will
1 year ago
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<meta charset="utf-8">
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<title>So You No Longer Trust Your Favorite Chat App</title>
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<h1>blog</h1>
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<h2 id="caption">So You No Longer Trust Your Favorite Chat App</h2>
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<a href="../../../">home</a>
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<a href="../../">blog</a>
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<p>Just once I'd like to write about something other than fixing tech problems.</p>
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<p>So, it seems we're having yet another wave of people expressing distrust in Discord over some recent feature or administrative action or policy change or other, only to, for the most part, not actually do jack shit about it. Did you people not learn from Twitter?</p>
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<p>Anyway, apparently this time it's over Discord retracting promises in their privacy policy not to record your calls and then announcing a bunch of AI features. This and all the billion other reasons to never ever trust Discord are <a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord">another article</a>, though. I've been less than enthused about using Discord for a while now, but this event in particular was enough to get some of my friends who use Discord talking about switching away, and you bet your ass I was eager to help them pick a replacement.</p>
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<p>I wanted to present as many potential options as possible, because while I know where my preferences lie, I don't know what my friends want and what they're willing to tolerate in their software. In my opinion, just about anything would be a step up from Discord, so it's mostly a matter of finding something that the particular brand of non-techie I associate myself with will agree with me about in that regard.</p>
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<p>To that end, I compiled and posted a list of every other chat app I'm aware of that I at least vaguely trust to be private, or at least transparent, with a list of pros, cons, features, privacy and security notes, and UX impressions for each in, ironically, a shared Discord <span title="I'm not fucking calling them servers.">guild</span>. That's not what I'm posting here, as it was very much a rough draft and full of conjecture as I hadn't actually used most of the options, but it was a start, and it did convince a couple of them to make accounts on an alternative.</p>
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<p>With this article I've taken that original rough draft and thrown it out completely. By the time you read this I will have at least tested everything I'm going to recommend, and hopefully received testimony from some more seasoned users as well. The hope here is to create a resource for anyone looking to abandon Discord and, ideally, take their social circles with them. Hopefully I can make it just a bit easier for you and your friends to choose the alternative that's right for you and finally escape to something better, even if you're not a turbo-nerd like me.</p>
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<p>So here's how this is gonna work. I'll start by listing each alternative with relevant links and a basic description of the platform and what makes it different from both Discord and the others, and then I'll lay out all the important points in a table for easy comparison, then conclude with some general advice for escaping Discord and, ideally, network effect platforms like it in general.</p>
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<h2>Your Options</h2>
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<h3>Discord</h3>
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<p>The incumbent. I'm including it here to give context for what we're comparing against. You already know about Discord, but it can't hurt to reiterate.</p>
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<p>Discord is a centralized, VC-funded, proprietary chat platform designed to appeal to large communities as well as small groups and marketed towards gamers. It's been compared to Slack and takes aesthetic cues from IRC, though provides a much better user experience. It boasts a huge feature set including extensive moderation tools, profile customization, integration with other platforms, custom emotes and stickers, reactions, something it calls "rich presence", and the best damn audio and video calling experience around. It also has literally no privacy features, opting instead for a nice long track record of violating user trust.</p>
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<ul>
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<li class="pro">Tons of features</li>
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<li class="pro">Extremely popular</li>
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<li class="pro">Unparalelled video calling experience and quality</li>
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<li class="pro">Very polished UX</li>
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<li class="ehh">Closed-source</li>
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<li class="ehh">For-profit</li>
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<li class="con">No encryption, even in DMs</li>
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<li class="con">Atrocious terms of service and privacy policy</li>
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<li class="con">Altering the default client or using a different one is a direct breach of TOS</li>
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</ul>
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<h3>Guilded</h3>
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<p>ROFL. Just kidding. Guilded is owned by the Roblox corporation, and I hopefully don't need to <a href="https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ">explain</a> why you <a href="https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY">shouldn't</a> trust like that. I'm only mentioning Guilded at all to try to explicitly steer people away from it. Moving on.</p>
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<h3>Revolt</h3>
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<p><a href="https://revolt.chat/">revolt.chat</a><br><a href="https://trello.com/b/4e2O7tge/roadmap">Roadmap</a><br><a href="https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/3/views/1">Issue tracker</a></p>
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<p>Revolt is a centralized, open-source chat platform that aims to be a drop-in replacement for Discord. It's immature and very much still in an alpha state, but I think it shows significant promise. It's missing some important stuff, such as video calls and native mobile apps, but all that stuff's on the roadmap. Also on the roadmap is end-to-end encryption. They plan to implement it for both one-on-one and group DMs, but not guilds.</p>
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<ul>
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<li class="pro">Similar to Discord</li>
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<li class="pro">Plenty of customization features</li>
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<li class="pro">Open-source</li>
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<li class="ehh">Incomplete and under heavy development</li>
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<li class="ehh">No end-to-end encryption, yet</li>
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<li class="con">Poor call quality</li>
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<li class="con">No video calling</li>
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<li class="con">No native mobile apps</li>
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<li class="con">End-to-end encryption is not present nor planned for guilds</li>
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</ul>
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<h3>Matrix</h3>
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<p><a href="https://matrix.org">matrix.org</a><br><a href="https://element.io">element.io</a></p>
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<p>Matrix is a decentralized, federated open chat protocol and my personal favorite as a replacement for Discord.</p>
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