

To me this looks nothing like Discord beyond having a compact sidebar… In fact, I would hope that Discord never inspires any software UI, because it really fucking sucks.
It’s probably not a good idea to infer how privacy friendly an open source software is, based on such a superficial visual similarity to a closed source proprietary product.

I don’t blame people for thinking that something is off after reading the linked blog post. This wouldn’t be the first time Google does something like this to OSS that poses some kind of potential threat to their business model (this is also mentioned in the post).