Delete Discord!

Why?

• is proprietary software
• which spies on its users
• monitoring of running processes (for the Rich Presence functionality - so people can see when you play a game)
• access to all messages. No end to end encryption is used
• extensive data collection. Practically every action you do on the app is logged with a timestamp and geolocation data. You can have more information on this by requesting that Discord give you a copy of your data.
• discord servers apparently inspect audio and video traffic
• account creation requires providing an email and a phone number
• since discord collects so much data on people (incentivises linking of your discord account with other accounts you may own such as spotify, youtube, twitter ect... on top of all the spying), it is a good target for crackers. The mere existence of such a repository of private data is dangerous because sooner or later it's either going to have a security breach or Discord will want to pay back it's investors and start aggressively monitizing that data.
• discord has a tendency to implement features incentivising shallow and distracting interactions rather than genuine human connection: gifs, reactions, superreactions (??!), games inside discord, animated banners, animated server banners... I can't move my mouse without triggering an animation on my screen, hurts my brain.
• list continues on Richard Stallman's website
• Discord is a centralised system and a gated community

What should I use instead?

• Matrix
• XMPP
• Signal
• Mattermost

Full guide to Delete Discord + migration guides to libre equivalents

First, you may want to get a backup of all your messages and servers, using Discord Chat Exporter (there is a package for it in the AUR). The documentation for usage on GNU/Linux is not so complete, I figured (on Arch Linux), I had to cd in /opt/discord-chat-exporter and then run dotnet DiscordChatExporter.Cli.dll <commands> (you must have dotnet installed, and have the correct version of it)

You might also want to ask for all the data that discord collected on you with this guide discord support - requesting a copy of your data. Warning: there is a 3 month delay between asking for the data and receiving it, for some unknown reason. It's probably just to be annoying so that less people do so I guess.

I also advise you to delete all your messages using undiscord, since Discord DOESN'T DELETE ALL YOUR MESSAGES UPON ACCOUNT DELETION, instead the message author is replaced with "Deleted User" (which is laughable, with enough messages it is trivial to guess who sent what). Careful, using undiscord breaches Discord's Terms of Service, so just to make sure set the delay between deleting messages to something reasonable (discord could delete your account for bot automation, thereby stopping you from deleting your messages). The default settings should be fine.

Then, send a message to your contacts stating why you are deleting discord (you can just send them a link to this page) and where they can find you afterwards. This is an important step because it contributes to inverting the network effect, which is the number 1 reason people continue using proprietary disservices.

Migrating your discord guilds (aka servers, but they aren't real servers) to Matrix

TODO

If this guide was helpful to you, send me email, or for members of tilde.town, sign my guestbook!