How they monetize is unknown, but they are big and well funded.

I keep my workstation behind a whitelist firewall. It is a pain, but this means I have a device that filters all network traffic and only lets websites I have added to the list to transmit and receive messages. So like, if I download something sketchy or accidentally write some buggy code, it won't have internet access to unapproved locations.

All legitimate commercial websites have their human readable web address. So on my whitelist, I can add Lemmy.world:443 and it will allow connections to Lemmy over port 443 aka https.

Discord doesn't do anything conventional like this. If you try to connect to discord with a whitelist firewall, and look at the blocked connection logs, all you will see are random raw IP addresses. This alone is super weird. Then you will find these addresses are trying to connect to odd ports with no documentation about what they are used for or the protocol. Discord does not provide any details whatsoever that I could find.

Okay so a few super weird connections on super sketchy ports, with no idea what they are doing, and no documentation. Hmmm. But it gets worse. I can jot down some notes for a couple of random raw IP addresses. At this point I really don't like it, but might just grumble past it like just before reddit died. But no, trying to connect to discord after punching these holes, lead to two more random raw IP addresses and different ports, and after that it happened again. Now I'm at 6 random undocumented holes in a firewall, and it still doesn't work and is trying for more. Fuck that bullshit. Reading their terms agreement is basically legalese for you have no rights to anything. It is totally insane that people just run this shit and don't take 5 minutes to ask where is the money exchanging hands to fund this. Who knows, maybe it is legitimate. I fully expect to hear about it in the news one day, and I expect this one to be a giant nuclear bombshell when it happens. I keep popcorn reserves on standby.