cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/26986197
Wayland and audio is fixed, but only on the canary branch for the moment, this isnt lazy either, they changed the whole screenshare flow to suit linux’s permission prompts
Note that the flathub version has not yet been updated. The version with the screenshare is 0.0.79.
Well, “nice” to have that feature, but you still shouldn’t use Discord, or at least limit your time on it as much as possible. Remember, when you use it, you’re part of the network effect that makes Discord big. You have to resist that. Take a look how Discord compares to pretty much any other messenger or communication tool in existence: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html Avoid it whenever possible, get your friends to leave it and weaken its network effect.
So, some of the drawbacks (there’s probably more):
- Discord has weak security (see URL above)
- Discord has non-existent privacy
- Discord has an incredibly vague privacy policy which means they do what they want. Even companies with strong privacy policies screw users over routinely. Guess what companies do who don’t even care about good privacy policies. They even weakened it further a while back because they need to train their new AI features on your data as well, and probably even their weak privacy policies were in the way before. Well, good thing that the users agreed that they can change it at any time for any reason and be fine with it.
- You grant all rights of everything you write, say, share or do on Discord to Discord, and everything you type, say, upload or share is being processed by their servers
- Discord tracks what you’re typing before sending it
- Discord suspended accounts and required even more user data for “verification”, such as telephone numbers which is completely unnecessary except for tracking and data selling purposes
- Discord shares chat logs with law enforcement (and they can share everything because they’re collecting everything)
- The Discord client app tracks what programs you have running so it can for example display what games you’re currently running. That means it contains a process logger. It has to scan every running application and then finds games out of those, and then you have to hope that only the game-specific bits are uploaded to their servers. Maybe that is the case, but can you trust them, and also to never change that? No.
If you have to use it:
- Never use their desktop app, always use the web version from a secondary browser (web apps running in the browser have much less rights than locally running applications), and even then limit what the site can access to the least amount of stuff necessary. If you never use your mic or camera then block it in the browser settings. Don’t trust Discord’s own mute setting (this also applies to other proprietary software).
- Use a fake e-mail alias / telephone number when creating your account, generally give them the least amount of data possible. Opt out of any options or features which are tied to you exposing more data to them
- Don’t give them additional money e.g. for their premium stuff (you already pay with data they gather from you)
- Block at least these API endpoints which are purely used for tracking purposes (there may be more though, and they might change) [easy to do with uBlock Origin for example]:
https://discord.com/api/v*/science
https://discord.com/api/v*/channels/*/typing
https://discord.com/api/v*/track*
- You can also block these related hosts safely without impairing Discord’s main functions (again there may be more):
crash.discordapp.com
status.discordapp.com
b.stats.paypal.com
app.adjust.com
client-analytics.braintreegateway.com
people on reddit are saying audio-sharing is still broken for every app that utilizes the pipewire audio API directly
Which programs use the pipewire API? I can only think of mumble but no one is going to stream that.
I’ve been using Vesktop since forever. They have had it working already for a looooong time.
Fuck discord. Proprietary spyware. That shit isn’t getting on my computer anytime ever.
tbh if you’re on linux there’s kind of an easy workaround
pactl load-module module-combine-sink sink_name='Stream' slaves='easyeffects_sink'
^^I have this aliased as “gamesound”
easyeffects is great for this because it’ll just be the default sink, plus easyeffects makes your mic sound good anyway. (if you configure it for that)
then when the game opens i set it to output to “stream” and bam i can output game audio in a stream without capturing anything else, since i’m on hyprland i can also stream just the window, discord screenshare with audio everywhere.
Been using matrix since forever :) But the dissing of shitty corporate centralized applications is necessary because way too many naive users still give their data away for convenience.
