Recently, I had the wonderful pleasure of deleting Discord once and for all in my life. Finally, I could rid myself of proprietary software once and for all. Just in time for their massive AI takeover anyways, as if there wasn’t a whole smorgasbord of reasons not to at this point. Now I have moved my IRL friends onto XMPP, and I can rest knowing I got my bases covered. Shoutouts to Victor for making an awesome script that lets you delete all your messages on your account (which Discord doesn’t do automatically). I will be sending a donation your way some time in the future, Victor.
Chances are if you are reading this, Discord is probably out of the picture for you as well. But, if not (and just to have some fun anyways), I’m just going to dump a bunch of useful articles here about why it’s bad and you shouldn’t use it.1
- The Chad Mumble vs The Virgin Discord or Why You Should Leave Discord
- Reasons not to use the Discord communications system - Richard Stallman
- Discord - Spyware Watchdog Article (mirror)
- Please don’t use Discord for FOSS projects - Drew DeVault (Archived)
- Let’s Reverse Engineer Discord - David Wells
- Why You Shouldn’t Trust Discord - Cadence
- The Discord of Discord™️ - Shy (mirror)
Looking for alternatives? Either check out the first article, or look at what the FSF uses personally. Or look at the article just for fun!
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Funnily enough, none of these articles even mention the infamous clause in the ToS about you not being able to sue Discord, or the aforementioned AI data harvesting, which were two big reasons for me personally. I’m aware that at this time, Discord says they aren’t using their own data for AI, but considering they tried to change their privacy policy quietly when the change was implemented; well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were just outright lying. Not like you can check the proprietary software anyways :p ↩︎