To be honest I’m just not a big fan of live chat apps in general like Discord. I can see the appeal, but it’s just not for me.

The saccharine colors and emphasis on gamification of the online chat experience always was a little offputting to me personally.

But I always remember that my tastes are kind of the exact opposite…and very old . If I am going to use a chat application, I still prefer IRC using Irssi from a Linux terminal, which is old even by nerd standards.

All that said, I’d say if you ARE going to use pretty much ANY application for any purpose, to always consider what your data is being used for and to try your best to avoid it if you feasibly can.

Discord always struck me as particularly egregious in this regard as it’s kind of obvious the devs don’t care about their users to the point of abuse and I’ve never found forum/chat software to be so complicated and impressive that I don’t think it can be easily replicated… because it can. What makes most social applications good is not all the flash and fancy colors, it’s the community around it…so maybe don’t take that for granted and don’t abuse your users?

You’d think this would be especially apparent now with the recent events with Twitter and Reddit. But people generally turn a blind eye to corruption in favor of convenience and comfort …until they’re abused JUST enough.

Not to circle jerk us all too hard, but I think the reason I like the people on Federated platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy is because I have a good idea as to why they’re here, they don’t put up with abuse because they have too much self respective for that bullshit, and I, in turn, respect them for that.

Matrix is a protocol for secure communications.

This blog post is a good overview of the problems with Discord and what you can use instead.

I personally like the Element Client for Matrix, but there are others.

Btw, if you still need to use discord, but want it to be less privacy invasive, apply a filters list in ublock. The devs got around ublock in a hacky way, but at least it’s somewhat easy to get around.

Trafotin’s video covers this pretty well.

Always mention Jitsi as an alternative. Mention the problems with zoom. Same with Discord vs Matrix. Most won’t listen, but some will. This is a battle of millimeters, not kilometers.