Mastodon vs Discord

Because Mastodon is federated, your public content can be downloaded by other servers, and even followers-only or direct messages may be delivered to other servers. That limits practical control over where your content ends up.

Direct messages are sent to recipients' servers when they are on other servers. Users should not assume DMs stay solely under mastodon.social's control.

Mastodon.social says it does not sell or trade personally identifiable information. It may still share data with service providers or when legally required, which is common but worth noting.

You can permanently delete your account at any time. This gives users a clear exit path, though copies of distributed content on other servers may persist in practice.

The policy says sessions and API traffic use SSL, passwords are strongly hashed, and two-factor authentication is available. These are meaningful baseline protections for account access.

Users can request and download an archive of their content. This supports portability and backup before leaving the service.

Authorized apps may access substantial account data depending on the permissions you grant. The positive limit is that apps cannot access your email address or password.

The service uses cookies to recognize your browser, connect it to your account, and save preferences. This appears functional rather than advertising-focused based on the provided text.

Reports are usually handled quickly, but reporters are not told whether punishment occurred, and some enforcement is not visible publicly. This helps moderation flexibility but reduces transparency for users who report abuse.

The service identifies the operating company and provides corporate registration details and contact information. That improves accountability compared with anonymous operators.

U.S. and Canada users generally must resolve disputes through individual arbitration, not court, and waive jury trials and class actions. This can make it harder and sometimes more expensive to pursue claims.

If Discord harms you, its financial responsibility is heavily limited to the greater of what you paid in the prior three months or $100. That can sharply reduce practical remedies for outages, data loss, or other service issues.

You may have to cover Discord’s legal costs and liabilities for claims related to your use, content, violations, or misconduct. This shifts significant risk onto users, especially creators or server operators.

Discord expressly says it does not sell personal information and says its business is funded by subscriptions, paid products, and sponsored content instead. That is a meaningful privacy-positive commitment.

Users can disable or delete their account from settings, and Discord says deletion permanently removes identifying information and anonymizes other data. This gives users a clear exit path, though some retention exceptions remain.

You can request a copy of your data in settings, and Discord says it provides the data in common digital formats such as JSON. This supports transparency and portability if you want to review or move your information.

You keep ownership of what you post, but Discord gets a worldwide, transferable, sublicensable license to use and adapt it for operating and improving the service. That is common, but still a broad grant users should understand.

Discord collects account details, messages and uploads, device and usage data, purchase data, and information from advertisers and other third parties. This supports personalization, safety, analytics, and advertising of Discord itself.

Public or widely available content and some reported material may be used to build automated safety and moderation systems. Users should know their content may help train detection systems, not just be displayed to recipients.

Discord can suspend or terminate accounts for violations, legal demands, safety concerns, risk to others, or even over two years of inactivity. It may do so with or without notice, subject to law.

Discord offers settings to limit personalization and some data use for service improvement, plus controls for visibility and safety features. These controls do not eliminate collection entirely, but they give users meaningful choices.

Discord says it will date updates and provide more prominent notice when privacy-policy changes are significant, such as email or in-app highlighting where required. This is better than silent policy changes.