Other issues aside, a big problem that's stopping me from using Discord and other services is the requirement to link your phone number (either immediately, or after "suspicious activity" or other methods) and the "convenience features" that entails: Notifications to your contacts that you're on the same platform, appearing in their list automatically, etc.
There's no certain way to stop this, because blocking access to your contact list does nothing if a platform uses people who have you in their contact list as basis instead. There's always this uncertainty that even if there isn't such a feature or it doesn't work this way right now, what about the next update? Surprise, now my family, boss etc. know I'm a wyvern online.
It's easy to keep your identities separate with email, but phone numbers are a royal pain in the ass and I sure as hell won't buy a second SIM just to have proper isolation.
@volpeon I saw drama on Bluesky this morning about someone using AI art, and yeah.
I feel like I'm in this middle ground in the AI debate myself - I've seen the rise of this AI bubble since GPT-2 / Talk to Transformer / the first version of AI Dungeon so I know the gist of how it works, and I also have artist friends who were pretty concerned about AI replacing them. They're not concerned about it now and some have even took to AI for inspiration and reference, to help them improve their own art skills.
It's really not as black and white as the professional online mass debaters want you to think.
@volpeon Lol unsurprising. This is part of why even though I use Firefox, I prefer Vivaldi as a company by miles. I don't care if they've made yet another Chromium-based browser, they know what they are and what they want to be and that's going to keep them afloat in their niche while Mozilla's going through its identity crisis.
I'm not even against Mozilla providing extra services, or even paid ones like their VPN (gotta get money somehow!), but this just feels like a cry for help to investors, or shareholders pushing them to ride the Next Big Web3 Wave.