The importance of self-hosted communications
There are evil things brewing right now, rumors that a big data breach is about to break loose in one of the major comms platforms.
This is of course, completely unfounded, from what it seems. Eventually however it will happen. One day, Discord will get broken into, or Skype (once again) or perhaps Steam will experience another breach of user-info like it did around the end of 2015.
I work with a lot of people daily on a range of things and a lot of them are creatures of _convenience_, they would prefer to just all use Discord to talk to me, which is completely irresponsible, of course.
People seem to sign up to a new service that pops up like crazy - they don't even do any research on who's behind it. Do you think anyone of your Discord friends knows about the developers' previous venture? Of course not.
We've gotten to a point at which we trust, blindly, a number of faceless entities. Today I read on Slashdot that only just now, Tinder has started encrypting photos. I HOPED they were joking, but it's true. I know a few people using that service, again, completely trusting them blindly, and they probably shared personal photos. Might as well uploaded it to some admins' FTP. What a joke.
So, I hope that you take this to heart - if you're working with people on things. Confidential things - please do not use public services. Do not. Set up prosody, OTR - anything. Use secure communications. Seriously. You will regret it otherwise. Trust me, you will. You are not just putting yourself at risk, but ANYONE you work with. Don't be such a selfish prick.
-- Marco