Discord has announced that it will begin requiring government-issued ID or face scans for use of large parts of its platform, extending beyond its original compliance with UK ID Verification Law and various Online Safety Acts around the world. What we found disturbing was what seems to be Discord’s strange web of connections, including links to the UK Government via partners, links to Peter Thiel and Palantir (and even Epstein) via venture capital-funded identity verification services, and Discord’s prior partner data breaches leading to concerns of the application’s ability to protect its users. This all comes at a time when Discord is rumored to be preparing for an IPO, which would be an awfully good time for Discord to suddenly know a whole lot more about its users – data that could be valuable for marketing or other disagreeable uses. At least as a positive, this has led to a rise of Discord alternatives.
The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.
Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.
It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.
It doesn’t even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D
For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514
it’s pedophiles all the way down 🤷♂️
I really hope that Matrix will be getting a large surge of support from this. I for one, will be making a contribution.
Hopefully revolt. Matrix sucks.
Do you actually mean Matrix or Element, the client? Cause I see a lot of people mixing these things up. Element does indeed suck as a Matrix Client but there’s been a sudden surge of quite nice clients.
didn’t that one rebrand to stoat, and then reveal they’re into slop coding?
Yeah they rebranded to stoat, idk about slop coding tbh.
There’s been talk in one of my main discord servers to move over to it though
Personally, I would like to see them both get new users. And Delta Chat, and XMPP, and other messengers too. Relying too heavily on one option is what got us into this mess.
I will check that one out! Currently evaluating a bunch of self hosting options right now
I prefer SimpleX chat
I’m already tired of hearing about this.
Well, on the positive side, you didn’t hear it this time… You’ve read it!
unless they used a screen reader
The future is going to suck for you
People today need a new scandal every 2 hours to even stay awake. Let’s get our shit together people. Ryoae is bored with today’s dystopia.
