While I understand that approach EF going Discord-forward, it's one that's prevented me from joining many circles now as I've pledged to take my data privacy more seriously and proprietary apps aren't it. I hope you offer at least one alternative (but if you're not targeting open-source users or privacy advocates, there likely wouldn't be a difference).

In this day and age that is simply not possible anymore.

Most apps have no good open source alternatives.

Zulip is a pretty good open source alternative to Discord / Slack.

Despite the looming narratives that tell us to give up our data, it’s always possible.

There are dozens of products and countless open protocols to base new products on. We could even just use IRC again.

One nice thing about IRC is it is sure to remain an alternative as services which purportedly lack alternatives build paywalls or become the center of scandals relating to mishandling user data.

My experience is that discord is basically just a vector for scammers to directly message me.

You can turn off random people messaging you for what it's worth.

If you join any cryptocurrency related Discords you can dial the random scammers up quite a bit.

Discord lacks features like SSO, auditing and security controls, making it impossible to adopt in many business environments.