Discord

Discord is a proprietary messaging service with audio and video chat options.

• Discord tries to take ownership of all the data you upload to the service, including your spoken and written word, in their ToS
• Discord tries to de-anonymise users
• There are people mining discord servers for PII:
  • Dis.cool, Help us fight Dis.cool

Like other closed-off chat apps, Discord is used to communicate valuable information like bug fixes, technical help guides and even life advice. However, you can't have a global search on Discord (and you probably also don't want to, because of the privacy issues). That means that lots of information is not searchable in the public internet and instead is separated into the Deep Web.

That means instead of sharing knowledge with the world, you're sharing this to a select group of people in an information silo. Since this is also not archived, all information is lost as soon as the Discord "server" is deleted. The same applies if Discord as a company loses interest in preserving history for you, starts charging money for basic features like search¹ or goes bankrupt and stops providing the service altogether.

• RMS on Discord
• Spyware report on Discord
• Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects (Drew DeVault, 2021)

• The Dark Side of Discord, […] best Solutions and Alternatives (Techlore, 2021)

• Matrix – decentralised and open source. They're working on their "discordification" to get feature parity with Discord. Still is an information silo if you don't make your chatlogs public.