4 ms·

Going from signal to discord is crazy. How can you be OK with knowing that your personal voice chats are being monitored, recorded and sold to the next highest

Going from signal to discord is crazy. How can you be OK with knowing that your personal voice chats are being monitored, recorded and sold to the next highest bidder? How can it be so easy to choose convenience over that? Or is it that we have essentially given up and wanna actively take a part in mass surveillance?

augment_me 1y ago
The trade-off here is a social connections versus privacy/integrity. I can make the decision to use Signal or whatever, but as long as my whole social circle does not do the same, it wont be useful. And since when they do the swap, they have to convince their whole social circle to do the same, this becomes an impossible task. Either you have 10 different apps for different friends that lie on different places on the ethics of privacy, or you just take the easy way out and use what everyone uses.
sadeshmukh 1y ago
Voice chats are e2ee, so I'm not sure where you're making this information up from.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Not every decision is about opsec. If, for what you're doing, you want people to be alerted about your actions without your explicit say-so, then signal is not the tool for that job. Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  Discord probably has a choice — free or ‘private/paid and then die sooner’. Sooner as in before a spectacular exit.
- udev4096 1y ago
  That's the difference between people who give in and people who don't. This is not about "opsec", it's about exercising your fundamental right to privacy. Majority of people are reckless, the ones who take a second to think about it are not
  - jaytxng 1y ago
    but why can't the same person use both? i like discord since it has better group chat features that my groups use, but i also use signal for privacy with some of those group members. it's not like people have to "don't give in" all the time...
  - otoburb 1y ago
    I agree with you, but the trade off is real for most people. It's unfortunately a binary choice: 'privacy ⊕ social community', instead of 'privacy & social' community. It's interesting how opensource Zulip[1] hasn't been able to garner as much of a following or usage amongst the gamer crowd compared to Discord. [1] https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/
    - cptroot 1y ago
      These two apps are not comparable. My guess is that 90%+ of people using Discord are doing so for the low-latency voice conversations with optional screen/game sharing. Zulip does not have first-party voice chat. You would be more likely to get gamers to switch to a Teamspeak server.
- heresie-dabord 1y ago
  > Not every decision is about opsec. Until you find that you expected security and privacy and the developer/corporation/investors say, "too bad for you". This is the warning of Niemöller's famous paraprosdokian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
worldsayshi 1y ago
Is there some reasonable way to self host a (secure) voice chat channel?
- denkmoon 1y ago
  Teamspeak
- derkades 1y ago
  Mumble!
  - udev4096 1y ago
    Mumble is awesome but definitely difficult to properly configure. Especially the TLS certs for any reverse proxy won't work directly, there's a hacky way to make it work which I don't fully trust
    - MattJ100 1y ago
      I work on a project in this space, and the endless insistence of people that they have to run clearly non-web things through reverse proxies always amazes me :) Not everything is a web app, and it's trivial these days to obtain certificates, even without a proxy (certbot, etc.). Of course I understand that if you host a lot of web apps, having all web requests routed through a universal proxy is nice for various reasons. But platforms like Discord and such are complex beasts and use more technologies than HTTP(S).
      - udev4096 1y ago
        > I understand that if you host a lot of web apps The only reason. Plus, it's a single source of truth and configuring an auth with a reverse proxy is far easier
- c22 1y ago
  Depending on your definition of reasonable, you could just pipe the audio over SSH: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116919/redirect-sound-microphone-via-ssh-how-to-telephone-via-ssh https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116919/redirect-sou...
Harmon758 1y ago
Discord voice calls and channels do use E2EE now, as of last year: https://discord.com/blog/meet-dave-e2ee-for-audio-video https://discord.com/blog/meet-dave-e2ee-for-audio-video
- shaldengeki 1y ago
  I think it's important to clarify that it's just audio and video that are E2EE, not text messages themselves. (You may have meant this, but "channels" was a little ambiguous.)

augment_me 1y ago

The trade-off here is a social connections versus privacy/integrity. I can make the decision to use Signal or whatever, but as long as my whole social circle does not do the same, it wont be useful. And since when they do the swap, they have to convince their whole social circle to do the same, this becomes an impossible task. Either you have 10 different apps for different friends that lie on different places on the ethics of privacy, or you just take the easy way out and use what everyone uses.

sadeshmukh 1y ago

Voice chats are e2ee, so I'm not sure where you're making this information up from.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

Not every decision is about opsec. If, for what you're doing, you want people to be alerted about your actions without your explicit say-so, then signal is not the tool for that job. Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).

crossroadsguy 1y ago
Discord probably has a choice — free or ‘private/paid and then die sooner’. Sooner as in before a spectacular exit.
udev4096 1y ago
That's the difference between people who give in and people who don't. This is not about "opsec", it's about exercising your fundamental right to privacy. Majority of people are reckless, the ones who take a second to think about it are not
- jaytxng 1y ago
  but why can't the same person use both? i like discord since it has better group chat features that my groups use, but i also use signal for privacy with some of those group members. it's not like people have to "don't give in" all the time...
- otoburb 1y ago
  I agree with you, but the trade off is real for most people. It's unfortunately a binary choice: 'privacy ⊕ social community', instead of 'privacy & social' community. It's interesting how opensource Zulip[1] hasn't been able to garner as much of a following or usage amongst the gamer crowd compared to Discord. [1] https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/
  - cptroot 1y ago
    These two apps are not comparable. My guess is that 90%+ of people using Discord are doing so for the low-latency voice conversations with optional screen/game sharing. Zulip does not have first-party voice chat. You would be more likely to get gamers to switch to a Teamspeak server.
heresie-dabord 1y ago
> Not every decision is about opsec. Until you find that you expected security and privacy and the developer/corporation/investors say, "too bad for you". This is the warning of Niemöller's famous paraprosdokian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

worldsayshi 1y ago

Is there some reasonable way to self host a (secure) voice chat channel?

denkmoon 1y ago
Teamspeak
derkades 1y ago
Mumble!
- udev4096 1y ago
  Mumble is awesome but definitely difficult to properly configure. Especially the TLS certs for any reverse proxy won't work directly, there's a hacky way to make it work which I don't fully trust
  - MattJ100 1y ago
    I work on a project in this space, and the endless insistence of people that they have to run clearly non-web things through reverse proxies always amazes me :) Not everything is a web app, and it's trivial these days to obtain certificates, even without a proxy (certbot, etc.). Of course I understand that if you host a lot of web apps, having all web requests routed through a universal proxy is nice for various reasons. But platforms like Discord and such are complex beasts and use more technologies than HTTP(S).
    - udev4096 1y ago
      > I understand that if you host a lot of web apps The only reason. Plus, it's a single source of truth and configuring an auth with a reverse proxy is far easier
c22 1y ago
Depending on your definition of reasonable, you could just pipe the audio over SSH: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116919/redirect-sound-microphone-via-ssh-how-to-telephone-via-ssh https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116919/redirect-sou...

Harmon758 1y ago

Discord voice calls and channels do use E2EE now, as of last year: https://discord.com/blog/meet-dave-e2ee-for-audio-video https://discord.com/blog/meet-dave-e2ee-for-audio-video

shaldengeki 1y ago
I think it's important to clarify that it's just audio and video that are E2EE, not text messages themselves. (You may have meant this, but "channels" was a little ambiguous.)