living without Discord

(okay, it's easy, and I've done it before. but since the E-mail thread on the matter generated a lot of attention, I figured it was appropriate to give some context in more of a prose format, as well as what I have done to remain as a member in some communities in which I participate.)

a quick chronological recap of my Discord usage:

• 2017 Jan 09: I create a new account on Discord, after having left it for a while due to being fed up with the guilds I joined at the time. they were communities around a video game I play, Agario, and quickly I figured out that I would much rather play the game than get into drama within specific player groups. by 2017 I was using Discord mostly to keep up with Twitch communities and a variety of other video games, software projects (why they choose Discord for their projects is beyond me), and various communities.

• 2018 Jul 01: I E-mail Discord support because I started receiving reCAPTCHAs upon login, not for Tor, but for using my VPS' IP address which has never been a vector for abusive traffic nor has been blacklisted during my ownership of the address:

  Today I set up TOTP two-factor authentication for Discord, hoping I could remove the E-mail confirmation and the reCAPTCHA for login. I had to switch to a VPN IP address just now because my ISP has been unable to resolve certain websites lately, including Discord, and so the reCAPTCHA is giving me trouble and asking me to fill in a LOT of captchas even though I'm sure I'm getting them right. I assume the IP address I'm currently using is "high risk" in Google's database, but I can't really help it.

  I don't have all night to fill these out just to check up on the chats I'm in, so can you please care to explain why this extra step is necessary for an otherwise-protected account? Other sites such as NameCheap let me bypass CAPTCHA check if I set up two-factor.

  Discord's response stated, Right now, enabling 2FA on your account will help you bypass the change in IP address emails for Discord, however if we suspect suspicious activity you could still be flagged with a Captcha. I can't fairly say that I was ever suspect for suspicious activity but regardless, Discord said they would pass [my] idea along. to this day, it seems their login mechanism has been untouched.

• 2018 Oct 04: yet another reCAPTCHA incident:

  I want to use Firefox to access Discord now, but the reCAPTCHA is endless and keeps telling me I have failed and that my browser is sending automated queries. It continues to do this even if I allow all cookies and scripts on the page (I use an addon to whitelist these for security), and even if I disable any proxies and use my real IP address. Audio reCAPTCHA tells me I need to try again later as well (which seems unfair to blind users). As I have stated before, I have two-factor authentication which should be enough to let me log in.

  Discord would not waive their CAPTCHA requirement even still, and I had to work around by [l]ogging in from another browser, logging out, and then logging in from Firefox. as you can hopefully see by now, I have a lot of problems simply with their login process, even before my full use of Tor on the site.

• 2019 Aug 15: after a long period of Tor usage, working around the CAPTCHA issues by simply waiting not to be served one upon login (and then proceeding never to clear Discord cookies) I invite a user on my friends list to a guild I had just created. almost instantly, this triggered a phone verification prompt, which I could not bypass by using the mobile app or another browser, even without Tor. this was not the first invite I've sent to someone in my Discord contacts with Tor. the only difference I can see is that my guild was less than a week old, but it already had a few members from a public invite I sent in another channel.

  you can see that E-mail exchange in my previous post.

• 2019 Aug 16: at least Discord is a step above many other companies, letting me delete my account without having login access to it. I was able to initiate the deletion process over a support E-mail, and two weeks later, the account has officially been deleted. people on Discord have confirmed that my account has disappeared from the user listings.

• now: I am able to participate in certain guilds without the need for a Discord account. I'll explain below.

the E-mail exchange between me and Discord ended up on Hacker News to which it received a lot of attention, including that of a Discord developer who claims that code [his] team wrote caused [my] account to be locked. some misconceptions surfaced that I would like to address:

• yes, the tone for my E-mails was very blunt. I never degenerate to this stage unless I am repeatedly dealing with someone's issues. it seems to be the only way people will listen sometimes. I know E-mail etiquette but I will not pretend to be something I am not, no matter the medium. I am aware that customer service representatives have to deal with a lot of shit on a regular basis, which is why I never gear my frustrations to the representatives themselves, but instead to the company they represent (except in some odd cases where the representative is legitimately braindead, which hasn't been the case for Discord).
• some (now dead/flagged) comments suggested the usual: that I was a criminal for using Tor, that I should use a VPN, that I was attacking Discord even though I believe my initial blog post on the matter was impartial, that Tor traffic somehow happened to kill their parents and rape their kids, et cetera. I commented in the discussion already, that I use Tor to encourage privacy awareness on the Internet. it's less out of my own necessity for privacy (I use a normal Web browser configured with a proxy and whatever privacy/security/anti-nuisance tweaks I wished to include, rather than opting for Tor Browser. I would still suggest Tor Browser for near-absolute anonymity at the software level) and more to prove a point that yes, Tor is usable on the Web, and yes, there is legitimate Tor traffic, especially from censored countries and ISPs. the fact that Tor also attracts nefarious usage is unfortunate yet unavoidable. people need to find other ways of addressing issues inherent with the Internet.

• the Discord employee himself suggested I purchase a burner phone for the purpose of verifying my account. does anyone else find this absurd? I didn't make a direct reply to him because I honestly was getting tired of following the HN discussion, but it's odd that developers know of ways around supplying a legitimate phone number and not only don't see them as an issue, but also actively encourage such practices.

  simply put, I will not pay any amount of money either directly or indirectly for Discord. phone verification should never be a requirement, either, since there are still people who only have landlines (which Discord's partner Twilio does not support) or who don't have a phone at all. and then there are the class of people who only need/want VoIP, which as I stated in another comment, I would eventually drop my cellular provider in favour of setting up a VoIP phone, and then just prepaying for a data SIM, using Wi-Fi most of the time. I believe this to be more cost-effective considering I want to go all-out on my home Internet when I'm able to live on my own, and given that the USA doesn't have a good choice of telcos, I can also avoid financing those companies.

it isn't all bad, though. many people expressed agreement with me, stating such things as:

• while I hadn't paid for the service, it wouldn't have made a difference even if I had paid e.g. for Nitro. others have complained that Nitro subscribers do not receive elevated customer service. one person stated that my mere presence on Discord helped to make it a more viable product (however small my individual impact) and in that way, I was actually paying Discord simply by using it and strengthening its network effect.
• Twilio's phone database is too poor and outdated to be viable for verification, false-flagging users' phone numbers as VoIP when this is not the case. chalk up another one for phone verification is awful.
• my tone in the support ticket was actually warranted (I was a bit surprised to hear others side with me on this).
• various assertions that Discord doesn't care about its userbase, that reCAPTCHA is broken, … you know, painfully obvious things that some people simply live with rather than avoid them. it's understandable; I chose my own battles, and I will continue to use the Web in the manner that I do, just to prove a point that it is possible to take the Web back into my own hands.

shortly after I requested deletion of my Discord account, I had set up Synapse for the Matrix chat protocol, where my public instance now resides at https://matrix.volatile.bz/. but before you make an account on there, be warned that I provide zero guarantees for usability or uptime. while I personally do use it, I am looking into an alternative which would hopefully not use up so many resources and would be more performant. so far, most (or, more accurately, all) of the Matrix ecosystem is in a state of heavy development. personally I have little faith in Matrix's long-term success, but at least there are plenty of ways to bridge different other chat networks together, including Discord.

since I could not generate an API key for Discord (I'd have to ask someone to do this on my behalf) and I simply did not want to run the node.js bridging software due to fear of running into issues with my already-limited resources, I settled for t2bot, a public bridging service that bridges Telegram and Slack in addition to Discord. sure, there are some issues with relation to latency, but I believe this is justified by not having to hassle with running the software myself. and for that I thank TravisR for offering such a service. (you can donate to keep his service alive if you wish.)

this bridge now operates for the BFBB Modding guild, a community dedicated to dissecting and making mods for the 2003 console game SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, a game I loved as a kid and would never have expected such a following to this day; as well as a small general chat guild for another community that disbanded recently. I was a moderator in the BFBB guild due to my efforts for hosting the game's wiki, and an administrator in the latter guild, which incidentally had to be recreated because I could no longer transfer ownership to another member. a third guild related to Minecraft advertised their Matrix bridge to me, so I am joined there as well. I am not sure whether the bridge existed already or if my departure from Discord prompted them to set up a bridge; in any case, it's cool that some other people see eye-to-eye with the issues Discord introduces to free, open chat.