Comment on Can we please unpin the proprietary off-site/off-network promotion of discord
unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year agoEveryone wants your phone number now because it’s a decent approach to combating spammers. Note that I said decent, not perfect. It’s relatively easy for a company to determine if a phone number is owned by a specific person vs. a voip company that enables spammers to use hundreds of new numbers, so now we’re asking everyone for theirs. SMS is also used for the lowest form of multi factor authentication, so they get to claim that it’s a security decision, not one for marketing, etc and because of network effects, we all have to choose to either go along or miss out.
Agree that it’s super annoying and certainly not privacy-centric, but Discord is owned by Microsoft, what can we expect? Innovation?
I understand the ease for choosing phone numbers. I would love it if they gave me another option to validate.
For a community like Lemmy, I would prefer that they choose a different chat system, one that doesn’t require me to validate with a phone number. Matrix is an option and doesn’t require phone numbers.
It also doesn’t work. I can’t use telegram because I have a number that I originally got from project fi, back when it was project fi. Eventually I moved cell providers and I migrated the phone number that I got with Project Fi. As such, a real number that I’ve had for over a decade looks like a voip range number, even though it isn’t anymore and hasn’t been for a long time.
kaito@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Discord being owned by Microsoft, now that’s news to me. I don’t think that’s a thing, at least not yet.
unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
For some reason I was convinced they had sold out, but it looks like you’re right, they’re still independent for the time being. Thanks for the note!