I've never used a contact list for my "buddies." We just have each other added on Discord.
I don't think they're totally off-base: I haven't used my phone contact list for personal contacts for most of the last decade. It's just a collection of work contacts that I don't trust enough to add anywhere I actually talk to people.
I'd say at least 95% of smart phone users in the UK use WhatsApp. I think that's probably true of the rest of Europe as well.
We had AIM and message boards pretty early, but no dedicated phone lines. By the time cell-phones became ubiquitous, we had cars and could just actually hang out. And by the time we all moved apart, voice chat services were good enough to just hop back to the old chat model.
Do you have multiple Discord servers or just one for all your friends?
Roughly how old are you and are you a student or in a job or something else? What country or region?
When you meet a new person you want to stay in contact with, how do you do so?
Do you use only Discord with friends or do you also add them on eg Facebook or Email or any other communication system?
In my world (employed, UK, middle aged) at work generally we use Slack (kinda like you’re using Discord in a way), shifting to phone numbers when you know people well for non work stuff.
Everyone else I meet, the assumption is to exchange phone number and use WhatsApp - exceptions would be iMessage or Signal sometimes. Or email or Twitter in business circumstances.
They have a desktop client, but it's just a weird thing that proxies through my phone in a sort of bizarre backwards self-hosting sort of way.
How does it help security?
You can use discord on multiple devices at the same time without the devices needing to directly sync with each other (because the state is stored on the server).
FYI there is a permission to disable this for a channel
It's about storing as little personal information as they can.
But no, I don't use Signal. I just think it's strange how some people can't seem to wrap their head around any of the rationale for this when it's the most transparent thing in the world. Do I like it? No, but it's ridiculous how some people pretend to be incapable of critical thinking in order to talk about how it's horrible. If something is actually horrible, being deliberately obtuse isn't needed.
Whatsapp has 2 billion users, and they are pretty open that they upload entire user's phonebooks to Facebook-owned servers. We know Facebook is not worried much about privacy, so I am pretty sure that this data can be subpoenaed, sold and so on. If you care about privacy, you probably want to install something else, like Signal.
But you know what happens if you cannot get all of your friends converted at once, so you keep Whatsapp around? It will keep sending your contact list changes to Facebook, just at it is designed to.
Let me repeat this: you worry about metadata, so you want to chat to a friend via Signal. But the moment you add them, this is reported to all other apps including Facebook's Whatsapp. And there is no way to opt out of it.
How can people not notice this? How can any company call themselves "privacy friendly" and do this stuff?
This isn't that hard.
There's just so so many places to get tripped up by keeping data rather than just routing bits and never storing them.
Just delete them manually then.
Update Discord.messages
Set Deleted=True
Where messageID='71d01110-e3d8-4673-9ba0-7bc676c5b6e6'
There is no such thing as privacy on Discord.
However, the current wave of phone-number-tied messengers (WhatsApp, Signal) have definitely pushed me in that direction.