While I understand the reason for adding phone number verification to Discord, it goes somewhat against the ethos of privacy and censorship resistance to require anyone who joins give up their phone number to a centralized entity.
Please consider turning the Discord moderation setting down a notch so users don’t have to provide a phone number to participate in Discord discussion.
Starting to feel like the people at lbry act even worse than people at youtube? It is like talking to the ethos. Talk all you want but answers will not be forthcoming.
I assume the reason for phone requirements is to make sure people commenting and discussing are real people and not 1 person with 1000 accounts like on twitter and other places. I don’t know this though as it isn’t explained anywhere but don’t expect to find any answers.
The harder I look for answers the more I am starting to feel the entire network conversation is BS.
I simply do not sign up for anything that asks for my phone number… unless I absolutely have to. AND it is always a red flag when it is being asked for…
the amount of trolling and spam that discord gets prevents us from dialing back the requirements. Besides discord is community managed and not LBRY Inc. managed.
This forum however allows you to participate in discussions without those harsher requirements
I created my account on this forum to concur with the sentiments above. Here is the text of the email I just sent to board@lbry.org:
Hello,
I had hoped to join your discord to view the different channels and see what the discussion is like. I cannot do this because I must verify my phone number with discord to do so, even though I’m not planning on posting.
I have no interest in giving Discord my phone number. There are legal distinctions between them buying existing marketing data to associate my email to a phone number and me actively providing it to them.
I am assuming this measure by the team is an attempt to mitigate spam/raiding, not to forcefully deanonymize potential community participants. This can be gotten around by any number of means (my favorite being google voice). If there is another place the community congregates that is more private, such as IRC or Element, wonderful; those links should be in the join server message.
Otherwise, this is simply a barrier that encourages iffy practices or outright forces the less technically inclined to consent to deanonymization if they seek inclusion in the community. Please consider finding a better solution to this problem that more accurately reflects your principles.
Yours,
A friendPS. If I have wrongly attributed your goal in forcing phone number verification, I’m all ears.
@Nikooo777 hit the nail on the head. The Discord is community managed, not LBRY inc managed. And the spam issue is why it exists.
Luckily we have other ways to communicate for those that don’t want to sign up on the Discord. Like this forum! 
I’d like to see this forum become more actively used for many of the more technical discussions and questions anyway as it is much easier to search when looking for answers. I’ll make a point of hanging out here more often to help with that if folks have questions!
There is also Matrix server with bridge to discord
https://matrix.to/#/%23lbry-community:madek.allaboutlbc.com
There is also the LBRY://Nomics community, which doesn’t have any phone requirement and the best members of the community are regularly active.