[knightoffaith]

People pushing these views (views I am highly sympathetic to, to be sure) often don't understand how to communicate them properly to people who don't already agree with them. People are already resistant to changing their minds through cordial and well-reasoned discussion, let alone through polemics.

If you're a discord user, there's a high, high chance that you don't give a hoot about privacy or anything like that. Convincing people to deal with inconveniences for the sake of something that doesn't yield a short-term reward is difficult, even with things normally acknowledged to be important, like health or finances---with privacy, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to persuade someone not just in the abstract but enough to actually get them to make changes.

I think you have to be, so to speak, the midwife who helps the other give birth to their own ideas---plant the seeds in their mind and allow them to come to the conclusions themselves. The temptation to shock people out of their dogmatic slumbers is strong, but it's just generally not going to work. I've been the person jumping up and down while screaming about how the 1984 dystopia is coming. It's never convinced anyone who didn't already agree with me.

...things would be different if there was an fully functioning free software, privacy-respecting drop-in replacement to discord; you could just say "instead of discord, why not use X?" with no polemics about privacy needed. That is, I think, the most effective way to actually get people to jump ship. As far as I can tell, none of mumble, xmpp, or matrix are as easy to use and convenient as discord. (As much as I love xmpp.) Maybe Zulip?