Grail (capitalised)Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit)
corytheboydBut Discord has cultivated a queer membership by serving a different need than those platforms: privacy.
Yeah, gonna stop reading right there. Discord is absolutely selling your data.
Discord became ubiquitous because it works well, and is free. Take VC money, run at loss, get tons of users, enshittify, die because something better becomes good enough. It’s just another one of those speed runs, which will happen over and over again until the end of humanity.
jarfilThe difference:
- Discord, Facebook/WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. are selling your data… to select customers.
- Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. are giving your data for free… to everyone.
Like, if there was a stalker wanting to attack you in particular… neither is good, but one is worse than the other.
Right, you do have to understand that either way, if you put something on the public internet is gone.
I don’t want a company to sell my data, making money off of me, then having the audacity to ask me for MORE money on top (nitro). It feels gross.
I don’t mind sharing bits of myself online otherwise.
The owners of federated instances can also just start selling your data too at any point. And as you said, advertisers will also just scrape public data trivially. Basically, the internet and world is a terrible place.
Stuff gets deleted from the Internet all the time… other stuff goes viral and lasts for decades. YMMV
It seems to me like your threat model is different from OP’s, though. Worrying about ad blockers not being enough, is not the same as fearing for your life because someone might decide to track down where you are IRL.