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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Fucking hell, this again.
Listen, you people need to realize a lot of people are here on Lemmy because Reddit screwed them over, not because Lemmy is open source or less of a privacy issue or whatever your reasons for using it are.
So you hate Discord. That's fine, you're allowed to! But pitching a fit because everyone else doesn't hate it isn't gonna convince anyone to stop using it.
I don't hate Discord, but I do hate that they seem to require my phone number. I tried joining Discord over a year ago. Upon first log in they claimed that there was suspicious activity that required me to verify the account by giving them my phone number. This was from a computer, I never even visited the site on my phone let alone use the mobile app. I gave up and forgot about until a few months ago and decided to try again. They still wanted my phone number, email wasn't good enough. I contacted their support email and was told that there was no other option but to provide a phone number and that they couldn't override it. So I told them to delete my account and that I would never use their service. It took two weeks for them to do it.
There are very few situations in which an app needs my phone number in my eyes. And a chat application is not one of them. Just like I refused to use the official Reddit app because it wanted access to my contacts and location. I am not a super privacy nut, but the whole hog approach of gathering my info is not acceptable. I would rather pay for the service. I would have paid for Reddit if they had gone that route rather than dropping 3rd Party apps. Instead I'm on Lemmy.
So fucking hell yes, this again.
There are alternatives to Discord.
Everyone wants your phone number now because it's a decent approach to combating spammers. Note that I said decent, not perfect. It's relatively easy for a company to determine if a phone number is owned by a specific person vs. a voip company that enables spammers to use hundreds of new numbers, so now we're asking everyone for theirs. SMS is also used for the lowest form of multi factor authentication, so they get to claim that it's a security decision, not one for marketing, etc and because of network effects, we all have to choose to either go along or miss out.
Agree that it's super annoying and certainly not privacy-centric, but Discord is owned by Microsoft, what can we expect? Innovation?
Discord being owned by Microsoft, now that's news to me. I don't think that's a thing, at least not yet.
For some reason I was convinced they had sold out, but it looks like you're right, they're still independent for the time being. Thanks for the note!