'What a great way to kill your community': Discord users are furious about its new age verification checks — and are now hunting for alternatives
https://www.techradar.com/computing/software/what-a-great-way-to-kill-your-community-discord-users-are-furious-about-its-new-age-verification-checks-and-are-now-hunting-for-alternativesOpen linkView original on lemmy.world1685
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Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their "support forums" on Discord.
I wish it was only limited to support forums. I've even seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.
It's horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.
🤮
Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?
Several open source developers in this case
It's people that don't want to have to maintain things, which I understand. It's trivial these days to host a forum with a cloud provider, or have a github, but Discord is one click. It's not the ideal tool, but one click, no payment, and you have a place everyone can talk to each other.
This is my biggest pet peeve of OSS projects. Someone writes some code and that is where it ends for them. The rest of the infrastructure is so free and so easy that there is no need for dedication to the project.
I guess, but even without talking about forums, even a subreddit would at least be publicly accessible and searchable. Using discord is effortless but antagonistic, at least a subresdit would be both effortless and in the service of the public.
Sure, I'd prefer an open source self hosted platform, but I'm hard pressed to find anything worse than discord
Sure, except that Discord was accessible when these were set up. There is nothing stopping Reddit from doing the exact same thing next year.
Discord is just as inaccessible from the open internet as it’s always been, if not arguably worse so, although you’re right in giving Reddit no further credit in that department.
It's too bad the open source community couldn't find some programmers to help them make an alternative.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don't understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
Hear hear!
Matrix is an ok alternative to Discord for what Discord does.
Support forums are not an appropriate use of Discord, or of Matrix. Discourse is pretty great open source forum software. NodeBB forums even added ActivityPub support! I never particularly like when companies use Reddit as a primary communication method, and for the same reason I'd rather they didn't use Lemmy or Piefed, but all of these are vastly better options than Discord, Matrix, or other un-indexable private chats.
Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
Sounds great. I hope it has video chat and screenshare or will implement it soon.
They do have those things from what I can tell.
I saw earlier that Zulip already has that option, but I still would much prefer a regular old forum.
As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I'm very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.
One of my friends' husbands brought it up, so good old word of mouth.
I did notice I wasn't able to get logged in last night, though the night before I was able to make an account without issue. I wonder if they got a hug of death like Stoat did.
Haha I opened a github issue on that and the main Dev confirmed they were getting the HoD.
@craigers @other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
My issues with matrix were mostly around the voice services.
@craigers oh ok! So far everything seemed to work fine with them. I hope they'll keep being stable in my experience. Thanks for sharing!
Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can't !lemmy because many of the communities don't have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.
Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.
It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.
But in a success story for open source software, the entire community migrated from freenode to libera.chat in like 2 days.
The way to defeat enshittification is by disallowing lock-in.
Gen Z will not comply with this. They'd rather lick boots and get bullied by chuds. They treat social media networks like kids in the 80s treated 7-11. And they will not leave.
There is stoat.chat (formerly Revolt). But you wont find much help on Lemmy or Mastodon. A lot of people on the fediverse have an aversion to Discord because when they try it, they have difficulty with it like a senior citizen with a smartphone. Even though Matrix and Discord arent similar, people on the fediverse will still try to recommend you Matrix, because they think Discord is just another messenger and not like having a forum, teamspeak, jitsi and other stuff in one program. And even if you explain it like that, they will be like "but then you can just use a forum, matrix, jitsi and a screenshare program separately" or something like that.
Lol. I can vouch for this.
Hell my friends are still Stans for IRC and will literally argue it has everything you need.
Open source community always loses to capitalists, because people won't do the work unless there's money involved. Otherwise there would be open source alternatives that are better and more popular. What incentive do smart programmers have to help the open source community when they're better off earning 180k+ per year programming for the financial sector? Especially in this ever increasingly oppressive economy. I'm sorry but unless leftists are donating billions to the open source community, it's idealistic at best to depend on them.
Nonsense. Open source built the web. Open source isn't some new anti fascist trend... What are you smoking?
Yeah and how's that working out, in the context of the subject of this thread. I don't see any open-source communities competing with Google or Microsoft or Palantir.
Open source didn't crumble under the weight of inevitability. It fell apart because corporate interests profiting off of it decided it was more profitable to create cultures antithetical to the guardrails that open source presents to exploitation and co-option.
A las, capitalism wins again. I don't like it, but it's a fact.
It was pruned. It will grow back. It's growing back now. There will be an Internet post American dominance and it will use open source.
I deployed several docker containers using an image from this one guy. Later when I needed help with an image I realized the support is provided exclusively through a Discord server. To nobody's surprise the guy is an asshole who shouldn't interact with users.
Yes, thank you.
IRC still supports most of the FOSS core.
More modern alternatives include Jitsi, Matrix and Simplex. Mumble also works well for voice.
Every time I see Simplex it reminds me of a virus.
Simplex is the most secure option available with the most resource intense client. I'm a fan, it's much newer so the code is less mature but they're comming along well, hitting roadmap targets, listening to the community and auditors.
Hear me out. Maybe, if you are a parent, its your duty to keep an eye on your child, and exert some control over the spaces and people they interact with?
Conservatives have been using the "think of the children line" to justify Draconian overeach for years. All while simultaneously doing everything in their power to take away programs that help children.
Let's not act like the dems don't do some of the same shit.
And no I'm not both sidesing this shit...just saying that the dems/left uses this reasoning a lot as well.
Minnesota recently used their tax on billionaires to expand education and provide free lunch to children so while the party isn't perfect they are not at all comparable.
What makes them so similar is first pass the post it guarantees a two party system and the practice of gerrymandering creating safe seats. The worst Democrats are the ones with the safest seats. If you want positive change start there.
We're talking about trying to pass legislation in the name of "think of the children" logic. KOSA is a fairly recent one that is from the dems.
Oh I know but anytime someone starts saying that they're very alike I need to remind people that they really aren't because these upcoming elections will be a fight for survival
Yes it’s an important fight for survival. Which is why the dems will nominate a bunch of corporatists who have been scorned by trump. Let the “good” money back into politics and “save the kids” my benevolent billionaires who are noble and just!!
This is why we need to push for progressives, it's the only card we have left. Look at the last year if you want to see what not playing gets you.
Average age of Lemmy is too low to remember the democrats always managed to support the war on drugs. Save the children indeed. Think of the children is just the go-to bipartisan reasoning for bad legislation
Off the top of my head I can only think of Lieberman and honestly the ESRB was a reasonable compromise.
Tipper gore? KOSA
What's tipper gore got to do with anything in the last thirty years? And kosa was bipartisan and died in the house.
30 years is a blink in time. You do realize laws don't magically stop being potential issues after a few years right?
The Patriot Act which was bipartisan was passed almost 30 years ago now (25 years ago) now.
KOSA was introduced by a Dem.
You're reaching to pull a both sides. Regardless republican platform positions harm children, Democratic ones feed them.
Don't know what KOSA is. Also, Tipper wasn't a politician.
I’m not both sidesing, but both sides…
You're mostly correct, but Dems are not left in any political paradigm with the slightest awareness of the existence of non-American countries.
political parties aren’t real. Their only purpose is market segmentation.
It doesn’t matter which teams win in sports, billionaires own all the leagues.
Bugger off ml bot.
I, too, attack the source when I cannot refute the claim
Absofucking- lutely!
My 12 year old has zero unsupervised access to the internet. Zero. "But they'll suffer sociallly!"
Will they? My son has tons of friends and they play sports and Nerf guns. And, he can read. A whole chapter book, on his own, without prompting.
Suffer socially, ask the "incels" who have recovered if the internet access they had as teens "helped them socially".
My nephew plays lots of on online games. My sister checks in with me to make sure that he is both playing games that are appropriate for him, and with people who are appropriate to play with. We've setup a discord specifically for him and his friends, and the account he uses is actually my sister's account, on her own device, so she has direct control over what communities he's on in discord, who he talks to, and what content he is exposed to.
He is not allowed to play public lobby games with out her supervision, or a trusted "chaperone" (one of many IRL friend and family members) being in the lobby with him. This is as much about protecting him from harmful content, as it is about teaching him proper gaming etiquette. He was showing some toxic behaviors (greifing mainly) and I shut that down pretty quick.
My kids had full internet use with only porn and advertising blocking, except for "homework time", as well as no restrictions on video games (except for fucking Roblox). They recently graduated high-school at the top of their class and continue doing great in university.
They grew up to be nice, well-rounded young men who make friends easily, aren't assholes, aren't glued to their cell phones (which they had since they were little), don't mindlessly watch TV, can easily switch tasks and "buckle down" when they have to, and have a great work ethic. They grew up with the attitude that internet/cell phones are tools, not rewards or distractions. Once they hit high-school I found I no longer needed to monitor them (and it was starting to feel creepy and invasive). When they had to study they studied, on their own without prompting or timers.
I had no worries because I know how to read papers, and there was (and still is) ABSOLUTELY ZERO evidence that doing so would be harming, but in fact the reverse is true.
Kids grow up to be like their parents. Don't want them to be assholes? Then don't be an asshole. Want them to grow up with a reading habit? Then read for yourself. It's that easy.
It's interesting to see that their friends who had strict internet/gaming rules ended up turning into complete shitheads they no longer associate with.
Lot of pride here.. Good for you?
Kids don't always grow up to be their parents. I found such a broad statement to put such a sour taste in my mouth when I read it.
Feels pretty privledged, and like, good for you, but damn this statement ... Is very broad, dare I say arrogant. Plenty of good kids come from shitty people and vice versa.
Anyway, enjoy your adult kids and thanks for sharing
I feel like it will be more common to heavily restrict the tech access of children as people who actually grew up using the internet become parents.
I also plan to restrict my (future hypothetical) children from internet access until 13 or so, depending on maturity. So your comment gives me some optimism in that regard.
As a parent: 100% agree
The conservative belief is that children are basically property and as such can be used for hard labor and kept from appropriate healthcare... But then when it comes to porn, Big Government has to do everything for them.
Nobody ever said it was a consistent ideology.
You went to a school where they had no controls over what you could and couldn't access?
My school was blocking harmful content on their computers when i was there in the mid to late 2000s.
When i got home i had something called CyberSitter on my computer in my room that sent logs of all my internet usage as reports to my dad.
It took me until 16 when i went out and bought my own computer with my own money before i had "unfettered" access to the internet.
Were these tools impenetrable fortresses? no, of course not. but they were a damn sight better than the ISP level blocks and legislating the "good" companies out of existence that the UK (and others) Government is currently engaged in.
Not that any of this is really about "protecting kids" anyway
By paying attention to your child.
Yes, by paying attention to their children.
Yep, by paying attention to when the kid was on the computer and what they were doing on there.
If you give a child a tablet or phone, you should probably pay attention to what they are doing with it. You wouldn't just give them a full tool box to play with unsupervised.
Yep, by paying attention to the kid.
Bullshit. You need to pay attention to your kids, that's a basic fucking part of parenting.
Maybe you should pay attention to your kid and not let them have unsupervised access to the whole Internet until they are ready for it?
Actually, you do have an ability to monitor who your kid spends time with, and when. It's called parenting.
Let's not pretend that phones and the Internet only started existing in 2026 too. I was a child in the 90's, during the real "Wild West" days of the internet. If anything, parents have more tools and controls over what their child can access in 2026 than they did in 2000. There weren't "child" cellphone controls when I got my first phone. My dad didn't give me one until I both needed it, and was mature enough to have it. The parental controls on my old Window 2000 machine were laughably easy to defeat. Do you know what kept me out of trouble though? My dad paid attention to when I used the computer, what I was doing on there, and how much I was doing it.
Either parent your kid, or don't, but it is not my job to make sure your kid is coddled on the internet.
As a recently new parent myself, your post is great. And as a IT nerd, your post is also infuriating.
It is so beyond easy nowadays to monitor and restrict your child's access to online content. Seeing the post you're replying to just reminds me of everyone I've ever talked to that had X issue and their only response is "throw hands up in the air after trying nothing".
My kids are still too young to be reasoned with, but my wife and I agreed that:
So far our oldest loves finding our phones and can open the camera app from the lockscreen and she runs around taking photos. So we've been letting that slide...but we don't unlock the phone, so it's a compromise we've made as she LOVES taking photos and seeing photos, which I want to encourage. As for content watching we have a TV with Plex and if there's something we approve of on YouTube and we want our kids to watch it(Ms. Rachel), then I download the YouTube video and put it on my Plex server. No ads, no algorithm auto played videos, just pure approved content. And we have classic cartoons(Rolie Polie Olie) and disney/pixar/ghibli movies, etc.
Of course if your kid is at school with no phone but its recess and their friend has a phone with zero limits...yeah I can't control that. But I can at least parent my kid to know that I don't like that and I don't want them to participate it.
Also when they're a bit older(5 or 6 years old) I plan on teaching them internet safety. Don't post PII, don't visit certain websites, always use an adblocker/ublock, only talk to people online that you know in real life, etc. I do plan on playing video games with them(if they have an interest) and I know that will eventually lead to online lobbies, but I am hoping to teach them in private Minecraft servers certain etiquette first and go from there.
I'm both excited and terrified, but this is my job as a parent!
It sounds like you are doing the right things.
Long ago, I had a co-worker ask me if fortnite was okay for their kid to play, and I said "I don't know. Why don't you go play fortnight with your kid this weekend and see for yourself" and it was like a switch flipped in their head. Playing games online with your kids is something you can do, both to see how people are interacting with them, and to see how they are interacting with other people. I think it is really important too, that kids (especially only-childs) see other people gaming online first hand, so they can see that the person on the other end could just as easily be their mom, or grandpa, or another human being, and not just a bot that they can antagonize without consequence.
By talking to your fucking kids lmao
Like, have a conversation with them. Treat them like a person, a real human being, with thoughts and feelings and basic decision making capabilities, instead of treating them like a wild animal that needs to be leashed.
Everyone immediately thinks "it's impossible for parents to be aware of and block everything they don't want their kids to look at on the Internet!". But maybe the first step should just be talking to your kids about what you do/do not want then looking at on the Internet, and trusting that they'll heed your warnings. Tight fisted control over what your kids can/can't see on the Internet should be the last resort.
Devices given to children can be configured to restrict access to unwanted things. Obviously, school networks already are.
The only uncontrollable thing would be kids seeing things via friends with less observant parents, but that is not a new thing.
No, it's the not the same but there are options you're ignoring.
We don't need to kid-proof all of society. Adults deserve things like freedom and privacy and to not be treated like children.
You dont give children tablets and phone, full stop.
Exactly, it's basically impossible to control as a parent, but just blaming the parents is a simple solution for many. Everybody loves their easy solutions to complex issues: left, right and center.
I don't give a shit if it's difficult, you chose to be a parent fucking deal with it and don't make it everybody else's problem
It's not impossible - parental controls can be used and school networks don't HAVE to allow access to Porn Hub
No it isn't.
Be a better parent.
Or, better yet: Don't have kids you aren't capable of raising properly.
If this all sounds too complicated, you aren't a capable parent.
So are you for or against mass surveillance veiled as "child safety"?
Should be pretty evident from the comment.
I can't help but see their comment as a joke. One can only hope
Hear me out: parents are irresponsible, and also can't watch their kids 24/7
I hear you. I guess shitty parents is a good enough reason to let a company monetize your PII for a bit before they (or one of their customers) gets hacked and dumps to the dark web.
It's not, but that doesn't make your argument any more sensible.
Ah, so maybe shitty parents isn't a good enough reason to let a company monetize and eventually lose your PII to the dark web?
That is what I said, yes.
Okay. Cool that's what I said too. Just... the way you said it sounded like you were advocating for using bad parenting as a pretext for massive breaches of privacy and identity security.
The way you said it sounded like you were advocating for parents to watch their kids every second of every day, and if they don't then whatever happens is their fault.
Americans- If you're thinking "this isn't so bad" please consider that all it takes is a teeny tiny, insignificant api added to the back end with absolutely no notice to users and suddenly the DHS has a database of dissenters, with cross-referenced IDs, photos of faces, chat history, link share history, raw uploaded photos, and approximate locations.
Say no to this. If you need a temporary alternative that's quick to get going, create a signal group chat with your friends.
LOL. Just like Netflix price increases, or reddit third party apps thing, the protest will barely register in usage metrics and discord will carry on.
These companies have effectively infinite resources with which to test changes with user reference groups, model potential outcomes, and mitigate risks. It's pure hubris to suggest that you have a better understanding of Discord's user base than they do.
The vaaast majority of users will just do the video age test and never think about it again.
Man 100%. Every now and then you hear that Facebook is “hemorrhaging users” or “it’s all over” but most normal people just don’t give a fuck and use it because they’re already there and their friends are too. This’ll be no different.
I’ve been off Facebook for at least 15 years. I’ve been trying to move people away from it for so long, or at least getting people to stop sharing shit about their kids, but a lot of people use it as their primary means of communication, news, photo sharing, etc. I just don’t get it. I do think most people I know just have ghost accounts now, though. But for some, Facebook is their internet. When they send me Facebook links, I just don’t interact with it at all. I don’t know what they sent me because I refuse to click the link, and even if I did, Facebook is blocked by my firewall and DNS so I won’t even be able to see it without getting around my own network. I just don’t even respond.
hmm idk, i only know like 2 people in my life that still use Facebook heavily. i know it's different in India though.
Facebook has seen stagnation or user drops in most mature markets, it's still growing in growing markets. India especially represents like half of all Facebook now.
no idea where you might be from, but this is not a globally universal issue. this will likely play out differently in different markets.
That’s a real good point. Here in the UK I’m the only one out of my friends group who doesn’t use it. Here’s me also jumping to conclusions that it’s the same everywhere !
In India, it's pretty much the old generation and elders who use it due to old habit I think. Most kids nowadays use instagram.
I dunno about netflix, but at least the reddit debacle diverted a lot of users to the fediverse.
If we get a similar exodus from discord to matrix, that would work wonders for spreading the fediverse to others. Most of them still haven't even heard of it.
A blip of users
I mean, do you want more people on the fediverse or not?
Thats not my point though.
At the time reddit closed their API to third parties loads of idiots were saying it was the end of reddit.
In reality reddit just sanitised their user base.
In reality, reddit gave a userbase to a platform that previously had none.
... and yet, that's not what im talking about.
Well they got rid of the users they didn't want so from their perspective, yeah.
They lowered the lowest common denominator by driving away the users that wouldn't tolerate their BS.
Idk, they lose users from stuff like this. For every one real user they lose, they are picking up several fake ones, the mechanized troll divisions, loitering chatbots with air support and artillery cover from amplifier accounts, influence agents, and political support to back them up.
The internet is dead, and those metrics are not the real metrics, the traffic from fake users, inauthentic users, is now greater than real people using the internet it's been reported.
So your metrics might even go up in user numbers/volume. It doesn't mean real people didn't leave, and while your value might not decrease having fake users and bots fill the void, the real value of that website decreases, and that real value will show through eventually.
LOL. Keep telling yourself that mate.
This is just supposition. They have the hard data.
Figures don't lie, but liars do figure.
It's not at all false that the true value in something lies in the true value, and that our clown economy that prizes confidence men and confidence games that value Tesla at a trillion dollars are unsustainable, and will in time come back to intrinsic values.
Having fake users may keep the company looking just as good, but it lessens the value. Interactions with bots doesn't satisfy most people, and will lessen the value to them, and they will use the site less. Moreover any advartising on the platform will see less payout because more of the accounts being served the ads are fake accounts operating under false pretense.
Just like reddit, they more than make up for users that left with new fake accounts, and they are already overrun with them, but when people are stuck interacting with those fake accounts they will generally use it less, because they aren't witty, they aren't insightful, they are spitting out learned answers that only sheep would enjoy fraternizing with. The fake accounts shout down real users, drown out real discussion anyplace that that discussion threatens the entrenched interests that employ those mechanized trolls, not just governments but corpoorations, all of them basically, they have trade groups that farm out contracts, often to AI, Actually Indians, to run the influence operations with the help of regular ai and computer programs because they are low cost and speak english well enough.
While the ivy league hacks running our businesses and government don't care if they have fake users that run off real users that makes their site less valuable intrinsically, because for now it doesn't affect their profitability, and they are unable to look beyond their next set of financial statements, it will catch up to them.
They will use their corrupt influence and anti competitive tactics to try and crush any upstarts that are nearing critical mass, so they don't think they have to cater to the user base at all, that we have no options, no alternatives. Let's make them wrong about that. Because following their lead is the end of the world.
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
After the reddit "collapse" of 2024 their market cap was > $6b following their IPO in November 2024. Right now it's $28b.
Yes, reddit is a cesspool and the UX has dropped off a cliff.
I'm sure /u/spez is tarrified that some dweeb on lemmy decided "it's going to catch up with them".
This might shock you but they don't care about your experience. Everyone made loads of money.
Not only that, verification is not mandatory. So, unless you frequent some questionable 2 furry goatse 1 cup channels, there is literally nothing to worry about. The rest will gladly verify their age and jerk off to their favorite AI generated porn.
They've stated elsewhere that even though they're deploying "age inference" (whatever that is), verification is mandatory if you don't want your account to be restricted to PG-13, basically.
Good.
Discord is overused for help forums and wikis, which makes them extremely difficult to search and dependent upon third party software to be maintained. I hope this will force people away from that behaviour and back to good old fashioned messageboards that have been working just fine since at least the 80s
Stop a calling this "age.verification" and start calling it what it is, "identity harvesting".
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
Many of the communities I am in are pissed and these aren't even tech people, this is even worse than what reddit did.The thing that most people online hate is age verification, who thought this was a good idea, reminds me of when Tumblr decided to ban porn same level of stupidity.
It's all about abuse.
Companies get too big for their britches and are accustomed to doing whatever they want with their sheep just going along.
I'm sure they're very surprised to see any kind of significant backlash.
They, like some political parties across the west, are arrogant in thinking people have no other choice. They've consolidated it all down into a few options, buying out their rivals, or crushing them legally, and or using anti competitive behavior to hurt them, that's against the law but not enforced because plutocracy, and think we have no other options, the other option is worse, so they can continually get worse and not lose market share, because what are you going to do?
You can start your own websites, they will use the law and courts to try and crush them. They will lean on isp's to strangle the traffic, get hosting sites to refuse to host them, they will lean on credit card processors to not process transactions for them. Maybe manufacture a terrorist connection to justify personally going after anyone involved in the website or it's operation.
There is no limit to the caprice of these entrenched interests where we are headed, with an openly corrupt government; openly sold out courts with contempt for the constitution and ancient rights of English Common Law countries, open contempt for their citizen charges seeking redress from powerful interests abusing them; an executive branch that is all but openly harvesting protection money, payoffs, and bidding off regulatory actions, bidding off laws and executive orders and justice department investigations, and setting the federal government up like a political machine from a century prior, where everybody pays and the boss gets a cut of everything. Like boss tweed or something, I don't know what we'd expect with a mobbed up blackmailing and blackmailed real estate baron from New York City that's been involved in over 10k court cases and never once paid any real price for cheating everyone he's done business with that couldn't hurt him and slandered them to justify it.
We could go on with the corruption bit, but point being, any new sites that start to get critical mass need to be set up in a way that they can't strangle traffic off on them, and that they cannot take down the whole unit for allegations of criminality in any part of it. Easy enough for them to set up a fake terror account, wire money from here to terror there, and then take the entire thing down. To sanction everyone involved. The federation bit could help limit the liability and prevent a lot of that maybe. But we need our own infrastructures. We need our own internets. We should be setting up community cooperative internets everywhere. There is no reason we should pay two companies trillions of dollars to provide internet poorly and spy on us in the process, when hundreds of billions could provide ourselves internet at cost under a less intrusive nature.
They for sure made the calculation, how many leave maybe 10-20% if we are lucky. How many stay and give them the right to sell their most sensitive data. How much money do they make with the data? Its more than they lose for sure.
What did reddit do? I heard about for in the Uk and aussielands, because they are leading the way in subjugating the internet to ai, to id every account and associate it with id and likeness and every word, every page view, to run ai threat detection, and create secret social scores, to then without attribution filter down to banks and search engines and isp's, to digital price tags on cctv facial recognition systems, to law enforcement information networks, the courts, etc., to decide your treatment. If you get the loan, pass the background check, get the job, what search results your internet shows you, what prices you are offered for individualized ai pricing. How much police scrutiny you get, your treatment in court. Your treatement in the business community.
This is surrendering their citizens to big tech, for a cut of the information and control of the all encompassing social scores. There will be ways for the authorities to slip bad scores on individual people, and groups, they don't like as there always are. How else are they going to stamp out anit salmonism or whatever? Or the criticism to their corrupt rule down the road.
Age controls, and chatcontrol, are trojan horses, redesigned as trojan sheep, to bring big tech and ai behind the walls of liberal democracy. It's a betrayal of your citizens to the most powerful people in the world, the peter thiels, with the most malign worldview and plans imaginable being put in charge of ranking citizens from winners to losers.
So reddit just did the age checks for the aussies and uk peoples so far right? They didn't do anything to mine in that regard, their moderation is dishonest site wide, violating people for false pretenses, for other reasons, so you can't actually challenge or even be sure what you are being violated for, whether it's Israel, or triggering some group of snowflakes like conservatives. But I was able to create new accounts without any such scrutiny just an email that returns a message to activate the account, as of half a year ago anyway.
I think the biggest exodus from reddit happened when they limited their API so all 3rd party apps died at the same time
But reddit had a lot of blunders so this is just my guess
Fwiw Australia's law quite specifically says they can't require ID for age verification, requires that if the user does choose to use ID it cannot be used for any other purposes.
Aside from ID, they're allowed a variety of options for age detection. Most of them seem to have gone with a short of sentiment analysis type technique. They work out you're over 16 based on the fact that your account is 10+ years old (and not many <6 year olds have accounts) or you're talking about politics more than Bluey. That's not collecting any data they didn't already have.
The real problem is, that the majority of users won't change, and it's the users that make Discord. There could be a much better alternative but if users are too lazy to change, it is worth nothing.
This is the case with Facebook messenger too. There are great alternatives, but it's messenger that has the userbase
And compounding the issue is that there isn't a better alternative to discord in terms of feature set and accessibility. Matrix is the closest, but its just... not there yet. There's no option for people who care about privacy that isn't a steep downgrade, and that just sucks.
The reality is that there never will be, because the feature set offered by Discord is functionally impossible to provide to the public without charging a subscription fee most users would be unwilling to pay. It's a doomed business model, where enshittification and being acquired is inevitable.
As someone who barely used discord, what are these other features, is it not just a regular chat app?
Not OP, but I'll answer from my own perspective. Note that Discord terminology can be a bit weird, since a server is just a unique shared group space, but hopefully makes sense.
So you can:
And key thing is: all very easy to get started with, whether you're just wanting to join a server, or start an entire community.
Big deal for my uses currently is voice chat and screen share in one place, while still being able to organise stuff into separate channels, pin messages in them, etc.
I think right now if I had to replace it, assuming I could get the people I interact with off (which is either 20 or 1500 people, depending on how much I'd want to carry with me), it'd have to be a mix of Matrix/Stoat and probably Steam's built-in features. Maybe a classic forum. That is, if I wanted to have all the features I use. I could do with less, but it's frustrating.
I think the alternatives will get there eventually, self-hosted even, but self-hosting also has a hardware cost.
That said, I really don't know why software stuff was ever moved on discord. My uses are gaming and university community-related.
For people that don't like Discord, this change does probably nothing. I only start it when I need it. I do basic communication,I don't buy anything and I don't follow 18+ content.
For all purposes this change just decreases the likelihood of accidentally seeing pr0n.
It's a sliding slope though. The initial reasoning is fair. But it will eventually spread to other features like (potentially) creating and owning servers or holding administrative and moderation roles
It's the same with the chat control currently looking over EU. Nobody can say that they are against efforts to stop CSAM. The issue is that the efforts don't limit themselves to fighting that. Likewise the age verification on Discord does not seem to be targeted or limited to certain content. They are leaving the door open to use it any way they want
I've heard people mention Matrix, but I've not tried it yet.
It's definitely nowhere near as polished as Discord, but it does a good enough job for my small gaming group to have moved over.
The equivalent of a Discord server is a Space, which is made up of Rooms (channels). Unfortunately Rooms are displayed in order of recent activity; admins can't define a set order to group things by function.
The two weirdest things: there are no audio calls, you have to do a video call and turn off the webcam. And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it's just strange).
Pretty sure discord has the same.
Discord has E2EE?
QR based sign in
It's optional; you can also just use your standard username and password.
Well yes, but it has it as an option.
I don't think the QR code has anything to do with encryption, though. They're just trying to make it convenient to sign in.
Meanwhile, Matrix has a lot of extra stuff going on behind the scenes.
Oh, it does? I've always logged in with username and password.
Yeah, but you can also sign in by scanning a QR code with a logged in device.
Though technically it's then other way around, you sign in to your desktop by scanning the QR code in the login window with your logged in phone.
It has QR based sign in. Shit, Steam has QR based sign in so it shouldn't be weird for people at this point.
So do "Smart TV" apps. Or messenger like Signal. That is really a common thing nowadays.
I've seen QR-based login before as an option. (Heck, I was an early adopter of SQRL...or tried to be. Sadly that protocol never went anywhere.) But it's not typically mandatory, and I don't think most casual users (the kinds of people who just reuse the same password everywhere rather than using a password manager) aren't likely to be especially comfortable with it.
They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top
I think the video call rooms (always open channels) remember your preference but im not sure rn
I don't see that. Video, Threads, Room Info, People is all I have at the top of my rooms.
Thats weird?
What version of element-desktop are you on? If its element-web it could be that your server is running a outdated version.Its only available in DMs not groupchats. It was added back in december https://github.com/element-hq/element-desktop/releases/tag/v1.12.5Oh right, nice catch. Yeah I only use it as a Discord alternative, so no audio calls for me yet.
Anyway, audio calls in that way aren't quite what I'm after anyway. They'll work. They'll do the job. Just like the existing video calls with webcams turned off do the job. But the Discord style chat room with an assumption of audio only on voice detection, with robust screensharing (including PC audio!) capabilities in an otherwise audio-only call is what I'm really after.
Yeah the video rooms feature is most of that but not quite. The "call" always stays open so you can join and wait until others join without disrupting them. It has good screensharing but no option to share your output audio. You have to turn off the webcam before joining. The voice detection thing would be cool as an optional thing because it can also cause problems. I just use a filter plugin for that on my computer.
Yeah the last thing you didn't bring up was screen share. I've found Element's screen sharing to be rather lacklustre. It's share whole screen only, rather than having application or game-specific sharing (and Discord's gamer-specific feature of detecting you're in a game and immediately surfacing the option to share that is excellent here). And when I've used it, I've found audio from the game doesn't make it through, and I'm not sure if it's possible (I've never really tried looking through all the deep options) to send game audio while also having your mic, without using third-party software to mix the two together into one stream—which would necessarily break your choice detection filter.
I tried starting an audio call (had a telephone icon) yesterday but it turned on my webcam without prompting. Didn't see a setting for it not to do that, and that's a wild default.
I never really thought if matrix as a discord alternative.
They're both messaging apps but directed at different markets / uses.
I would have said Matrix is a kind of hybrid. Obviously Matrix has 1 on 1 chats and individual IRC-like rooms, which are not at all like Discord.
But the addition of Spaces is very much positioning itself as an open Discord alternative.
Yeah, I have no idea why the matrix developers decided to have stuff called "spaces and rooms" instead of servers and channels.
Coming from IRC it always baffled me why people on Discord would talk about servers and channels too. Especially servers. It still irks me when someone says "Join my Discord server".
Calling them servers in discord always annoyed me. Spaces and rooms isn't much better. Room is fine, but space is incredibly nondescript.
Like the other replies you've gotten, I never really liked "server". It implies something very different from what it is.
Rooms is pretty obvious and straightforward, I think. And to be honest I rather like Spaces too. It's a lot less immediately clear, but there's something ineffable about it that just feels right to me. I'm just glad to see the old Communities feature (which was their now-deprecated first attempt at a Discord-like functionality) is hard to even find out about now. When I first joined I was confused about the difference between Communities and Spaces and had to search to figure out which to use, but when checking now to remember what the old one was called, I found it hard to even find the name of it.
I run a Matrix server and it's deffo YMMV based on the server admin and how good they are at maintaining things.
Getting the federation to work can also be a chore and a half. Otherwise it works super well. The clients often implement features on top of the protocol (looking at Element and their weird jitsi integration for instance).
I and my group are all just on matrix.org. We didn't want the risk of dealing with potentially less reliable servers or federation.
We also use Element desktop and Element X for Android. I think I read that the old Element might have supported audio calls? But these days, it's video only, with the very weird UX of having two different options for video calls (one being, as you say, Jitsi). I assume there's a historical reason for that, but it doesn't make much sense as a design today, to me.
Having Discord-style audio rooms built around the idea that people are not broadcasting all the time (as opposed to the more chat-like design of today) would be one of the most impactful comparatively low effort (considering they already have video calls working) things they could do, IMO.
Absolutely a strong way to go.
Yea, there are some historical reasons for the integrations, but they could do a better job evolving the UI to match the current state of things for sure.
I've been forwarded this pretty neat summary of the current alternatives (Mastodon thread) :
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@mdiluz/116043145998840217
It’s terrible. They’ve had years and years to get their shit together and they still can’t. It’s just horrendously bad.
I use it all the time. There are many mature clients, and matrix is a protocol, so I don’t know what you mean. Since the sliding sync implementations, I have found it really nice to use.
Don’t know what to tell you. I’m literally unable to read messages sent to me, they all show up as “unable to decrypt”. If I can’t even use the damn protocol then how many clients it has doesn’t matter.
And I have tried different clients.
And as far as I’ve read, this “unable to decrypt” affects a lot of users.
What server are you using and with which client most recently? It sounds like your device is unverified so untrusted or the key isn’t present.
To expand, “unable to decrypt” would affect a lot of users. That’s a good thing and exactly what you want it to do when not correctly trusted.
I'm using the default matrix server and I've tried with Element and FluffyChat. I've never used a different device to access Matrix. It has always been Firefox through Element, and then when that stopped working I switched to try to use FluffyChat which also did not work.
No, you do not want this affecting every user who has done nothing to change their environment. The device is still trusted, else I wouldn't be able to sign in and get new messages at all. Here's a massive list detailing many of the ways this can happen and note that this goes back to 2022. So for 4 years now they've had numerous issues with thousands of users being able to decrypt messages sent on the only device they've ever used and it still isn't fixed.
Maybe I came off as dismissive or just stupid, but I really did mean to be helpful. Of course you don’t want users experience bad interactions. I meant if those interactions were for an actual intended reason. So yeah, never mind.
Bummer you’ve had a hard time. I think they and the free software community are trying to put together a good solution.
Sorry, clearly I responded too harshly. Honestly I'm just tired of the suggestions to use Matrix, when myself (and several other people I know personally) have constant issues with it. I've tried to use Matrix for over 3 years now and I am required to use it sometimes, but every time I'm incredibly frustrated.
I agree, and I do think we need that, but sometimes the focus should be on usability before security. I know how much that sucks, but if you look at Lemmy you see the same thing. The focus was on usability first. Security came later, because (honestly) security is kinda pointless when every user can set up their own instance and intercept any posts they want. We'll get there eventually with security, but if people aren't using your platform then security is pointless.
Your server, not mine, homie. Shop around for a better admin who actually knows how to install the thing.
So the Matrix developers/creators don’t know how to actually install the thing then? lol not a good response homie.
The overloaded, overbloated main instance?
No, they don't. It either shouldn't exist or should be broken up.
So the devs who created it can’t run an instance and it doesn’t scale properly. Yeah, I’m just gonna go out on a real short limb here and say that maybe the problem isn’t the instance.
Matrix is terrible any way you slice it.
Agreed, Matrix works fine as a toy, but it breaks down after a year or two with even a moderate amount of chat.
For me it broke down the second I started using it. I literally am unable to see chats on the only device I’ve ever used to access matrix, they’re all “can’t be decrypted”.
Slightly related. Does anyone know of any decent Matrix clients (apps) on Android and/or Linux? Because, and I don't mean to be rude when I say this but...Element is very, very bad.
Im using SchildiChat on Android
I like Cinny
Stoat.chat seems to be a more likely alternative. I love matrix, but I don't think it can replace Discord. Not yet.
This seems to be like Bluesky vs. Mastodon.
I see a lot of morons shilling one over the other, so I expect it to be the stupid-platform.
For me it's as long as it's not Discord.
As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.
The absolute shitload majority of users will not care about this enough to stop using the product
I found this little substack article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
After what happened in Nepal last year, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living. The powers that be saw a small country use it as a tool to affect change. To me, and tell me if I lm jumping to conclusions here, its obvious as to why this policy change is happening at all, to prevent the site from being used in that manner again.
Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they're going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it's someone else's problem.
So they're going to turn everybody into teenagers. Last I checked, teenagers can't buy things like nitro right? Doesn't that completely fuck up their own business model?
They must have come up with some sort of plan to merit losing some nitro users for harvesting personal information.
Y’all just aren’t thinking about the shareholders.
It'll be the new Victorian age all over again. Morals and acting righteous up top and secret human stuff just underneath the surface. Just look at what is happening in the bad old usa today. This is not about protecting minors.
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
I've been floating the idea of running Matrix on my NAS anyway, so thanks to Discord for finally pissing me off enough to prioritise getting off of the shitty platform.
I highly recommend looking into Matrix Ansible Deploy, has an amazing documentation and actually works robustly. It will make the whole process of hosting it way easier, I only needed to change like 5 config values, give Ansible the SSH key for my server, and then basically run "just setup-all" from a Ansible docker.
Oh that's interesting, I'll look into it. Cheers!
I was using discord with notifiarr for a notification platform for my jellyfin server/*arr stack. Shut all that down and setup a self-hosted instance of ntfy today. Works perfect, should have done it sooner.
this is not at all what i'm seeing on discord, and I think it's worthy of note that the article's sample is Reddit posts in r/discordapp. Discord users who use Reddit in general have a systemic bias that's close to ours, as opposed to the majority that is young Discord users.
sadly people will forget about this next week
The EU has apparently decided that this has to be done for most public platforms by July 2026, so Discord may not have much of a choice and other platforms will likely follow: (Edit: I forgot, the EU strict age verification stuff seems to be limited to EU DSA's definition of "platforms" so as a text messenger I'm not sure Discord is part of it. But this'll still likely be coming to more services near you and perhaps Discord is just voluntarily joining the chaos..)
I could be wrong I’m not a lawyer, assume everything I write from here is bullshit, but see here:
https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say “Online services get up to 12 months to apply age verification, EU guidelines say” This was in July 2025.
EU guidelines in question seem to be:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-guidelines-protection-minors and
https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226
Quotes:
“[…] the Union legislature enacted Article 28 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and the Council (6). Paragraph 1 of this provision obliges providers of online platforms […] to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors, […]”
“Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below.”
“In the following circumstances, […] the Commission considers the use of access restrictions supported by age verification methods an appropriate and proportionate measure to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors: […] an online platform accessible to minors has identified risks to minors’ privacy, safety, or security, including content, conduct and consumer risks as well as contact risks (e.g., arising from features such as live chat, image/video sharing, anonymous messaging)”
“Age estimation methods can complement age verification technologies and can be used in addition to the former,” (AKA the alternative to a literal gov ID check seems to be big data AI sucking up all user data to estimate user age.)
The in my opinion horrible solution the EU seems to have found to avoid sharing the physical ID for services that don't want to request one, is apparently this app: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui Which from what I can tell
The EU app seems to require Google device attestation so all custom ROMs are out and to be a citizen you can apparently no longer own your device,
Unless you use iOS or Android you're apparently not a citizen,
Once everyone is used to using some citizen app like that, I feel like a fascist government could easily tie it to a social score or other authoritarian measures bewyond the age verification.
Anyway, I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. But spread the word, somehow press seems to be ignoring this.
Oh right, another account to delete.
The only viable alternatives are Stoat or Steam Chat. Teamspeak is still dragging their feet when it comes to modern feature support.
I've read that Stoat is bad for self-hosting, something about calls/video broadcasting not being part of the docker image, and needing to compile from source with every update?
I spent most of my day searching, spinning up containers, and discussing with friends and users on my discord 'server' about what to do. I burned out after a few hours of frustration. I had Mumble up and running a year ago but that was a bit too techy for new users, and it's not really the 'community' feature set that I'd want...
Man if steam made a shitty version of discord I'd happily use it. I really like the boy integration.
Mumble vs teamspeak?
Well, I hope that Revolt/Stoat picks up most people.
did you tried it, what is the experience like?
Honestly, it's almost a drop-in replacement as far as UX is concerned. The challenge is the lack of existing communities, which could be overcome if a whole community joined.
no pressure to the stoat team but I hope they put focus on the selfhosting part
understandable, I suggest contributing to the project if you can
the single problem is when you never codet in rust:(. I am only able to code in C and python an a bit of java
What's wild to me is that I'm not on corporate social media, and the outrage has absolutely exploded on Mastodon and Lemmy. I wonder how bad it has gotten on the corporate media sites, because there's no way the algorithm hasn't noticed it.
It reminds me of when OnlyFans (stupidly) told us all they weren't going to allow porn anymore, as if that wasn't the core of their business.
XMPP is the way! There are dozens of us!
https://roguesecurity.dev/blog/xmpp
Ive been trying to migrate off since 2020
Communities I follow refuse to, and no other service is close to parity. Guilded was the closest until they allowed themselves to golden parachute with their Roblox purchase, so they're now not longer worth considering
Teamspeak and teamspeak6 is a joke, anyone who prefers it is off their rocker
I've been following Revolt/Stout, River on FreeNet since I found it on FUTO, and others but frankly all alternatives I've found suck for varius reasons
If Gen Z had left Twitter when Musk ruined it this wouldn't be happening.
If people didn't leave Twitter when it became an unholy cestpool of alt-right propaganda, they have chosen to stay there because their audience is the alt-right.
Ah, haven't heard that in a long time. 'Member when Nazis weren't mainstream conservatives?
We were just being polite and giving some of them the benefit of the doubt. Now, if you're conservative you're a fucking Nazi no mincing of words. Especially the neo-liberals who talk "oh this is awful someone should do something" then vote for his nominees.
Unfortunately this isn't true. My GenZ niece is trans. Her and her friends believe they have to stay on there for "Reach" and for each other. They are now nearly 4 years into being brainwashed. She explained to me last year how activism was just a meme. (This was before the recent protests)
This platform has trans people believing that pronouns are why things broke down. This is not me using hyperbole, which I often do. Just is.
I'm truly surprised that lots of people don't like it. I expected most will just silently obey the new orders of our overlords.
I am already learning about matrix protocol which is seeming like a good alternative. https://matrix.to/#/#all-topics:matrix.org
Discord was always an overhyped crap.
It's basically IRC, with 2 good features (voice, video) and a whole helluva lotta bullshit features that only exist to be monetized (Nitro, stickers, etc).
All of that extra bullshit actively detracts from discord and I hope Matrix never follows suit.
True, but it made it easy to chat with others without having to enter in an IP address.
Definitely uninstalling discord. I hardly use it anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC
Thats why it is important to have an alternetive ready people can switch to. If there is a backlash (for any platform) and a decentralized alternative is there this is the biggest chance to become the "norm". So thanks to all the people working on lemmy, peertube, mastodon, etc.
So far, I have stumbled upon Stoat, a project called Sharkord, the Matrix network and the XMPP network.
Xmpp is both secure and snappy. Stoat doesn't federate but the interface is really Discord-like.
Some kind of XMPP based Stoat would be nice.
The practice of making a "free" thing so you can whore your MAU numbers out to private equity to keep the lights on should be wholesale abolished.
I'm already making backups and deleting all the posts and DMs I made on discord. Yes I know they probably have everything backed up, but there is always a possibility that they lose that shit or don't fully back up everything. I am not interesting in playing along with their bullshit.
I keep researching alternatives, and every time I circle back around toward Matrix, despite criticisms. Part of it is a question of what everyone is using. I pretty consistently see that groups who use or used to use irc are now using Matrix additionally or as a replacement.
Part of me would like xmpp to be the best answer, but I've yet to see an implementation that handles public communities well, particularly for anything that functions at all like Discord. Matrix seems to be at least gaining voice/video chat support?
I mean I've wanted to change anyway since the enshittification started. I think the first thing was a paid avatar/profile decoration store. Annoying enough, but if they're decent cosmetics and not crazy prices I can understand. I still wish there was an internal, native seeing that would just remove all the visual teasing of paid options, but I can ignore it. (Mainly I hate trying to add an emoji to chat and just seeing pages of emoji from servers that I can't use on the one I'm on- which is already super annoying, but they put the regular result ones behind all those so you have to either scroll past them or manually switch to the default emoji page- that's just pure rage bait- default should be first, followed by the ones from that server that you can actually use)
But my main problem was when Nitro showed up.
Unfortunately, of the up and comers none are quite ready yet, and none have the full suite of functionality.
This change actually doesn't affect me at all, I don't really engage with any communities. I have one that I use just to mess with admin options and see what kinda choices there are and how it works, one server with a few friends (like 5 regulars counting myself) and one for some of my siblings that we only really use to play Jackbox remotely.
But I still resent the change and have wanted a good alternative ever since subscriptions started.
So anyone who knows some good altenatives that are either FOSS or EU based?
What features did they exactly disable for unverified accounts?
It is not disabled yet, but they will be resticting age gated channels by the end of the month to anyone who hasn't provided them with a copy of their ID
Worth noting that Discord had a pretty bad data leak a few months back, where it turned out the ID verification company they hired was not deleting the IDs after they were checked
Edit: I'm not completely against the idea of age checks for adult content, but it needs to be implemented in a transpatent manner, and the verification should be non-traceable.
The EU appears to be working on a pretty solid solution as part of their digital wallet.
But that is not what Discord is using.
Edit 2: Added some relevant links
You are treated as a child, literally, so no nsfw stuff. I think no advertisements as well.
No advertisements seems like a bonus to me
"Give us personal data or we won't be able to monetise every waking moment of your life" seems like a real silver lining. I wonder if they then can't legally do certain marketing things because the user isn't age verified?
I wasn't a huge discord use but I just removed all the channels before deleting the app on every device.
Not going to make a huge difference but if everyone does it, maybe it will!
Steam asking you Everytime means they ACTUALLY are deleting private details you give them, and only store them locally so you have full control over how long they know.
This is literally the fucking exact ideal way this should be handled. Why the fuck would you be upset over literally the most consumer way possible to handle age verification.
No one sane is going to pretend we don't need some form of verification. Even if it is just lip service for legal purposes. 10 year olds should a have at least a check to be like hay this isn't for you ask Mom and dad first. So parents can also be aware there IS something for them to be aware of.
You can't expect parents to be omniscient after all.
So having companies actually respect data privacy and control, and give appropriate warnings is literally exactly what we want.
They are not though, deleting the information. They are just not keeping it in that part of the system.
Anytime you think they are deleting your information, ask yourself, is that information valuable to them? The answer is always yes. Then ask, why would they delete it? Why would they not keep it secretly or otherwise? They would, they always do.
Which doesn't even address the point that other interests got that information when you gave it to steam. You verifying your age is information the national security state would sweep up, but possibly others, to say nothing of hackers targeting the company holding the data. Some of whom are the national security state.
Actually, if it would be possible to somehow ask parents beforehand, it probably would be perfect.
Say, you register an internet connection and sign an email that will receive requests from DNS upon visiting explicit sites. Whenever you visit these sites, you get an email with a "Confirm" button. Let's say it has 1 hour cooldown before sending request for the same domain again. In case your child dials up pornhub, you have a choice + you know they are trying to access something meant for adults.
As for open access points, they already been using DNS sinkholes and are totally not for NSFW stuff anyway, so all access denied by default.
No ID needed aside of signing up for an internet connection which already requires an ID anyway. Everyone is happy. No idea if it is possible.
Tangential, but if it is enforced (alchohol has good reason to do so) it should be enforced impartially regardless of how you look, otherwise it's discrimination. My comment is based on my Asian looking experience.
so... you do want face verification for online interactions?
edit: In-person, for a "regulated" substance - it seems reasonable to require that proof be checked as part of policy, regardless of appearance. There's no storage (in most cases) and the cashier is the only one who looks at the ID and they are supposed to do it to keep their job. The only place I've seen recently where your ID is actually tracked is stuff like sudafed, where buying too much makes you a potential meth maker.
Online, the rule has been "trust me, bro" forever. There's no person testing you, aside from maybe a paywall to ensure you have a credit card as an age check. Steam is doing the online equivalent of minimal validation and minimal retention that the booze store is.
This is hardly OMGVALVE.
Anytime they scan your id the information is stored. They know you went into that store and bought alcohol. If you think they aren't storing that information, I've an exciting investment opportunity for you.
It doesn't matter if the schlepps at the store don't see the information stored and don't retain a record, obviously they wouldn't.
I hear that. My local ABC store doesn't scan my ID, though I don't see a future where they don't eventually scan every time; and my local grocery store scans occasionally, but not always.
I can't just not buy age-verified products, though, because sometimes it's cold medicine or a prescription. **
Back to the original thread, this is not a Discord problem, this is a privacy problem. We need to push back on data capture in general and tell legislators that privacy is important to all people, even those who buy booze.
** could we make little sneaky stickers that obfuscate the barcode enough to prevent it scanning? The cashier would likely revert to visual inspection without the data retention: face matches photo, age is good, override.
Wait, there are still ABC stores?
What bothers me that people are outraged as if Discord would lock everyone out until they prove their age. As far as I can see, age verification is not mandatory unless you want to engage in 18+ channels. No major changes besides some friend invites warnings, blurred age restricted content and some other things.
I like your point about that nobody talks about children lying they are 18+. So far there are no way to restrict them from engaging in adult chatrooms. Discord has a insane reputation for being a cesspool of pedophilia and exposure to adult content to children. Shit ton of people talked about it. And now, when Discord decided to actually do something about it - major buzz against it.
Noting will change to any user if they use Discord to chat and play with friends. What will change is a mandatory verification for people who visit explicit groups and channels marked as 18+ content. No more, no less.
As you have mentioned, they are protecting themselves before going public.
I use discord to chat and play with friends, many servers have an nsfw channel to share things that you probably don't want to suddenly be on your phone screen in public. It will also filter images in dms.
It's not the end of the world, but it's ineffective at tackling the actual problem, if anything adds appeal by making content "forbidden". I'm certainly cancelling my cheap nitro I've had for a while because I'm not giving any company arbitrarily implementing identity verification any of my money.
I'll also probably look into setting up my own matrix server later...
That is the difficult part for people to accept. Your friend chat might be full of adults and you have nothing to worry about when posting this content. But, say we got a major channel with hundreds of people that might or might not be adults. If there are NSFW channels, these children can access them. How to prevent this?
ID verification does not fix the issue, of course. But at the very least it minimizes the damage. As many state, children will find explicit content somewhere else - so why bother? I would argue that letting things stay as they are doesn't solve the issue at all. Doesn't even try to regulate it.
Discord has been known to be a gateway for children to explicit content. It also has been known as a place where many children diddlers been hanging around. This always has been an chat/call/video call app. People who miss their friend NSFW chats, can move them outside of the app and keep on using Discord as before without needing to prove their age. Maybe inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
I disagree that this will help at all. Certainly not to a degree that justifies restricting other people's freedom. Grooming happens in small circles and doesn't become substantially harder if teenagers can't access nsfw channels. Predators don't seek out adult-dominated spaces. Kids might be exposed to slightly less porn or something but they will still go to pornhub, and now an access channel where there are at least likely normal adults around that could give context id needed is restricted. Worst case they'll be driven to fringe spaces filled with predators.
And also, people don't just use nsfw channels for porn or questionable memes. People mark servers as 18+ for a variety of reasons, some have political discussion channels marked as nsfw to make them easier to avoid, etc.
Teamspeak 6! Voice + Streaming. Selfhosting is also possible! You can also rent an instance from them for 4-5 bucks.
https://s3nd.chat/
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
I hope this brings stoat.chat more attention. It's promising, but not at the same level in terms of features.
I am going to bet noone in their team wants to do that, they are most likely pressured into it legally.
I hope they find a way to fight this
The thing is they aren't (yet). It looks like the EU might be thinking about introducing some sort of requirement for age verification, but it's nowhere near decided enough for Discord to demand it globally. There are also methods of age verification that are much better and more secure than what they will use, like the German AusweisApp.
The eID can do this EU wide already but it's usage is regulated and that's not something a company wants to accept. The EU Digital Identity Wallet would hit the spot even more, since it's very privacy friendly: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/pages/930450954/The+Age+Verification+Manual
That's still in testing though and even less in the interest of a company that wants to extract as much user data as possible.
Sorry if I misread your post, but hopefully this comment of mine is relevant:
In my humble opinion, the digital wallet is horrible, because as far as I can tell 1. it requires Google device attestation so all custom ROMs are out and to be a citizen you can apparently no longer own your device, 2. unless you use iOS or Android you’re apparently not a citizen and you can't e.g. purely use Linux (this is as far as I know not the case with the German AusweisApp), 3. once everyone is used to using some citizen app like that, I feel like a fascist government could easily tie it to a social score or other authoritarian measures bewyond the age verification. 4. There is a privacy friendly alternative approach for age verification anyway, that most governments seem to conveniently be ignoring: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/13/california-law-online-age-checks-00606115
Also see here on the EU apparently trying to make this mandatory: https://leminal.space/post/31858818/21120139
Not exactly sure what you mean by this. I know for a fact that AusweisApp2 works fine on e.g. Linux and there is this: https://www.ausweisapp.bund.de/open-source-software
Of course a close eye must be kept on this but ffs this is miles better compared to the usual practise of copying ID documents in shops or using the PostIdent system and beats any 3rd fishy party provider - and that includes device manufacturers.
Same for the upcoming Wallet asking for open and established standards.
I am referring to the EU Wallet age verification app: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/ Sorry that I forgot to link it.
And just because it might beat PostIdent, doesn't mean it's sane to give up online anonymity for age checks everywhere. The EU claims the wallet will allow anonymous age checks, but if they ever tracked you, pretty sure you wouldn't know.
This is not how remote attestation works. It's the whole point of the age verification of the wallet that such meta data doesn't have to be stored. The data submitted is transparent and can be viewed before accepting the verification. It's in the core concept that this process is unlinkable and the goal is to implement this with ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) mechanisms.
That is in the technical spec for this proposal. It is designed for exactly this kind of requested online anonymity.
Does this have to be watched? Absolutely Yes. What you're doing here is spreading FUD though without any proof whatsoever just because "iTs fRoM tHe gOv". Now I don't know your frame of reference and it's probably a good idea to keep a healthy level of mistrust in place but(!) the EU does a lot of things correct and I take this over any system designed by a private company that is definitely always only interested in our best: money.
Here are my sources:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/ (I don't agree with every bit of that article.)
("CL" seems to refer to a common zero knowledge proof algorithm.)
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technical-specification/blob/main/docs/architecture-and-technical-specifications.md#332-enrolment-methods-without-existing-identification
(As far as I know, they mean device attestation with this where you no longer fully control your device.)
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/issues/20
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/issues/15
Feel free to share your sources.
I've heard Matrix was involved in some crypto bullshit and military operations of some sort. I want an alternative but Matrix is just shady enough all around for me to stay the hell away.
For someone that used discord only for video chat and the chat sidebar for D&D since we have players in person and a couple in other states, what would you all recommend?
Should we just switch to Zoom or something?
My understanding is that if your community is not adult content and you aren't on any adult servers, you won't need to ID verify. But I suspect it's only a matter of time before all accounts are required to verify.
Matrix would be great for that. You just need a single room for that sort of thing, and the video support is pretty great.
I guess the positive side of this is that at least some open source projects might move away from discord now.
The negative is that a lot of them used discord not only for communication but also documentation, losing all of that knowledge in the process.
Just copy paste it over?
that will do it. was thinking about over-moderation and reddit mentality moderation ideas/power trips. never jumped into tw/reddit/ but the ad buisness model infected everything. no ads and contributions feel good too
Is there a reason people don't just go back to Vent/TS? Has it really been so long since those were the de facto options that people are in a quandary over what to do when Discord is clearly in the midst of rapid enshittification?
require a laser scan of whole body. for security
How to kill your company 101
Anyone have any experience with Jami?
xmpp and mumble.
There really isn't a good alternative to Discord, sadly. Yes, I've tried Matrix
We need socialism
*blinks
...What?
I'm sorry everyone, this reply was for a totally different post and I don't understandd how it got on this post.
Time to organize
Atleast point the gun in the right direction, please. I've used Discord since it's release, when I moved over from Skype. I've seen the enshittification all the way through and can safely say, as with every other SaaS software, if its run by a corporation it will eventually pile into a bag of shit. Thats not the users fault. Ive been looking for a promising alternative for a long time but there just isnt a good alternative. When it comes to features used by Discords users and communities most alternatives are lacking some key component that makes a switch hard. I just hope this speeds up the development of these features on alternative platforms.