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blog/posts/discord/index.html

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     <p>The centralized nature of Discord, the platform, means that it, in its entirety, is inherently vulnerable to anything that happens with Discord, the company. Any change the company decides to make is universal. If the company shuts down, the platform goes with it. If the admins at Discord don't like what you're doing, they can unilaterally prevent you from using their platform at all.</p>
     <p>This ties pretty closely into the whole VC-funded thing - Discord, the platform, is fundamentally subject to the whims of Discord, the company's investors. I guarantee you that's why they changed the username system: the corporate big wigs providing the funding got confused by Discord's unique (and very good) username system and decided it would be better if it was more like Twitter, so Discord made it more like Twitter.</p>
     <p>That's really the core of the issue here: being centralized means that Discord can easily suffer the same fate as Twitter. Some incompetent nutcase with more money than the entire planet's collective pool of sense could buy it out and destroy it, or the current owners could just make some boneheaded decision and do the same. A decentralized platform, running on a common open protocol, is much less vulnerable to the antics of the Elon Musks and u/spez's of the world.</p>
-    <p>[UPDATE 2023-08-24] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/22/22345792/microsoft-discord-acquisition-report-10-billion">Speak of the devil...</a></p>
     <h3>The Privacy Problem</h3>
     <p>This issue isn't really inherently connected to the others - a lack of good privacy doesn't fundamentally doom a platform like the other two points - but I'm treating it as a third major issue because I feel it's extremely important and warrants consideration.</p>
     <p>If you value your privacy, Discord is an atrocious choice. Take it from <a href="https://tosdr.org/en/service/536">their own terms of service</a>. Anything you send on Discord, whether in a DM or a public guild (I'm not calling them "servers"), is <strong>not encrypted</strong>, meaning it can be accessed and read by Discord staff, as well as any hackers that manage to access their systems or any law enforcement entities that might demand it. Discord is not even trying to pretend to be private. I'm not convinced it's something they ever thought about.</p>
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       <li><a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord">Spyware Watchdog - Discord</a></li>
       <li><a href="https://moth.monster/blog/fediverse/">A different explanation of federation in the context of federated social media</a></li>
       <li><a href="https://proton.me/blog/whatsapp-alternatives">A privacy-focused comparison of messenger apps</a></li>
-      <li><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/22/22345792/microsoft-discord-acquisition-report-10-billion">The Verge: Microsoft in talks with Discord over $10 billion-plus acquisition: report</a></li>
     </ul>
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       <img src="discord-no-way-2.gif" />