5 ms·

Only if your friend group tolerates closed-source messaging. Discord in particular is very unfriendly to anonymization, requiring a phone number to sign up.

throwawayboise 4y ago
Anonymous friends. An interesting concept.
- sweetbitter 4y ago
  Pseudonymous rather than anonymous, generally. And it can work better than you'd think, depending on how you've met! One interesting facet of how internet relationships are formed is that certain phases of those friendships might happen in different orders than they might in the physical realm- for example, on a rule-less gameserver that I used to play on (think literally 4chan in game form with a very old persistent map), the users would tend to go through trust first, and then getting to know each other later. This is efficient due to the lack of consequences you deal with for most things online, since if someone breaks that trust you will just find ones who won't. In the case of that particular gameserver, I've seen groups of like a dozen people capable of sharing even their account credentials to various things without having much fear, and this kind of thing really speaks volumes IMO. A number of people I've met in this way (chatrooms, games, etc) I've actually come to work on real projects together with. Though at this point, considering how comfortable we are giving info about ourselves, I suppose the pseudonymity somewhat lifts itself away over time.
thorncorona 4y ago
I think that for the overwhelming majority of people, whether the messaging platform is closed source is not a consideration. Even among the tech community.
holler 4y ago
Join Sqwok instead! (https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im)
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
> Discord in particular is very unfriendly to anonymization, requiring a phone number to sign up. IMO, this is a Good Thing because it significantly reduces spam. It's not like your phone number appears on your profile.

throwawayboise 4y ago

Anonymous friends. An interesting concept.

sweetbitter 4y ago
Pseudonymous rather than anonymous, generally. And it can work better than you'd think, depending on how you've met! One interesting facet of how internet relationships are formed is that certain phases of those friendships might happen in different orders than they might in the physical realm- for example, on a rule-less gameserver that I used to play on (think literally 4chan in game form with a very old persistent map), the users would tend to go through trust first, and then getting to know each other later. This is efficient due to the lack of consequences you deal with for most things online, since if someone breaks that trust you will just find ones who won't. In the case of that particular gameserver, I've seen groups of like a dozen people capable of sharing even their account credentials to various things without having much fear, and this kind of thing really speaks volumes IMO. A number of people I've met in this way (chatrooms, games, etc) I've actually come to work on real projects together with. Though at this point, considering how comfortable we are giving info about ourselves, I suppose the pseudonymity somewhat lifts itself away over time.

thorncorona 4y ago

I think that for the overwhelming majority of people, whether the messaging platform is closed source is not a consideration. Even among the tech community.

holler 4y ago

Join Sqwok instead! (https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im)

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago

> Discord in particular is very unfriendly to anonymization, requiring a phone number to sign up. IMO, this is a Good Thing because it significantly reduces spam. It's not like your phone number appears on your profile.