Really annoying!
This is or was part of their anti-spam/flooding protection. In the server admin dashboard, you can require a phone number on the account or you can disable it and allow users without verified phone numbers to participate.
They do not require this just for a discord account last I checked. It’s likely due to whatever discord server you’re trying to join.
Same for Twitch. Same for a Microsoft account. It’s become the new normal.
Stop using trash service
They also sell that number, all your chat logs, voice calls and media to AI training companies.
Dont be a loser, dont use discord.
I would love to if all of the most helpful specialized communities didn’t all use it.
I can’t even get my friends or family to use Matrix/Element, let alone the masses.
Trust me, I want to make the full switch, but if I’m hanging out on my fancy open source server with no one on it, what’s the point?
I will agree that anything akin to Facebook or Xitter isn’t helping achieve anything, since they don’t provide communication that can’t be found elsewhere (social updates, memes, event invitations, etc), but for communities like this specifically, there’s just not many other places to go.
Source? The only record of data being sold I remember is some 3rd-party that scraped public servers.
Per their privacy policy they collect
Content you create. This includes any content that you upload to the service. For example, you may write messages or posts (including drafts), send voice messages, create custom emojis, or post other content that you create with features that we develop. You may also upload and share files through the services.
Thats what they collect(so not the calls apparently my bad). In regards to how they use it, they mention advertisement stuff and the usual vague language of “improve our services” and “personalization”. The AI stuff is supposedly opt in, but they collect the data and they are subject to US subpoenas so all bets are off anyways.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect service, I’d rather all private messages be E2E encrypted, but there’s no evidence Discord themselves have ever sold any data, so I don’t understand why we are making crazy claims when them collecting data is a privacy issue enough on it’s own.
Calls recently got encryption, so while Discord is as popular as it is, we can only hope they keep expanding encryption into other areas.
there’s no evidence Discord themselves have ever sold any data
Even if that were true, thats not how things work in the real world. If you cant mathematically prove that you dont have access to the data, then you arent trustworthy.
Calls recently got encryption
Says who? Discord themselves? Did the publish the code?
Can you provide a source then if it isn’t true? I am genuinely curious.
And yes, they did publish the code for their e2ee protocol.
The whole internet is the same, unless you are running all your own built software that you can vet, you are just putting faith in what a company/individual is telling you. If you want to use the internet, there’s always the inherent risk your data is being collected and sold without you knowing.
Sadly there are a lot of communities that are only on Discord.
And it’s so annoying! Bring back forums!
There was a server I poked around in once that required members to provide phone number just to join. Seems very unethical considering all the bad things that can happen from identity theft or stalking… it’s not like mods are employees for Discord. They’re just random mofos. Why would I trust a stranger on the Internet of all places?
The server owners can’t see your phone number. Discord allows you to set a minimum verification level for users in your server. The lowest is simply having a verified email on their account. The highest is a verified email, a few minutes old (so no brand new accounts), been in the server for a few minutes, and a verified phone number. It’s just a bot prevention thing, because spammers/scammers are a big issue on large Discord servers. Especially early in Discord’s history, it was a big issue where bots would raid a server and just totally shut it down with spam links. So Discord started allowing server owners to set minimum verification levels before users could interact and send messages.
Can we just go back to irc already?
If we had ircv3 specs that included reactions. etc we might be. I rolled a small group of IRC servers with a few selfhost people a year back and it was quite fun. Tbh IRC itself is still alive and well, it’s just not user friendly enough to get non-tech people over easily
