should take that to heart.

krapp 7y ago
>HN should take that to heart. Why? It's nonsense. If the `net really worked that way, no one would even be concerned about censorship on social media or Discord, because it wouldn't exist.
- samatman 7y ago
  This is somewhat like saying that, if the Net interpreted damage as damage and routed around it, there would never be service outages when undersea cables are accidentally cut. There's a lot of malicious damage out there, and the Internet has been steadily centralizing, de facto, for a couple decades now. It's an arms race, basically. I support the defensive side here, but victory is by no means assured.

shadowgovt 7y ago

This particular paragraph is strangely under-informed in an otherwise-good article. """ Many people in the free software movement find censorship in general to be abhorrent. (That’s one very good reason, for example, why emails you receive that might be spam go into a special folder, instead of being silently deleted without you having a option to choose to see them if you wish. Your email server could just delete them! The fact that it doesn’t was a deliberate design choice to avoid censorship.) """ Lots of people's email servers do, in fact, silently delete quite a bit of email, because the signal-noise ratio in the world of email spam is so bad it swamped the attention budget of users (and in some cases the storage budget of service providers) ages ago, even with a spam folder attached. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_(email) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_(email) https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/hotmail-silently-dropping-emails-from-work-domain/5c8d927c-533c-4c2a-8a61-28c4ce0cf600 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/ho... https://blog.paranoidpenguin.net/2015/01/outlook-com-is-silently-discarding-email-messages/ https://blog.paranoidpenguin.net/2015/01/outlook-com-is-sile... http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsp/article.php/3511691/Spam-Fighting-To-Bounce-or-Not-to-Bounce.htm http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsp/article.php/...

lwb 7y ago
Yeah I don't understand that argument -- how could silently deleting emails enable censorship? I guess the email server could censor emails by silently deleting them? If so the fact that it's not in the protocol certainly wouldn't stop the censor...
- FalconSensei 7y ago
  If there's no way for people to access those emails (as they were silently deleted), it's basically censorship, or am I wrong?
  - sneak 7y ago
    Correct. Censorship is a tool, it is not inherently good or bad. You want your email server to censor all entirely-obviously-over-the-top spam messages, for example (e.g. SA score >20). Most people want Facebook and Discord et al to censor spam postings. However, when censorship veers from basic utility into editorializing (e.g. Facebook and Instagram's algorithmic prioritization/deprioritization in user feeds, Discord banning the legal and regulation-compliant /r/guns subreddit's Discord, or Facebook banning posts with male nipples, or Youtube banning instructional/educational videos about computer security, or Apple and the Taiwanese flag, or Gmail spam-foldering emails from smaller email providers not part of the deliverability cartel, or a million other examples), then it becomes a social issue and a potential problem that we need to address. Email that is not 100% not-a-false-positive should never be silently trashed.

shadowgovt 7y ago

I very much appreciate the author's intellectual honesty at the end of the article, where they note that one won't be able to find a drop-in replacement for Discord (but they do note one can build a solution from several not-quite-there alternatives).

shadowgovt 7y ago

It's weird that the author is surprised that the system kicked them off for signing up for a new Discord account and immediately sending the same message to three people via DM. That's the base vanilla behavior template for a pornbot.

sneak 7y ago
Yeah, which indicates what a terrible false-positive this is. It's like their spam detection is just pattern/behavior based, and entirely unintelligent, censoring even authorized users doing normal things in projects they participate in.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  I wouldn't call it a terrible false-positive. The Bayesian estimate on this behavior is that it's far more likely to come from a porn-bot than a legitimate use case. (Arguably, the use-case in question isn't even what the service would consider "legitimate;" user was trying to tickle the tiger's tail on purpose. If one doesn't want to get kicked off like a porn-bot, it's not hard to avoid acting like a porn-bot).

tbyehl 7y ago

Author misses two important points: 1. I'm not going to self-host any of that stuff for my own projects, nor am I willing to pay for an alternative SaaS that a privacy-extremist finds less objectionable. 2. Few projects are important enough to me to sign up to use their weird self-hosted or non-mainstream-SaaS solutions. Discord wins for the same reasons that GitHub wins, that Sourceforge used to win, and for the same reasons that no upstart projects are standing up their own Trac or Bugzilla servers any more. Insert "Old Man Yelling at Clouds" meme.

beders 7y ago

"Their spying extends to every single message sent and received by anyone, including direct messages betweeen users." It's not spying if it is in their Terms of Service. Full of hyperbole. Yes, common sense SHOULD tell you: If you are using a free service such as this that is not free to operate, then YOU are the product. And you will be marketed to and you will not have privacy. Get over it.

paulcarroty 7y ago

https://sneak.berlin/s/2020/20200218.discord/tracking.png https://sneak.berlin/s/2020/20200218.discord/tracking.png Remembered me the Win10 installer settings :)

Razengan 7y ago

We need an improved IRC protocol and modern open-source clients, now more than ever. Just make a cute, free client and people won't care about the underlying tech. Most of the better IRC clients throughout history have been paid, but when Microsoft Comic Chat was bundled with Windows, IRC got an influx of tons of new users, in an era with generally fewer computer-literate people than today. That kind of resurgence can be repeated today if somebody can make a free IRC client on par with Discord's functionality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

rs23296008n1 7y ago

I'm not even sure its suitable for gaming based on the criteria from the article. We've set the bar lower each year for what is acceptable service operator behavior. Why should gaming throw away privacy and other basics? Is it impossible to respect simple privacy while providing gaming communications? I don't think so. Why is discord so delighting in logging everything? Who knows? One low effort answer is: To sell it. Privacy is a commodity that can be sold. And yes, I use discord for all sorts of purposes. Hmmm. Might need to rethink things. What alternatives exist? Signal? The big problem is the ability to create a group chat for text, voice, multimedia sharing, eg images, as part of that chat.

kazinator 7y ago

This repeats a lot of what Stallman has already written is "bad about" Discord: https://stallman.org/discord.html https://stallman.org/discord.html

numpad0 7y ago

Value Discord had over Slack was single account rather than per-instance in Slack(you register a new account over and over for each project admin you work with with Slack), and one fact people be skeptical of competitor is "friction" as discussed here of account creation. Identity is also a problem for lots of Twitter users who rely online identities to it because Twitter the company loves to destructively refresh userbases. So for civil rights perspective there should be single account database, THE Civil Registry of Internet that let you tie, link-unlink, manage accounts. A face-book in modern term but not necessarily in your real name or for always fully disclosing your genitals. What OAuth realized for a brief moment. One of the oldest core function of a nation, and we need it. Well that used to be my billionaire dream idea for this quarter and there it goes...

unicornporn 7y ago

It amazes me that there's not a single word about Matrix/Riot.im in this submission or the blog post itself. If you want to resist control over your communications medium, a federated system seems like a no-brainier. And yes, the E2EE is there if/when you need it.