We are offering a free service that is 100% optional. You don’t have any negative side effects in Kirby by not joining Discord.
In this sense, Discord can be very much compared to our Twitter profile, our Instagram account or our Youtube channel. If you want to interact with us there, you have the exact same problem. You need an account and you need to hand them your email address, IP and probably even more. All that data is stored on US servers as well. That’s why, again, all of those services are free additional offerings that you don’t have to use in order to be able to fully enjoy Kirby.
You can go to the privacy pages of all those services, read them thourougly and then decide if you want to agree with their practices or not.
Maybe just ask yourself if it is legal according to the DSVGO that pretty much any German DAX company runs a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a LinkedIn profile and sometimes even Twitter.
From discussions with our own laywer, I can only assume, that half of the internet is based in a legal twilight zone and GDPR and DSVGO didn’t help at all to clear this up. I wish wholeheartedly that it was different. For a small company this is a nightmare.
We do everything to act responsibly and transparently for our own site and software and we explain it in detail here: https://getkirby.com/privacy For all third-party services (Twitter, Instagram, Discord, etc.) we can only leave the choice up to our community members if they want to use it or not. We don’t have any control over the personal data of their users. We don’t even see their email addresses.
But as much as social media is fundamentally flawed and broken, we cannot simply run a content management system in a highly competitive market without using any of those tools and platforms. Of course we chose Discord because of the network effect. Because it’s a highly popular chat platform, optimized to create vibrant communities. We don’t have privacy-focused alternatives for that, which are based in the EU and have a similiar success. The same goes for Youtube. Self-hosting our videos would be possible, but all of those tools and services also help with marketing and community-building. It’s a shame, but it’s reality. It’s a form of dependency that we truely hate.
We still follow our ethics for everything we create, how we communicate and what choices we leave up to our users.
But I would like to use this discussion for a different kind of topic. Speaking of rules: you decided to use this forum - which is also a 100% free and optional service - and you agreed to our community rules by signing up with your email address here. We warned you many times that the way you post comments here is not ok. It’s always aggressive to an extend that it feels threatening. I personally cannot tell if you posted these comments here in order to help or to threaten us. I gave you a fair warning some weeks ago after many many incidents that we just tolerated as a team. But I’m no longer ok with this form of communication and neither are the other members of the Kirby core team.
If you’d be truly concerned about our company being in danger, you would have sent us a personal message and discussed this in private.
By posting it so publicly and so aggressively it feels like a threat. I wouldn’t say this if this was the first time. It most definitely isn’t.
I no longer believe that you belong in this community and that you actually want to be a part of it. That’s why we decided as a team to ban your account for violating our community rules multiple times and after a very clear warning. You get the chance to reply before we ban the account tomorrow.