- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/17618684
Forced arbitration means any legal disputes you may have with Discord must be resolved through a single third party mediator, who 99% of the time is chosen by, and will rule in favor of, the corporation/Discord. This effectively removes all your legal rights as a consumer, because arbitration decisions are legally binding and non-appealable.
The new ToS goes into effect April 15th, 2024.
YOU CAN OPT OUT OF ARBITRATION. You must email [email protected] BEFORE MAY 15TH (30 days after ToS effective date) with your username stating that you wish to opt out of the arbitration clause. Once May 15th passes you are bound to arbitration with Discord forever.
Opt-out before it’s too late.
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is it 30 days BEFORE april 15th, or 30 days AFTER april 15th?
You have until May 15. The announcement just went out today; if they tried to make it retroactive, it wouldn’t hold up in court.
Opt-out. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to [email protected] within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.
I was skeptical about all the hate Discord has been getting recently, but this settled it for me
It’s ALL companies…be skeptical of every single company out there. None of them have their products, or customers care and safety in mind. You are literally disposable to them all…treat them the exact same way.
Eh, mostly true but there are good ones. From Software has a great track record, for example.
Definitely an exception to the rule tho
Capitalism
Like when McDonalds offered free fries or something for everyone who used the app, but then quietly changed the terms of service for the app to include forced arbitration.
Why is forced arbitration legal
Fun, so you cant sue over them selling your data to ai
lmao no way in hell this is legally binding
Welcome to America. New here?
Does that applies to accounts registered in the US but now I’m not physically lived in?
Innocence is no protection, truth is no defense.
It will if they can make it. Ditch this shit in every way you can.
Is anyone still using discord? 🫠
Many, many people. It can be very hard to avoid. You must live in a foss bubble to think that no one does.
Isn’t everyone living in a Foss bubble already? 🥲
I’m trying my hardest.
Wholesome exchange, folks. Keep up the good work.
It’s hard NOT to use it when every damn project uses it for announcements and discussions.
Be me.
Playing game. Custom mod.
New release! Much excite. Find bug.
Investigate bug. Find replication steps. Take several screenshots.
Go to report bug. No git. Only discord links.
Delete screenshots and go back to playing.
i genuinely think compiling the bugs with some details in a youtube video and posting it on youtube would be more useful than finding that discord and joining it lmao
I’m all for providing free support/testing for community projects…
But discord is not meant for documentation/management/bug tracking.
I just can’t even…
The only way to communicate to the dev is via discord. I don’t mind that. But I don’t want to join yet another server!
i genuinely don’t understand why the move has happened, it only seems more annoying than something like github, especially if you work on open source software.
If you want it to be an method of communication, that’s fine. But the primary is actually insane.
Create a Lemmy topic? Free and open source, better organized 🤔
What makes you think the Dev will notice a Lemmy post or will even know what Lemmy is, if they’re not even using git for reports and are using a chat client for something that it should have never been used for.
I’m also not going to complain about a free mod created by a dev for the community.
If they wanna have discord as their documentation/issue tracking I just won’t contribute.
For me it’s matrix, very rarely can see anyone advertising discord
Can I ask how this is going to affect other countries outside the US? I do not want to accept something that I do not really know how to handle because it doesn’t really apply to my country.
Just a reminder for me to check this thread later.
deleted by creator
I’m sure that this won’t stop the idiots who argue in support of using Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.
Thankfully no TOS is legally binding here since pressing agree doesn’t count as signing a document.
Do you have anything to prove that? I’m serious, This feels like it shouldn’t be binding but I can find no legal reasons or information that it wouldn’t be, and I would really like to find that.
Seems ludicrous that a company can be like “OK STARTING IN 30 DAYS NO SUING US ALLOWED. IF YOU DON’T SPECIFICALLY TELL US WITHIN THOSE 30 DAYS THAT YOU MIGHT SOMEDAY NEED TO SUE US THEN YOU NEVER CAN FOREVER.” But then a lot of stuff here is ludicrous.
It depends on where you live. In Germany, forced arbitration in general TOS is invalid and has to be separately negotiated and agreed to. In general, what you can put into your TOS is pretty restricted, anything you put in there that a consumer wouldn’t reasonably expect is not gonna be legally binding.
That is the case for all of Europe and most of the rest of the world. That’s why that ToS change is only for US customers.
My country only considers electronic signatures made by our national ID cryptographic signature system to be legally binding in contracts. A ToS without that and just an agree button can only be used to set rules within that platform here. In a court a ToS is basically meaningless.
Fun fact: Our online voting system works on the same principle.
Ah ok I misunderstood your comment.
I had just read the thing and had that it only applied to US fresh in my head. Then I read your comment and assumed “here” referred to US also. My bad.
Where do you live? This sounds pretty based.
For anyone who didn’t click into the original post and whose client didn’t include its text, here are the instructions for opting out:
Opt-out. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to [email protected] within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.
Note that the forced arbitration clause applies only to Discord users in the US. The class action waiver appears to apply regardless.
This is also not a new addition to their TOS, but it does appear to require opting out again even if you already did, and to grant an additional opt out opportunity if you didn’t.
They also waive rights for class action lawsuits, one should also say to not agree with that.
We need a Federated FOSS Discord alternative built to work with the activity pub protocol.
The what?
…Matrix…?
We don’t need a completely decentralized system. Matrix is not efficient, its bloated and overly complicated compared to what you could have. A federated system with minimal overhead would be nice. This is the reason I went with XMPP over matrix for self hosting a discord alternative. I just wish we had something like XMPP that interacted with activitypub.
Matrix isn’t decentralized, it is federated just like lemmy or mastodon, except it is its own protocol.
xmpp is still stuck in the early 2000 and even the ecosystem of apps around it are stuck in the 2000.
How is it not decentralized?
decentralized is peer-to-peer while federated is server-to-server
Honestly, matrix is incredibly user unfriendly. It needs to stop being held up as an option for these sort of things.
How is it user unfriendly? The default client Element looks exactly if not better than discord and there’s servers where you don’t even need to verify your mail to register.
Even my 60 year old mother who needs tech support for her iPhone every other month had no problems setting up a matrix account when I asked her to use it instead of sms.
What are your issues Matrix?
Unfortunately, ActivityPub isn’t really designed to scale in a way that a Discord alternative would require. The intended behavior for federation isn’t clear either. Matrix is already a mature federated chat server with dozens of clients including an official one. Building a Discord clone client for it would be a lot easier than rolling a whole new custom server.
revolt.chat?
not federated, no app access if you run your own silo, etc
Please stop enshitifying discord
Its always been shit
It seems largely fallen out of favour but I’m genuinely wondering how Teamspeak is still going and hasn’t succumbed to enshittification
I mostly stick to matrix but I’m not a big voice chatter. If i had to pick I’d probably choose mumble.
As for gaming voice chat, steam does a plenty good job on its own.
Too late mate is a shit long ago
Opt-out. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to [email protected] within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.
I can’t opt out if its a chat like the graphemeOS discord bridge that feeds my data to discord without consent.
What is forced arbitration and why is it bad?
If a company does something bad, you can sue to fix it.
Suing sets legal precedent and forces all companies to abide by the ruling, more or less.
But now if a company tricks you out of your right to sue by putting arbitration clauses in everything, then you can’t sue. You can only have a (hopefully) impartial third part tell the company to stop doing something specifically to you. The company is still free to keep doing the thing to everyone else, and their arbitration doesn’t affect any other companies also doing bad things.
There are other issues too.
Most importantly, Discord pays the arbitrator.
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/arbitration/what-is-arb.html
Essentially, arbitration waives your right to sue the company in any capacity and instead requires all legal disputes to be resolved by a 3rd party mediator hand picked by the company.
You can guess how often these arbitrators rule against the companies that pay them (Spoiler: it’s not often)
It’s used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for companies to basically have legal immunity from any kind of consequences, as all their customers must arbitrate and get told to suck eggs. Arbitration is legally binding and not appealable. It also conveniently keeps the corporate dirty laundry out of the court systems, because arbitration is private, confidential and closed-doors.You can also watch one of Louis Rossmann’s latest rants about ToS changes and arbitration being forced down users’ throats suddenly without warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AddtrV6UFFs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=AddtrV6UFFs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
ToS and the like are legal documents that people/customers ‘sign’ or agree to before using a service or product, usually agreed or signed AFTER a purchase has been made. Arbitration causes in these documents mean that you agree to not sue the company for any reason, like a class action lawsuit. Basically if you feel like you have been scammed or taken advantage of by that company, you cannot sue for damages. ToS are not the law though and can be superceded by legal means, like a lawsuit ironically. Correct me if I’m not 100% correct, as I’m not a lawyer and this is just my understanding of this.
