Internet-scraping outfit Spy.pet claims to have harvested more than four billion public messages made by nearly 620 million users on more than 14,000 Discord chat servers – and is selling access to this trove.
The website presents the data it’s collected in several ways. Each known user has a profile, which contains all known aliases, pronouns, connected accounts to other platforms such as Steam and GitHub, Discord servers joined, and public messages. If you wanted to quite literally spy on a Discord user or users, Spy.pet lets you do that, for a fee.
I just support the fundamental rule that was taught to me in one of those internet safety PSAs back in the day: The internet never forgets and whatever you posted is going to stay out there forever, good or bad.
That phrase is more often used as a post-hoc justification for harm, or to gloat, than as a legitimate warning.
I’m not sure what the difference with discord and Lemmy is. I would assume this is all being scraped as well.
Discord communities are inherently gated, Lemmy ones intentionally have everything publicly exposed. A better comparison would be between Discord and Matrix rooms, where privacy expectations could potentially vary tremendously.