[brendyn]

It's interesting seeing a post about censorship in China on the front page with many concerned HN posters, while under it is a post about Discord gaining many users where none of the comments point out the most important thing:

Discord is proprietary software, meaning users have no practical capability, or legal right, to study, modify, or share the code, and it is a centralized service. Thus Discord can be used for censorship and surveillance at a moments notice, and the only power people have is to not use it. Such large software systems take a lot of time and effort to create. Network effects and motivated complacency make it unrealistic to simply wait until something bad happens before switching to a freedom respecting software.

Discord should be rejected outright simply for being proprietary, but software that is used for communications and forming communities have even stronger reasons not to be locked down and controlled by any one entity.

[taohansen]

try bringing up this argument with any of the reddit communities for meditation, Linux, or communities you'd expect to make ethically informed choices about the software they use and support. you will not be well-received.

for whatever reason, people have these shield-walls up against criticism of the software they use every day. it points to a double-think that allows people to engage in ethical practices (meditation) while blissfully continuing to neglect the activity of living ethics (which is the only true meditation). if one doesn't inform the other, you're doing it wrong.

it's deeply troubling.

[herbst]

I mod a community around anonymity and have to explain exactly this at least once a month. There is no reasonable way we could trust such a software for anything related to privacy, anonymity or free speech.

[falcolas]

This bothers me too, especially since many communities require you to integrate it with other platforms too. Want access to N channel? Connect to Patreon to prove you contribute. So many integrations, so many communities controlled by a single entity. Oiy.

And this doesn’t even touch on the attention cost... it gets stupidly demanding of your attention with all the @ mention options. If you’re part of more than one community, you had best prepare to be quite liberal with the mute feature.

[AlphaSite]

The front end is well document, so you can trivially implement a client.

[cuckcuckspruce]

Which doesn't matter if your are banned from the network. Changing clients or implementing alternate clients won't fix that.

[philtar]

Your opinion should be rejected outright for offering no alternatives.

[driminicus]

Start using riot.im it's Foss, and federated (with a very cool end to end encryption I might add).

If you prefer a more classical voice chat use mumble.

[SauciestGNU]

Matrix (the protocol riot uses) includes voice and video, and riot.im supports both. I run a matrix server for some friends and we like it a lot, though some of us still prefer IRC.

[atc]

Discord won many people over simply because it was such well written software, and that continues today.

Its proprietary nature has always concerned me too, as well as what they're doing with the data (i.e. assume they're reading & listening to everything).

What they mustn't do is forget how quickly they grew and the underlying concept that enabled it: people will flock to different messaging platforms quite easily (Teamspeak to Discord is a great example) which means Discord can lose just as quickly as it won.

[merb]

I think the biggest reason is/was because it is free (Costs no Money). Not because it is/was well written. Nobody cares if it is well written... (at least outside the hn spectrum)

[zaarn]

Everyone cares it was well written, otherwise people would be using Skype, which is also Cost Free (sans some features) or one of the P2P chat apps (bitmessage), but nobody is doing that.