Notably Discord stopped using that format two years ago, moving to globally unique usernames.
Their stated reason[1] for doing so being:
> This lets you have the same username as someone else as long as you have different discriminators or different case letters. However, this also means you have to remember a set of 4-digit numbers and account for case sensitivity to connect with your friends.
The actual reason here, implied but not stated outright in that one, is that Discord being a public platform, having only numbers to discriminate between users makes it extra-trivial to impersonate someone else. Obviously you can still do some of this with unique usernames (you see slight misspellings, adding harder-to-see characters like periods, etc, as strategies), but these are more complex to execute on at scale and easier to block once and reduce the impact, vs being able to use ~arbitrarily many post-username numbers.
Not saying that wasn't ONE of the reasons but the main reason was really that a large chunk of users had no idea that they even had a discriminator, as it was added on top of your chosen username. "add me on discord, my username is slashink" didn't work as people expected and caused more confusion than it was solving. This wasn't universally true either, if you come from a platform like Blizzard's Battle.net that has had discriminators since Battlenet 2.0 came out in 2009 it was a natural part of your identity. End of the day there were more users that expected usernames to be unique the way they are today than expected discriminators.
Addressing that tension was the core reason we made this change. We are almost 3 years past this decision ( https://discord.com/blog/usernames ) and I personally think this change was a positive one.
Your account has almost certainly been assigned a new username already. From the same link:
> Starting March 4, 2024, Discord will begin assigning new usernames to users who have not chosen one themselves. If your username still has a discriminator (username*#0000*), Discord will begin assigning you a new, unique username as soon as March 4, 2024. We will try to assign you a unique username that is similar to your current username.
> I wonder if they'll delete my account eventually
Just some days ago I received warning from Discord that they'll delete my account since I haven't logged in for two years.
> Your Discord account has been inactive for over 2 years, and is scheduled to be deleted on $DATE. But don’t worry! Dust off the cobwebs and prevent your account from being deleted just by logging in.
The stated reason is obviously not able to justify the change; either they have an internal reason they're not willing to admit to, or someone at Discord just went crazy.
Imagine trying to connect with your friends... by telephone.
> I think the American First Amendment would obliterate this government body and probably the whole institution if it was ever tried.
This is not a government body, Ofcom is the relevant government body, like the US has the FCC, which you are aware of. The FCC has broadcasting rules. Your supreme court upheld their ability to issue sanctions for violations. This has lead to broad self-censorship by US broadcasters in much the same way the UK has Clearcast, to the point that censorship of stuff like swearwords is a recognizable trait of quite a few TV shows exported from the US. In the past year there have been multiple cases of censorship in response to threats from the FCC and other government bodies, much worse situations than banning an ad. The first amendment has done nothing to stop this.
I'm not here to defend the UK, they have some extremely scary laws on the books, but the US is really not notably different on this front.
I'd go so far as to say any implementation that doesn't conform to RFC 4180[1] is broken and should be fixed. The vast majority of implementations get this right, it's just that some that don't are so high profile it causes people to throw up their hands and give up.
It helps a bit that it's written in Zig, but its primary differentiating feature in the sea of terminal emulators is that it's created by mitchellh, who is kind of a celebrity in some circles.
You can turn on a feature documented as allowing the terminal to be controlled by escape sequences, but then output of programs can control the terminal! Whoop-de-do.
BearSSL is really cool, but it claims beta quality with the latest release in 2018, doesn't support TLS 1.3, and hasn't seen meaningful development in years. It's averaging about 1 commit per year recently, and they're not big ones.
This documentation page[1] seems pretty clear. One primary at a time, any number of read replicas that automatically proxy writes to the primary, when compute scales to zero the data is in object storage and a new primary can spin up elsewhere.
According to their ToS all customer accounts registered on or after September 3, 2024 are signed on to a US company, so no they're not doing what's necessary to keep US hands off the data.
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