Is Discord somehow unsafe to download to MacOS?

[cateye]

Man, miss me with that gatekeeping stuff. Are you like, 20? I hope, otherwise this is just kinda sad, ngl

Sorry to disappoint you. 52, and business owner. Computer user since the 80s. I have been involved in the industry in one form or another for almost 30 years.

I'm here to represent ideas, not cheerlead or handhold. But I am self-aware that I often argue certain extremes that people may not have considered, may not be willing to consider, or have considered and rejected for their own fully-valid reasons. S'cool. We're all adults here and I mean no umbrage.

 

[mzeb]

Thank you!! Really useful comment, this is great. I'm good on ads & convo tracking. Obviously none of this is stuff to make your skirts fly up but it's mostly coordinating about pickups and drop offs, pretty prosaic stuff. And I don't expect to use it a ton, even.

The processes thing has me a bit more wary and would love to know more about what to look for and how. If you have a guide in mind you'd like to share, that would be great!

V. much agree on the last sentence. This is why I came here to get more info! I think we're gonna need more of this in time, ppl who keep up and can advise/curate for others. Many sites obviously do this including with various listicles, but what's missing there is a bit more customisability and esp. more credibility.

The process tracking can be detected by seeing what system calls are made by each app. Find a good debugger and you'll be able to check for yourself.

The security model on the Mac is actually kinda messy. On Windows the NT Object Model makes it easy to set an ACL to deny discord access to the task list. I haven't figured out a clean way to do this on the macOS. Basically, don't run discord on a Mac .

I'll throw a word out there that might be what you're looking rather than "customizability" or "credibility" and that's "transparency." The App Tracking Transparency feature that Apple added to the App Store is an awesome thing. Discord doesn't put their Mac app in the store (the cynic in me would guess the reasons) but if you look at the iOS App Store you can get a feel for it.

‎Discord - Talk, Play, Hang Out

‎Discord is designed for gaming and great for just chilling with friends or building a community. Customize your own space and gather your friends to talk while playing your favorite games, or just hang out. GROUP CHAT THAT’S ALL FUN & GAMES ∙ Discord is great for playing games and chilling...

apps.apple.com

Transparency leads to informed decision making by customers and credibility and customizability follow from there.

 

[bogdanw]

Open Source alternative
Swiftcord - Native Discord client for macOS built in Swift
https://github.com/SwiftcordApp/Swiftcord
"Swiftcord is beautiful, follows design principals of the official client while keeping the macOS look and feel that you love, and most importantly, its (really) fast!
Powered by DiscordKit, a Swift Discord implementation built from the ground up."