My Migration Away from Discord and Other Proprietary Platforms

Published on 2024-12-14

Effective 2024-12-31, I will be deprecating Discord or any other proprietary services. Instead, communication wise, I will begin to only be available via the following:

By 2025-01-31, I will have Bluesky (or via any AT-protocol-compatible service), Mastodon (or via any ActivityPub-compatible service), or Matrix set up for communication. These details will be added both as a post here, and on my contacts page.

Why I Need to Move

First of all, proprietary platforms demand that you essentially make the platform a co-owner in anything you share on their platforms, for all copyright or intellectual property purposes. And that is fucked up. I should be able to share my content in the way that I believe to be the best license to share it under.

Chilling Effect
Next, content moderation is a black-box that creates a chilling effect , stifling free speech. To clarify, I am not against content moderation. I agree that platforms should have a right to remove content that they deem to be unsuitable for the platform. However, I believe that these platforms should set clear expectations for their users to follow, in order to avoid sanctions, such as, but not limited to blocks, bans, or content removals.

Anti-Competition
In addition, they are making it more and more difficult to leave platforms in favour of others. For example, Discord does not offer federation nor chat exports. (See this article).

Paying with Privacy
Finally, despite these services being monetarily free, you are paying with your content and your privacy. There are no expectation of privacy on these proprietary platforms. Site operators can read your every message.

AI training
Even worse, many platforms, such as Reddit, will sell my data to generative-AI platforms to train their datasets off, despite my strongest objections to such generative AI platforms. To clarify, I love AI, but only when it is made and used responsibly. I believe that AI has huge potential that cannot be achieved by any other means, and, if made or used irresponsibly, can cause serious, irreparable harm to society. Unfortunately, contemporary generative AI companies fall in the aforementioned category. (For more information, see [a], [b], [c])

Anyway, fuck closed source, proprietary software. Fuck unethical, illegal, and harmful generative-AI. Stay safe. ☭