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 arbitration-opt-out@discord.com 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.
I’m sure that this won’t stop the idiots who argue in support of using Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.
Fun, so you cant sue over them selling your data to ai
Nice one 😁
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.
Um this is not going to hold up in the Ontario Consumer Protection Tribunal due to this: Ontario’s Consumer Protection Act, 2002 (“Consumer Protection Act”) prohibits mandatory arbitration clauses and class action waivers in consumer agreements.
The fact that they’re even trying thus needs to trigger an exodus.friends don’t let friends use discord.
Just give me a snippet to file a consumer protection application. It’ll get struct down
A what protection… That’s not a real thing, and if you rely on abusive daddy and his magic hammer to save you, you’re going to be so fucked.
Just stop using it. Get your friends to stop using it. Ditch this garbage. This isnt even the biggest reason to do that anyway.
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that these types of forced arbitration violates my province’s Consumer Protection Act
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.
These are the main parts that mention locations for it, I’m no lawyer but it looks like this only applies to people in the US, with lighter restrictions for California residents, someone please correct me if I’m wrong
If you are a consumer residing in the European Union, this clause and these terms in general do not affect any mandatory consumer rights you may have under your local law, and all disputes arising in connection with the services and/or these terms shall be submitted to the exclusive jurisdiction of the court of Amsterdam, the Netherlands or, if you are a consumer, to a court closer to your domicile if in an EU Member State.
The Federal Arbitration Act, federal arbitration law, and California law will apply to these terms and any disputes related to these terms or our services, regardless of conflict of laws rules. Any dispute that is not subject to arbitration will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts in San Francisco County, California, and you and Discord both consent to venue and personal jurisdiction in these courts.
IF YOU’RE A U.S. RESIDENT, YOU ALSO AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING MANDATORY ARBITRATION PROVISIONS. PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY – IT MAY SIGNIFICANTLY AFFECT YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, INCLUDING YOUR RIGHT TO FILE A LAWSUIT IN COURT: (rest of the document)
I’m NO LAWYER but it seems to apply to US residents only? EU has their own provisions written down where discord begrudgingly follows the laws there. But for non-eu non-us people this doesn’t seem to apply to us. “IF YOU’RE A U.S. RESIDENT, YOU ALSO AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING MANDATORY ARBITRATION PROVISIONS. PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY – IT MAY SIGNIFICANTLY AFFECT YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, INCLUDING YOUR RIGHT TO FILE A LAWSUIT IN COURT:”
For folks who will continue using discord, and that’s probably most folks, it would be a good time to change your account email to an alias if you haven’t already. They have clearly stated they are about to get sketch AF.
That’s good to hear. Everyone else was only talking about the US and EU, and I’m like… “what about me, who doesn’t live in either?” 😐
I’m not sure what most of this means or how it could affect me, but you’re saying that as an EU citizen, this is not something I should be overly concerned with?
It means that the forced arbitration provisions do not apply to you if you’re in the EU, so you can still sue them by other means and with people not paid by them.
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!
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.
Opt-out. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com 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.
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 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 arbitration-opt-out@discord.com 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.
We need a Federated FOSS Discord alternative built to work with the activity pub protocol.
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.
…Matrix…?
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?
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?
revolt.chat?
Inb4 people who opt out start finding themselves getting randomly banned for vague, obscure TOS reasons.
I’ll update if it happens.
oh good lord i hope not.
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 arbitration-opt-out@discord.com 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.
There’s an even easier method, if you do not log in for a year or so, discord deletes your account
along with our data?
whoa whoa whoa let’s not get carried away
deleted by creator
Expecting Discord to delete your data is like expecting a company to burn the money you paid them after you stop doing business with them.
Seriously?
Yes
