Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse
I don't get it.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?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 "Sorry, this page isn't available." and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is "Sorry, this page isn't available.". Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always "But what if you lose your private key?"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) "decides" to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you AND you lose your private key.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.I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.