We set up a bridge between the Lemmy.world General Matrix room and the Public-1 channel on the Lemmy World discord server yesterday. It’s not perfect as emoji reactions aren’t visible and some minor things like how it handles edited messages but other than that it seems to be working well.
Now people on both chat clients can interact with eachother!
Matrix has E2E encrypted chats with user controlled keys and open clients.
Discord doesn’t, at all, any of that.
Why should a random admin who can’t read your chats, be more trusted than a corporation which logs them all?.. well, for starters they can’t read, modify, datamine, profile, or leak, what they don’t have 🤷
They could use a corrupted version…
Also the risk of data loss, system failure, lack of maintenance…
If you host your own shit then yes go matrix why not.
If not discord is still better. Maybe one day they’il do shit, at this time this is not the case
This is why I asked “why don’t just use Reddit” in the first place.
While Reddit worked seamlessly for more than 15 years, it turned to shit within 1 year. The worst part is that we cannot easily switch to a different platform because Reddit is mainstream, and the alternatives are not appealing enough because there are not enough people. Isn’t it possible that we will experience the same thing with Discord?
Also, I really respect Lemmy.world’s decision. It’s not my job to interfere in internal affairs because I’m not a user or admin here. I just wanted to express my opinion, after all, that’s what the comment field is for, right? But not again, I will not comment on instance meta communities, as it supposed to be :)
Discord already “shares” data with third parties (has been doing it for years), has full control over your client, and doesn’t need to “corrupt” anything to already have access to read, erase, and modify everything.
Matrix servers can’t access encrypted content, no matter how “corrupted” they are. Data loss is on the user, you can keep a backup of anything… or not, your choice. System failure and lack of maintenance, are mitigated by identity servers being separate from the chat relay servers.
If you want to trade privacy, message integrity, and user non-supplantation, for some more system stability, then sure, go ahead and use Discord, WhatsApp, Messenger, or whatever (…actually, WhatsApp is slightly more secure than Discord).
It really depends of your activity.
If your country is dangerous or there is any kind of risk with what you do (journalist etc…) then I totally agree with you.
If it’s for a gaming community that just need to spam memes and a vocal channel, then you won’t convince anyone with these arguments because most people simply don’t care.
In this case there seem to be three activities: general chat, official announcements, and attack coordination.
The first makes sense to use the most popular option, the second benefits from source confirmed identities and decentralization, the third benefits from everyone’s confirmed identitites and decentralized encrypted chats.
In either case, no technical aspect makes Discord “better” (who cares if the “spam memes and vocal channel” fails and burns), at most the ability to send invite links to private channels without having to set up a bot, makes Discord a “calculated risk”.