Why I Am Not On Discord

I am not trying to make a thesis here; if you are looking for one, Discord Holds the Keys to Your Heart^(archive) is the page I have found that I most agree with. People keep asking me the same question, though, and I felt like making this page. It is just to explain the title.

Permanent, but Not

In my opinion, chats should either be entirely impermanent or entirely permanent. If one wants to save impermanent chats, it should be easy to log to a file and that can be referred to if necessary. (I believe people have a right to personal access to everyone's messages in a chat they were present in; we should not be arbitrarily limited by memory.)

Discord is at a weird halfway point in that regard. Your messages are permanent:

You cannot set them to expire
You cannot delete them en-masse (even just for one long conversation) without breaking TOS (selfbotting) or having control of a privileged bot in the chat
You cannot delete them if you lose access to a chat (via write permissions, read permissions, no longer being in the server, or losing access to your account)
Discord support has a history of not complying with GDPR removal requests

However, they are also impermanent:

While you can export your own, you cannot export those of the people you are talking to without breaking TOS (selfbotting) or having control of a privileged bot in the chat
The search available is rather limited and often doesn't listen (searches fuzzily when you don't want to, doesn't find messages with exactly what you searched)
Upon losing access to a chat, you lose all of the history you were present for
The owner of a server is responsible for maintaining everyone within's access, and can also nuke everything for everyone

Multiple Accounts

Server profiles are a half-measure (one still has a "canonical" profile and username viewable by anyone) and one partially locked behind Nitro. I play pretty fast and loose with my real identity online, but it is still a breath of fresh air to use multiple accounts over IRC or XMPP. Chats can be viewed in one unified panel with some account associated with each chat. By contrast, one needs multiple emails and potentially multiple phone numbers to create Discord accounts for one's personal, gaming, school/professional, etc. lives. Once one does that, using them all is a rather terrible experience.

Third-Party Clients

Electron is a cancer
Scrolling far back in history is laggy and you constantly lose your place
Server folders feel half-implemented, took forever to be added, and have not been improved at all since their initial release
The "inbox" feature in the upper right doesn't work well, so I would often have no clue what caused an alert sound
Direct links to messages are great. . . the one in ten times Discord actually loads the message in question instead of dropping you at a random point in time
Accessibility has always been an afterthought
The web mobile client has been buggy for years
The client has not substantially improved since 2016

Not allowing well-behaving third-party clients is terrible. Honestly, nowadays anything I am using for a substantial amount of my time has to be open source. . . it is just too nice to be able to add any feature you want. Being so wishy-washy about banning over it is also terrible - if you have a good reason to need one, go ahead! They don't usually ban people using them. You just might randomly lose access to a large portion of your social life with no warning if you're unlucky :)

If third-party clients were allowed I would be able to mitigate most of my complaints and might still be on the platform.

Someone Is Still Hosting

A big draw of these sort of platforms is that you don't have to have a friend (of whatever degree of separation) willing to host a server. However, due to Discord not adding features at any sort of pace and basically forgetting that their feedback and suggestions forum exists, lots of functionality is implemented with bots. . . which someone, somewhere, has to host.
Other platforms have bots, of course, and they can be very helpful in many cases where implementing something to a protocol or client doesn't make sense. On other platforms it is clear where to host the bot though - on the machine you already have hosting the server. In that case you also have the source code and can ensure that it will not be backdoored or exploited.

This is less a reason for me not to be on Discord and more why a reason to use Discord is invalid. Not that this one applies to me anyway; I would be the friend willing to host a server.

Exit Strategy

As Discord continues to kill forums and poison people against other chat platforms, it is important to look to the future. Discord is still not profitable. I would argue it has been being unintentionally shittified for years, but with that aside, the value extraction phase has not started. Are you prepared to pay for chat? Are you prepared to lose friends who are not willing to and vanish from the platform without a way for you to contact them? Are you willing to scramble to delete your messages without getting banned before you can do so if Discord updates their TOS to sell your data? Are you willing to lose access to old content you might not know you will want to look back on in five years if Discord stops hosting everything indefinitely? Back in the day we hopped chat platforms pretty easily. I worry about how unwilling everyone has become, and how attached we are to a platform that does not do as much as it should for us.

Why I Left

I didn't care about most of these things when I was a little baby and was invited to Discord by a friend. There wasn't really a "last straw" for me to leave; I just had started caring about these things and had enough friendships deteriorate that leaving wasn't that much pain. Nowadays I prefer XMPP, IRC, and SMS for chat, am using Steam Chat / calls for less enlightened friends, and am (extraordinarily) slowly working on a Mumble web client to have a better one-click calling solution.