For a few months now, I have been free of the odious communication system known as Discord. In this post I’ll explain exactly why it sucks and I will no longer be using it… With some caveats.
At the time of this writing you’ve undoubtedly heard of Discord’s decision to enact age verification through some rather invasive means. That’s been explained and discussed ad nauseum by now so I won’t talk about it here. Instead, I’ll give a few reasons why it was terrible even before this all happened.
For the past few years I’ve been using Protonmail as my email provider as well as ProtonVPN. I ended up subscribing to the Unlimited plan for a deal on their cloud storage, which eventually expanded to a password manager which ended up replacing Bitwarden for me.
For the most part I’ve been satisfied with Proton services with the exception of two main gripes:
VPN app on Android disconnects randomly, forcing you to manually reconnect in the app. This has been happening for probably over a year. Very annoying because I use it 24/7 with the killswitch enabled.
The Proton Bridge, a program required to use a local client, is extremely annoying to deal with when using anything other than Thunderbird. I consider email to be an inherently insecure form of communication to begin with, so I’d rather have IMAP support than the local encryption provided by the bridge. I can’t be leet unless I use neomutt, dammit!
I’ve dealt with these relatively minor issues because of the convenience of having all these services under one account and “Portal”, but lately I’ve begun to see having all of my eggs in one basket like this as more of an anti-feature than a benefit. Not to mention the feature creep of the service which now includes an AI chatbot, crypto wallet, and probably some other nonsense by now while the existing products sit with unresolved bugs. I want to get a new email provider at the least, but now I might not qualify for the same subscription price without it so now I have to find another provider for this and this…