Idk about them, but it's a centralized, locked-down service that absorbs and holds information and data hostage like tomorrow.
As someone who's trying to completely avoid Discord, it's quite frustrating how many communities and projects will put important information in their Discords, and nowhere else. You have to have an account to see it, and it also isn't searchable in a search engine. It is actually quite terrible for pretty much everyone.
Element/Matrix lets you peek into public chats and servers/spaces without an account, so it can definitely be done. They won't do it though, because they gotta make you feel dat FOMO lol.
I can acknowledge all that and still say fuck discord. I never mentioned herding everyone over, I just explained why I think it's a parasite and why I have a strong disliking towards it.
While the community is often what is providing the information, one person or group is the one creating and distributing the Discord server. You can't have an entire community create a Discord server; one person has to do that, and it's most often the project maintainers. I was saying that the people creating the Discord servers should also create Matrix spaces and bridge the two together.
Don't need the majority. The majority is not even interested in these communities. The ones that are, are likely proponents of FOSS themselves and should (in theory) switch over.
Matrix is a better platform for realtime communication, but it has the same issue with needing an account and being difficult to search. Any discussions that take place on Discord or Matrix will be fleeting, as it prioritizes only the most recent discussion in the chat. Thus making long form discussions about particular topics impossible.
All technical discussions should be archived on a searchable forum. If you are using a source forge like GitHub and GitLab, then public discussions should take place there. There's no better place for discussions and questions about code than in the same place where the code is hosted itself. Platform integrations make it very easy to associate discussions to commits and merge requests.
While not ideal, even hosted forum platforms like Lemmy and Reddit are still better than using a chat client. If only to serve as a platform for broader public discussions and questions. People are more likely to already have a Lemmy or Reddit account than they are to have a GitHub or GitLab account.
Old electron version (meaning no screensharing on wayland), really buggy linux application, no encryption, poorly enforced rules and policies, micro transactions... Honestly, the linux version of discord is so terrible that I've been running it from a web browser for the last month or so, it's genuinely much better lol
Yesterday they enabled monitoring of all messages in their servers. It was obvious before, but now they are getting even more 1984.
Communities should migrate as soon as possible.
They were already scanning every message and DM for data tracking and whatnot to sell anyway, the only difference now is they're using it for TOS violations.
Privacy-wise nothing has changed, but actual consequences for actually bad things like racism / transphobia / csam / etc. is good. The only real issue is what if they decide that sharing a music file is piracy and now your account is penalized? What about uploading an NES ROM to a friend via a DM? Or sharing a link to an anime piracy website?
It's the kind of thing that has to be a balance between making sure users aren't doing stuff that is strictly against Discord's rules, but also about making a good-faith attempt to limit things that can get Discord themselves in trouble from companies who are becoming more and more aware that Discord has been used as a piracy-safe haven for quite some time now. (Like how they're limiting their "using discord upload URLs like your own CDN" issue last month.)