While I think the above poster was wrong in equating the two, the article does sound really paranoid in a rather entitled way, and as a result makes a great point come off poor, despite the core idea ("Discord is bad") being true.

"Phone numbers are bad and shouldn't be used but also you should use Signal!"

"The only thing I used my account for was DMing a link to a bunch of people and they banned me in a way I could contest because it looks like spamming!"

"For notifying people about stuff you should use electronic mail but don't notify them more than once every two months!"

Seeing a sentence like:

> You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops.

in a post about [checks notes] FOSS software development, puts things in a certain light.

FWIW I'm privacy-conscious myself. If the author had just made a general effort to point out the privacy implications of using Discord, that would be one thing. Instead he made a contrived effort to connect it to FOSS development - arguably one of the least-private activities one might be doing online - and then went on to call Discord altogether "unacceptable", instead of just saying "don't assume that what you say on Discord is private".

Agreed, and that part (regarding ratting on the cops) is a bad argument. In any public chat, anyone can log. People log in IRC as well. As can servers. E2E encryption makes little sense there. If you do FOSS development, you might actually prefer to know the realnames of the people you develop with. You might want to (temporary) log chats between developers, to read them later. Surely, Mattermost and Discourse allow this as well. Also, Slack is barely mentioned in the article, while I'd say the same argument counts for Slack (but perhaps worse). The alternatives (Discourse, Mattermost, and Mumble), are three, which all 3 would replace Discord. But not on their own...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the server is hosted by a trusted source all the normal users can log is messages and nicknames. You can join anonymously. That does not identify you for the purpose of law enforcement.

What light does that sentence put things in? It's not been 30 years since the US tried to prosecute the author of PGP for the crime of FOSS development.

> the US tried to prosecute the author of PGP for the crime of FOSS development

If you're referring to what I think you are, then no, his "crime" was publishing a product that was not allowed to be exported to the public (effectively exporting it). You're statement is equivalent to serving poisoned food and saying you were prosecuted for the crime of owning a restaurant.

No matter if you agree with the export ban or not, it was a law and Zimmerman broke it. That's what he was prosecuted for.

How does this disagree with my point, which was that creating FOSS can get you in trouble with the law (particularly given all the random jurisdictions your contributors might be in), and thus "You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops" seems like a fair value to hold in the context of FOSS development?

Creating FOSS does not get you in trouble with the law. Creating things that are against the law gets you in trouble with the law - FOSS or otherwise (in Zimmerman's case, even if PGP were proprietary, publishing it internationally was illegal). I have a hard time seeing why a FOSS project* would care about discord ratting them out in case of illegal activity if they weren't doing any. Unless the idea of FOSS is illegal, as your comment suggested, but that is plain false (in your example and in all jurisdictions I am even remotely familiar with).

* - except for things like Signal, Tor..., which are illegal some places, but they probably wouldn't even consider Discord in the first place

> How does this disagree with my point, which was that creating FOSS can get you in trouble with the law...

Creating (or in this case distributing) anything that's against the law could get you in trouble with the law -- kind of how it works.