I have a lot of people, I'd consider friends, that I only communicate with through discord. If I lost my account, I'd likely never hear from them again. Kinda get it.
This is one of the bigger reasons I don't want to use social media controlled by a corporation, it means they can choose to cut me off from people at their discretion, which will probably be based on what is convenient and easy for them.
personally the $3 a month nitro is worth it for me, considering how much I use it. I know Lemmy hates anything capitalist but a coffee a month isnt that much
Personally, Discord has facilitated a long distance relationship with my now wife, and nearly ten years of weekly TTRPG games. I don't mind the cost because they cannot provide that service for free forever, and I think it's worth it for what I get out of it. The other benefits they add for paying are almost just bonuses to me after that.
that's true. however, you're gonna have a tough time finding something to run on there that isn't worse than discord by any reasonable metric.
like, buddy, i get it. i also selfhost. but let's not lie to ourselves. google drive is LIGHTYEARS ahead of collabora, matrix is a buggy mess, jellyfin -- okay, well jellyfin is actually unironically better than netflix, but that's assuming you have the technical chops to run a seedbox and the money to bulid a sufficiently beefy transcoding server (either that or put up with external video players, excessive bandwidth usage, and in some cases stuttering bc of software decoding), and you can either overlook the moral issues or buy everything on blu-ray, and ChatGPT and friends might suck total ass but they can still run circles around anything you can load into ollama.
this is also ignoring the fact that you would need the technical know-how to self-host, which as techies we tend to underestimate. is docker easy for us? yes. is it easy for joe random who may or may not have ever intentionally opened his browser devtools? no. plus there's still configuration files to think of. but even if you're using one of those easy vps services that does all that for you, you're still selfhosting a freaking chat platform. assuming you want to talk to anyone who isn't an LLM, you're going to have to either convince them to join your chat platform and then do moderation, or federate, in which case, what can you get from a single user instance that you can't get by joining someone else's instance and saving yourself a LOT of hassle?
And I'm not looking forwards to the effort it is going to take to get my friends to migrate away from discord. It was hard enough to get them on discord in the first place.
This is why people should be worried of using these massive services, luckily it was ‘only’ Discord (if this was your primary way to interact with friends, this can be a huge deal).
But imagine if it was your email account!
Getting a reputable provider, self hosting or using a decentralized option is paramount for your own sanity.
He had a telemedicine appointment for his son who had a problem with his penis. Dr asked him to send a close-up photo so he could diagnose the skin condition
So the guy takes the photo with his pixel phone and sends it
The phone automatically backs up the photo
Google's AI says it's child porn, his account is deleted and police are contacted
Police look into it and say "not porn, totally fine" but have to go to his house to tell him the was no problem because his phone was Google, his internet was Google fibre, his email was Gmail and his photo album was on Google and all that was irrevocably deleted
Currently having problems with GMail
I lost my old phone (2fA) and no device was logged in so i could not access steam and like everything that requires that old mail
And my phone provider or postal service is stupid because i could not get a replacement sim after multiple tries which normally works
Googles account recovery policy is basically:
2fA
recovery email
create a new account x.x
I think the recovery mail option only gets unlocked after 6? months inactivity because ~3 months ago i did not have the option
Now after requesting a recovery i still have to wait a full month before they maybe send me a password reset to my moms mail
But steam support was nice. Managed to get the account by providing a product key i used a few months ago and was lucky enough not to have thrown the physical card away
This made me thinking about Valve potentially banning my 19-years-old Steam account due to some error or a mistake 💀 I heard bad things about their customer support.
Same happened to me but with animal cruelty content or something. I tried to get the account back but turns out it was a "ban wave" so a lot of other people who got banned but were innocent were doing the same so discords services got overwhelmed by the appeals. Maybe they should have realized after that that this kinda banning is a horrible approach.
On this topic: I currently have installed on my phone and computer: slack, zoom, MSTeams, element, discord, Facebook messenger and signal to communicate in various projects and friends. What is this madness?!
I remember what a game changer Trillian was 20 years ago. Having AIM, MSN, and ICQ all in one app was so nice. I have yet to find anything modern like that. I just checked and Trillian still exists but it appears to just be its own stand alone chat app now.
I created a Discord account so I could try Midjourney and my account got blocked within a few hours. I use a VPN most of the time, can't remember if I was with Discord so might have had the same IP as another user. Didn't bother to set up another account.
I have a Discord but I hear a lot about how easily you can get banned, largely on the whims of the people running a single server, so I've always been a bit reluctant to use it.
Also, I find it genuinely disturbing how much information all these companies have about you and your stuff.
Given their reputation, you should question if it’s actually due to CP, or some other kind of possible political crackdown. I wouldn’t assume either way.
Usually when it looks like these people are doing their jobs for once, it turns out to be something in line with their previous shit.
So basically if you hate a community, you just gotta go there and post some no-no pics, and everything gets nuked? Great, I'm sure nobody will abuse this.
I'm legitimately paranoid about this scenario, especially since I'm in a couple of ERP servers, and I was friends with ReploidRevo.. yes THAT ReploidRevo, and never knew about what he did until after his downfall went viral. (Shocked the Hell out of me because he seemed so normal and on the up and up)
i hate discord so much my first discord account got permabanned because the owner of a server i was in went nuts and doxxed 8 year olds and my second account i got locked out for a year because they thought i was a bot and i couldnt use my phone number to verify because it was already in use on my first account then when i finally got in it had a 6 month ban because a server i was in got raided by racists that said slurs
I still don’t understand the point of discord. I just deleted the app cause it was sooooo boring. The only social media I have is a perma banned reddit account (a few), snapchat (which I never use anymore as I have grown out of it and it has turned to absolute shit) and the lemmsters. Feeling good
Whats the draw of discord? I don't get why people go on there. It's boring af and you gotta talk with people while you play video games. I'll go on if I absolutely have to for a group, but I avoid if I can.
Being able to enter and sit inside a call where your friends can see that a call is active and who is in call is a really nice feature. It completely negates having to ping a whole group that may or may not be available like with Skype.
Chat plus streaming as a freemium service that has its hooks in with the networking effect.
Probably the biggest draw of Discord is how many people use Discord. But past that, it fills a bunch of real time social media roles well.
As a case in point, I'm in a game of Pathfinder Kingmaker with friends, and Discord does a good job of letting players join virtually, sharing screens, rolling dice, keeping a log of the different chats, pinning the links to the Kingdom management files, and providing a search function to find historical info.