Hi all,

I haven’t used Discord in a while, but it became so that now I have to use it for communication with certain people getting support for some services that I use. What I’m doing currently is:

  • using a separate randomised e-mail address only for the Discord account
  • using a randomly generated username
  • no profile picture
  • tweaking the settings as best I can for privacy

Other than these points, I’m also being wary of talking about anything personal on Discord. Would you add anything so I can be even safer when using Discord?

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
    1·
    1 month ago

    Always consider what you say on Discord as potentially public, since there is no E2EE.

  • LazerDickMcCheese@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    1 month ago

    I know interested people don’t like to talk about it…but we, the people, should really be moving away from Discord. A bucket of water doesn’t fix a burning house, ya know?

    • Tmpod@lemmy.ptM
      0·
      28 days ago

      While this may be a good end goal, these comments are really more harmful than anything else. Removing your dependency on some proprietary service can be very far from trivial, or even doable, there is a wide-range of internal or external factors preventing you from ditching it.
      For example, part of my work and a bunch of good online friends of mine use Discord, so I keep it around. If you do any social gaming as well, you’ll also most likely find it hard to ditch the platform, as it’s grown deep roots in the community.

      Anyway, it’s better to take small steps in the right direction than trying to make a U-turn and fail miserably.

      • Autonomous User@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        28 days ago

        I would invest more into stopping ‘friends’ encourging me to get abused than micro-optimising the malware infecting me. Not saying don’t break it down into steps.

  • refalo@programming.dev
    0·
    1 month ago

    The biggest issue IMO is the random phone-walling. Eventually, all the things you try to do to increase privacy will just cause Discord to force your account into phone verification. This happened to me many times. It’s now to the point where I cannot even sign up for discord whatsoever because it immediately transitions from the logged in screen to “something suspicious going on” and forces you to give out a personal mobile number, which I refuse.

    • Tmpod@lemmy.ptM
      0·
      1 month ago

      Yeah, they have upped their “paranoia” quite a bit in the past couple of years. A while back, I discovered smspool.net while trying to register for Claude (wanted to give it a shot, was disappointed) and was so satisfied by their interface and prices I’ve used it again in 3 other occasions. There may be other similar services out there, you should give one a try next time Discord prompts you for a number.

      • refalo@programming.dev
        0·
        1 month ago

        thanks for the recommendation, but unfortunately due to my privacy settings, most cloudflare sites do not work, I just get endless “are you human” prompts that never go away.

        Plus any site that uses crimeflare isn’t private anyway because they can MITM all your traffic including credit card info etc.

  • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    1 month ago

    In that situation, I would also:

    • Only use it through a browser (with fingerprinting protection), never a Discord app.
    • Dedicate a browser installation, or at least a user profile, to Discord.
    • Only use it over a VPN connection dedicated to Discord, or Tor if it’s allowed.
    • Have an alternative channel (maybe Matrix?) ready and waiting for contacts who might be willing to switch.