Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
Why use Element for matrix?
From what I can tell it collets and links data to you: Location, identifiers and contact information.
How is that private or better than Signal?
Because people don’t use discord for privacy. They use it for gaming, voice chat, communities and streaming.
@Nikelui is 100% right: a chat room may be private, but it’s not secure. Even in an encrypted room, every additional person you add reduces your security. I’m sure there’s some paper out there that studies this, and that the graph of # of members vs security is an inverse power ratio.
If it’s a public chat, there is no security.
However, with Matrix, if you run your own server and restrict access to your friends, at least you can be fairly certain your chat room isn’t being used to train an LLM, or to harvest information about you for advertising.
There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.
Public chats are not my concern. That’s information I’m putting out there willingly.
Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.
Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?
I don’t know. I don’t use Element; I wasn’t aware it requested location service access. I switched to FluffyChat ages ago; it only asks for notification.
But that’s just for group chat. I’ve been using Jami lately, and it does ask for location access; that’s because it has a “share location” feature, that - if you use it - shows a little map with your location to the person you’re sharing with. Maybe Element has implemented something similar?
This is what shows up when I check Element. Every other Federated app that I use doesn’t collect any information. Voyager, Pixelfed, Peertube, Mastodon all come up with “No data collected”
Huh. I just checked Fluffy, and it asks for location, camera, and phone. I just denied it everything but notifications, so VOIP won’t work, but all I use it for is chat rooms anyway.
In any case, it doesn’t look any better than Element, in that respect.
Does it? On Android, it never asked me to grant location permission unless I try to share my location to another user. Similar with contacts and calendar, it’s working perfectly fine without them. Where exactly does it link those identifiers and with what?
This is what shows up when I check Element. Every other Federated app that I use doesn’t collect any information. Voyager, Pixelfed, Peertube, Mastodon all come up with “No data collected”
The Element web client will break encryption when you clear your browser data.
Does it? I think it logs you out and after logging in again, you need to provide your encryption key/verify with other device again in order to access the history. Or wdym with breaking?
Signal is centralized and require a phone number to register, it’s not private at all.
That’s bullshit.
A) Privacy =/= anonymity
B) They have usernames and the option to hide your number from searches for those interested.
C) Signal has absolutely no way of accessing any of your information: https://signal.org/bigbrother/ They publish all their subpoenas and there is no information that are able to collect. It’s all encrypted.
D) Phone numbers are an easy way onboard the normies and Meta addicts that don’t value privacy.
Your phone number is tied to your identity, there are no reasons to ask it to begin with.