Especially since there is already a lemmy.world announcement community..

IMO that's being too fanatic. I love FOSS, but you don't have to use FOSS for absolutely everything. Making a FOSS product does not mean you need to use FOSS for everything. And sometimes the closed source options are simply the best. Eg, GitHub and Discord are widely considered the best options in their field.

Also, at least before Twitter became such a shitty alt-right shit hole, many FOSS products did have twitter accounts! That's just part of promoting your product and providing an alternative place to contact and discuss. Eg, when Reddit went down, I'd usually check their twitter to get updates on it.

I don't hate Discord, but I do hate that they seem to require my phone number. I tried joining Discord over a year ago. Upon first log in they claimed that there was suspicious activity that required me to verify the account by giving them my phone number. This was from a computer, I never even visited the site on my phone let alone use the mobile app. I gave up and forgot about until a few months ago and decided to try again. They still wanted my phone number, email wasn't good enough. I contacted their support email and was told that there was no other option but to provide a phone number and that they couldn't override it. So I told them to delete my account and that I would never use their service. It took two weeks for them to do it.

There are very few situations in which an app needs my phone number in my eyes. And a chat application is not one of them. Just like I refused to use the official Reddit app because it wanted access to my contacts and location. I am not a super privacy nut, but the whole hog approach of gathering my info is not acceptable. I would rather pay for the service. I would have paid for Reddit if they had gone that route rather than dropping 3rd Party apps. Instead I'm on Lemmy.

So fucking hell yes, this again.

There are alternatives to Discord.

Yeah I'm here because I like the alternative to Reddit's bullshit.

I couldn't care less about Foss. I mean it's cool, but it's not why I'm here.

Not saying I agree here, because I don't, but I think the idea is that lemmy.world is down so much that they wanted a stable platform for meta stuff.

I might be more sympathetic to that idea if they made announcements on the Discord and on Lemmy at as close to the same time as possible, but they don't.

To get the privacy benefits wouldn't you need to forego bridges?

Uh He never said it has to be self-hosted though, so this already sounds like a strawman argument. Only one who has mentioned self hosting in this thread is you.

People want something that is secure and respects privacy, they could simply use the Matrix channel, or create their own Matrix space specific to lemmy.world , both of these would be better options for the users than to try and get them to use Discord which is a proprietary corporate service that is not only prone to security problems but also has some serious privacy concerns due to being corporate owned.

How they monetize is unknown, but they are big and well funded.

I keep my workstation behind a whitelist firewall. It is a pain, but this means I have a device that filters all network traffic and only lets websites I have added to the list to transmit and receive messages. So like, if I download something sketchy or accidentally write some buggy code, it won't have internet access to unapproved locations.

All legitimate commercial websites have their human readable web address. So on my whitelist, I can add Lemmy.world:443 and it will allow connections to Lemmy over port 443 aka https.

Discord doesn't do anything conventional like this. If you try to connect to discord with a whitelist firewall, and look at the blocked connection logs, all you will see are random raw IP addresses. This alone is super weird. Then you will find these addresses are trying to connect to odd ports with no documentation about what they are used for or the protocol. Discord does not provide any details whatsoever that I could find.

Okay so a few super weird connections on super sketchy ports, with no idea what they are doing, and no documentation. Hmmm. But it gets worse. I can jot down some notes for a couple of random raw IP addresses. At this point I really don't like it, but might just grumble past it like just before reddit died. But no, trying to connect to discord after punching these holes, lead to two more random raw IP addresses and different ports, and after that it happened again. Now I'm at 6 random undocumented holes in a firewall, and it still doesn't work and is trying for more. Fuck that bullshit. Reading their terms agreement is basically legalese for you have no rights to anything. It is totally insane that people just run this shit and don't take 5 minutes to ask where is the money exchanging hands to fund this. Who knows, maybe it is legitimate. I fully expect to hear about it in the news one day, and I expect this one to be a giant nuclear bombshell when it happens. I keep popcorn reserves on standby.