But many people don’t want to have everything completely public

This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.

Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason “search term + reddit” became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn’t a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it’s popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren’t equivalents at all has been much more damaging.

It’s actually not a very comms heavy game now. Like some players definitely enjoy their milsim call-outs and coordinating more closely with their squad, but a lot of players like myself are just totally silent. It was added to Xbox Game Pass last year, and that has introduced a ton of more casual players.

Yeah that’s fair, it’s definitely not that kind of game. A match does take quite a long time (although you are under no obligation to stay for the whole thing, again like Battlefield). Hopefully you have some free time to try it out at some point in the future, if it’s something you’re still interested in!

I’m not sure if you meant literally no free time to play video games, or just not willing to make time for a perceived steep learning curve, but if it’s the latter then maybe you could reconsider. The basics can be learnt very quickly via YouTube and it’s possible to have quite a bit of fun casually playing an hour here or there as the Rifleman class simply treating it like a milsim Battlefield without ever diving into the deeper mechanics.

It’s way less egregious than the Brave co-founder making donations in support anti-gay marriage amendments, and even that has been massively overblown (the real reasons to avoid Brave are a) Chromium, b) shady crypto stuff and c) its financial incentives as a for-profit company with investor backing to compromise on its claimed ethical principles). I’m getting so sick of these purity tests on completely irrelevant and unrelated issues standing in the way of genuine alternatives to big tech. People are so eager to let perfect be the enemy of good.