Regarding what you mention about Discord nosing around - is there any easy way of launching an app in a sandboxed environment on Windows to stop this sort of thing?

For software that works under wine, I guess it wouldn't be too hard to simply set a wineprefix and do it like that, but that is a bit of a hack, and wouldn't work with a lot of software.

There's actually a new feature for this! https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-windows-sandbox-windo...

However, I use Virtualbox and/or VMware Player a lot, and Hyper-V doesn't play well with others, so I can't use any features of Windows that depend on Hyper-V virtualization.

I personally use a UWP app that embeds Discord's web interface. It's surprisingly serviceable.

Sandboxie is a free option that usually works:

https://www.sandboxie.com/

Well, Discord specifically works in a regular web browser too, which will sandbox it from the rest of your system. There's a couple minor features that will be missing, like the ability to show your friends what game you're playing, but those features tend to be the ones any other sandboxing solution will block too.

Browser. Virtual Machine. Literally called Windows Sandbox. https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-windows-sandbox-windo...

> The FOSS project I work on uses IRC, but we have an IRC logger all the time, so nobody even has to ask anyone to "rat you out to the cops", it's on a public web URL.

You can use it via tor, so it can’t access a persistent record of your location history, as Discord can. The public logget doesn’t log DMs. Likely, anyone can join without being forced to give up PII.

As for the CoCs, that’s a good thing! That’s the right way to do it. Demanding that your users enter into an absurd legal agreement with a third party to be able to participate is not.