Really annoying!
They also sell that number, all your chat logs, voice calls and media to AI training companies.
Dont be a loser, dont use discord.
I would love to if all of the most helpful specialized communities didn’t all use it.
I can’t even get my friends or family to use Matrix/Element, let alone the masses.
Trust me, I want to make the full switch, but if I’m hanging out on my fancy open source server with no one on it, what’s the point?
I will agree that anything akin to Facebook or Xitter isn’t helping achieve anything, since they don’t provide communication that can’t be found elsewhere (social updates, memes, event invitations, etc), but for communities like this specifically, there’s just not many other places to go.
Sadly there are a lot of communities that are only on Discord.
And it’s so annoying! Bring back forums!
There was a server I poked around in once that required members to provide phone number just to join. Seems very unethical considering all the bad things that can happen from identity theft or stalking… it’s not like mods are employees for Discord. They’re just random mofos. Why would I trust a stranger on the Internet of all places?
The server owners can’t see your phone number. Discord allows you to set a minimum verification level for users in your server. The lowest is simply having a verified email on their account. The highest is a verified email, a few minutes old (so no brand new accounts), been in the server for a few minutes, and a verified phone number. It’s just a bot prevention thing, because spammers/scammers are a big issue on large Discord servers. Especially early in Discord’s history, it was a big issue where bots would raid a server and just totally shut it down with spam links. So Discord started allowing server owners to set minimum verification levels before users could interact and send messages.