Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse
I don&#x27;t get it.<p>We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts?<p>I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is &quot;Sorry, this page isn&#x27;t available.&quot; and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is &quot;Sorry, this page isn&#x27;t available.&quot;. Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.<p>But when say &quot;Ok, let&#x27;s build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof&quot; then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.<p>Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always &quot;But what if you lose your private key?&quot;<p>Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) &quot;decides&quot; to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.<p>This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you <i>AND</i> you lose your private key.<p>If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in.<p>I could sleep way better if I knew that <i>two</i> have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me <i>and</i> the platform.