Setting up Element (a Discord alternative)

01 Jul 2021

Whenever there’s a group project to be worked on, the first thing my classmates do is exchange their Discord handles. Why? Shouldn’t CS majors, even if we’re mere undergrads, know better?

I hated Discord’s proliferation amongst my peer group so much that I wrote the original version of this walkthrough as a class assignment some time ago. Now, after a round of revisions to make it suitably unprofessional, it’s enshrined here forever.

What’s Wrong With Discord?

“What’s wrong with Discord” could be a book on its own. I’ll keep it short:

It’s wide open to third-party scraping.¹
It’s known to collect extremely detailed data of its userbase.²

When Discord’s investors inevitably come knocking to cash out, it’s a foregone conclusion as to what that despicable company is going to do with all that valuable user data.

What is Element?

Element (https://element.io) is a fully encrypted chat client that uses Matrix to do the chatty bits. If you’re reluctant to migrate away from a spyware because the UI doesn’t look Discord-y enough, don’t worry: Element’s UI is functionally similar.

Despite the distributed nature of Matrix, you can still communicate with anyone in other Matrix instances. From the users’ perspective, Matrix’s inter-instance interaction works similarly to that of emails: You can send emails from you@gmail.com to friend@outlook.com because email is email regardless of domain.

For this tutorial, I’ll be using Matrix.org’s own instance to set up an example account.

Requirements

You must have:

A reliable Internet service
Basic knowledge on how to download and install something from the Web

Step 1: Download Element

Navigate to Element’s download page (https://element.io/get-started) and scroll down to the Desktop section. Then, click on the button corresponding to your operating system:

If you’re on Linux, your package manager will most likely have it listed under element-desktop or something similar.

Once the download is done, install Element as you would any other program.

Start the Element client. You’ll be greeted with the sign-in dialog. Click on the Create account link near the bottom of the dialog:

Leave the server setting as matrix.org (default). Fill in the form with your desired username and password:

Once you’ve filled out all the requisite fields, click on the Register button.

Step 3: Chat

That’s it. Now go forth and convert your peers.

Oh, and don’t forget to uninstall Discord.

Dis.cool was a third-party tool that scraped a mountain of Discord user data and hosted them under a website bearing the same name. Potential “customers” were charged for access to the data. It collected messages, emoticons, channels list, and everything else within reach of the official Discord API. [Reddit] [Eduonix] ↩
In 2018, a user named Cadence requested a copy of their own Discord data after GDPR took effect. The data that Cadence received was extensive. It contained the device’s locale data, IP, device name, location data, operating system information, click events outside the client, and countless others [link] ↩