Computer guy, occasional gamer, shitty music producer. Denver, CO
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.
But 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.
Also, how do I verify that this fork isn't malware wrapped in emulator code?
The code is open source, you read it all, ensure that you download exactly the code you read, and you compile it yourself. That’s the only way, in general, to accomplish this.