Discord walks back age verification fears for most users
Too late assholes... I'm already deleting most of the posts I made on my discord and I will be migrating elsewhere soon.
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Comments150https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/discord-walks-back-age-verification-fears-for-most-usersOpen linkView original on discuss.online
People need to realize that this isn't JUST a Discord issue. This is a policy issue AS WELL. Fucking pay attention to the politics around you. And this isn't just a United States issue as well.
this is true.. its not just Discord.. politics are pushing hard on tech.. like Facebook, Google, well everything basically.. They want to push age verification everywhere.
Its really dangerous, and I will never comply (even though I have nothing to hide). I already deleted my discord. I will not join back anymore. Its too late already.
Each chat, social network or anything that is trying to implement this -> ACCOUNT DELETED.
Edit: Discord's preparation to go public with an IPO.. So go away from discord now.
What I'm saying isn't that you should or shouldn't delete social media accounts. What I'm saying is that eventually they're all going to HAVE to do it to be able to operate within certain countries. The account deletion/boycott/etc isn't enough, you have to go after the political leaders that are FORCING companies into these deals cause governments are GOING to continue to go after companies to force the whole of the internet into surveilling users. Policy and laws need to be changed. The work HAS to be done.
I just host my own open source instances. Like matrix for chat. And mbin for the fediverse. This is how I now communicate with you.
No age verification. Mbin will never implement it either. And matrix won't either. Otherwise I will fork matrix also.
Good for you, honestly. But not the point I'm trying to make at all.
Yea I got your point
You must never comply ESPECIALLY if you have nothing to hide. They are treating innocent people like terrorists and criminals and this is not acceptable.
I pray that the impetus from all this results in overturning all of the (allegedly) anti-terrorist legislation made post 9/11 (post 2000 in some cases).
I agree. I just mentioned it explicitly, since I was afraid of responses like.. Ow.. Do you hide something?
ahem... politics is NOT pushing on tech..
tech is pushing and telling politics what to do. tech controls politics now
Well.. I dunno well.. I think both. I believe nobody wants to be responsible and they just point to each other 🤔
Bullshit. There are plenty of examples of politics pushing on tech and tech pushing back. Tech may have its hands in politics' pocket, but they don't have a hand up their backside like you imply.
They don't actually care about age verification, they just want the personal information.
They are trying to set up identifying every account to a name and face to have their computers record everything, from their footage on the streets, cctv of you in your car, in stores, over traffic lights, to every website you visit, every word you read, every word you write, and so forth and run it through AI threat detection/social scores. It's new tech that is coming online and they are trying to surrender us to it, to bring this trojan horse behind the walls of liberal democracy. To let Palantir and like companies to decide winners and losers, what jobs you can get, loans, what search engines will even show you, what prices you are charged, how the government treats you, how businesses treat you, etc. All in a way not attributed to it, that you can never know and never challenge.
100% accurate.
This became incredibly obvious to me several months ago. I was trying to buy vape parts (coils and tanks, no liquids or batteries or anything) and the site wanted me to do a 3-D selfie to verify my age.
First of all, absolfuckinglutely not. Second of all, metal and plastic aren’t controlled substances so there’s no reason I even should have been carded, much less asked for 3-D face scan shit.. so yeah it wasn’t FOR anything other than data mining.
This is the way.
I’m just going to repeat myself for the hundredth time here. This is exactly what happens when you define words in such broad terms. Social media does not include things like discord. It doesn’t include Reddit, it doesn’t include Lemmy. But because so many damn people just refer to any site that they can talk with other people on as social media, it became enshrined in law and now literally every service you touch is legally defined as social media.
This is not hyperbole; with the current definitions across numerous countries, Amazon (the place where you buy things, not other services like games) is legally defined as social media.
Words mean things and when words are hijacked for other purposes it allows governments to strip away your rights without you realizing.
Okay, I'm gonna ask: why is reddit not social media?
It’s a forum. Just like all the other forums before it. It just happened to get very popular. To be clearer: if you define Reddit as social media then you are including almost every single website on the planet. It makes the definition completely pointless.
Regulations shouldn’t be defined in this way.
Words don't have meanings. Meanings have words.
Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.
Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?
A better question is what sort of legislation should apply to every website on the planet, without exception. Because that’s what the current definition does, makes the law so broad as to be pointless. Why are laws being passed that affect every website, when the problem is a few very massive websites.
Off the top of my head:
I define my dick to be broad. I declared it, and thus have manifested it into reality.
What other things should I will into existence with my new found powers?
So I kinda walked away from this to think about what's being said a bit and I just kinda have to disagree? Like, being clear and concise and accurate in defining something is hella important.... to the people that care about those things. The thing we see though isn't lacking definitions, especially in a legal sense, but people not pushing back enough whenever bad actors start bringing up terrible arguments. There are people out there that you can bring up the best, most logical points in the world and they will still twist and twist and twist until your original point is lost. We can make the most robust, perfect definitions and some people will STILL either find ways around it or completely ignore what was rationally established. The definition doesn't matter, the problem is fascists want to monitor the world and make whoever they want disappear and people kinda just let it happen.
And to be clear, I'm trying to say you're completely wrong. Defining things is important to establish a shared common framework of understanding and policy making and regulations are SO SO SO IMPORTANT cause they save lives in more than just one way, but problem isn't clear cut to be solved with "we need to define things better." We have a culture issue. Culture issues need more than one approach to resolve.
I disagree. By definition social media is "new media technology that facitilates the creation, sharing and aggregation of content amongst virtual communities and networks" so Reddit and Lemmy are social networks.
There are several subkinds of social networks some are worse for kids (and adults) than others. Most sites in the internet don't allow users to create and share content, online newspaper only may allow users to comment but the content comes from "journalists" and collaborators.
Discord is used like a forum though, with chat capabilities but it's social at it's core.
And by that definition you include every website on the planet. Your blog, the comment section of your local news, etc.
Just because you think that news sites comment sections aren’t included doesn’t mean that definition doesn’t include it, cause it does. That applies to that entire definition.
No it doesn't. It's in plural. A blog is a single person creating and sharing, others may comment but that's it. It's a single person (well it can be many authors but that's covered in the newspaper example), that's why I used newspaper sites, they don't facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content amongst virtual communities and network.
Reddit, facebook, instagram, tiktok, lemmy allows people to create communities, content and sharing. A blog allows ONE person to publish stuff, rarely it builds a community but it can happen, so can happen if you manage to read my diary with a bunch of strangers.
The definition you quoted comes from a 2010 business paper that literally states that it includes blogs. So yes, it does, because that’s where all these business and political morons got the definition.
If you create a website, then you are sharing content. And if people read that content then you have created a network. That’s the “definition” according to the government.
But that’s not what social media ever meant. Honestly I’m not going to argue this again, if you really want to see the true nexus of what social media was and is you can read my previous comments on the matter. I’m sure you can find them in my profile.
Suffice to say, social media is an incredibly narrow subset of social networks and the internet isn’t a social network though it is a “network where people are social”.
It's all the same for me. It doesn't matter, whether it's discord, games, reddit, lemmy, Mastodon, mbin, X, Facebook. It's all the same and also at the not the same.
But in the end it's all software. I hope that we can agree with. And this software is empowering people. And politics don't like that..
I vote for this guy for president.
I grew up with certain words meaning certain things. Then I get older, and suddenly, those words are gone, new words exist, old words mean new things, medical terms are now no longer medical terms and just purely an insult derived from a definition that didn't used to define the root word. Pluto isn't a planet. Instead of 9 planets, there are now an unknown number at least in the thousands. There's like 4 other Earths.
Language shouldn't change over time. It can adapt, but I should know that grass is green. Not grass is plubertatude. A word I just made up for the demonstration of absurdity. Nothing wrong with grass being green.
Language drifts over time, that's normal, always has been. Stay on target soldier. FORMAL language however needs very strict definitions or it just stops working. Words mean things is true. That still doesn't mean you get to say the "R" word.
This is misleading. Discord is not reversing course. It was in their original announcement that they would try to automatically determine everyone’s age and “most” people won’t need to do any sort of verification. A lot of people and journalists didn’t read that far apparently.
Yes, they aren't changing course, but Discord certainly did not say "most" in the announcement and it was a single sentence in a long article about age verification and content gating. They should have been far more upfront about their inference method being the primary one in the first place. This was a communication issue and not a reader issue.
It's also possible they decided to tune their inference model to be a lot more, let's say, permissive so that there isn't a huge backlash of people getting asked to provide ID when they've been using the service for nearly a decade or longer.
What you mean there clear and comprehensive announcement? Yeah that didn't happen, this is on them.
They still haven't really provided any information. They say most users won't have to verify, how many is "most".
Agree headline is misleading. "Walking Back" implies reversing course, that is not happening.
Plus we all know how great AI age verification is. Big empty "reassurance" there.
So they're going to scan everything you do with AI to figure out how old you are instead. Not really better.
Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn't that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially "grandfathered in", but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?
they have already done this for at least the last year or so easily. I noticed it when I requested by data package last year, theres a clear area on it that infers both your gender and your age in it.
They are just acting like this is a "new system" but in reality its a system that have had for awhile now, just didn't have any public facing usage of it.
For anyone else that wants to see it themselves, and they have a discord takeout.
its located at the very bottomin the events file in activity/analytics.the end ofthe file shows json objects that indicate what your predicted age and gender is.edit: I found this file isn't a static location, it is still in the activity/analytics directory in one of your event files, but you need to search "age" or "gender" to find it if it isn't at the bottom
They already do this for advertising. And it is extremely accurate.
They didn't walk back shit, they upped the stakes by saying they use your chats to analyse your age. That's just as bad.
They were already doing that.
Every advertising company already monitors you whenever possible to determine things like your age to target ads as effectively as possible. If a isn't relying on a third party for advertising like Google AdSense, and they're handling it internally, they definitely know that info.
I assumed they were already doing that, after all the IPO is coming do they will be doing all they can to make money and avoid risk. Admitting it however shows they are desperate.
To think they weren't already doing that is naive. They hold a lot of liability hosting the amount of data they do, and that's without the obvious gain they'd have selling data.
If I used discord, they would assume I'm 7 years old.
goes back to sitting on the living room floor, and watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles while eating cereal with gummy bears added in
Jokes on you, discord! I'm 42!
They definitely know you're 42. Kids these days don't have the attention span for longer, plot-heavy cartoons like TMNT.
That's why I am deleting my shit and going to delete my account.
I think the article title is technically correct. They walked back the fears that users had. You're right that they haven't changed their policy, and they've exposed themselves as being extra creepy to someone like us, but we aren't the majority of Discord users.
I imagine the average Discord user, if they were even aware of this change at all, is breathing a sigh of relief right now, until these changes (or changes like them) actually affect those people
it is admittedly going to be a bit funny if some immature 45 year old man child gets flagged as a teen
Decentralize and federate or die.
Piggybacking off this:
XMPP and Deltachat are two excellent decentralized, self-hostable, federated, encrypted communication platforms. Deltachat is limited more to text (though it can send videos or audio files that can be played in the app like snapchat), but with XMPP, we could use the Movim Client.
Movim can do group video calls, screen sharing, differing permissions in groups, and even user blogs! And I believe the devs are working on adding discord-like channels with multiple groups under a single community. It's currently our best option to shift to, and due to being FLOSS, will only ever improve (we'll never need to worry about investment capital enshittification), so it's not just kicking the can down the road, it's a long-term, almost permanent solution.
If you have a link to a discussion or issue where they're tracking this, I'd love to follow it.
They'll also need to figure out how to let rooms have more than 1000 people, which is currently the limit on Movim (and it might be an XMPP limitation). Right now, Matrix seems like the only option for a Discord migration, but I hope that changes soon.
I might move my Discord community to Matrix, but I'd want a full 100% clone of the server's history. Seems like that's almost possible?
Discord scrapers like DiscordChatExporter can dump a whole channel to JSON (although I don't see a lot of scraper options that let you pause/resume/retry an export... looking for suggestions if people have any).
And the Mautrix Discord bridge already makes it look like real users sent bridged messages. I think with a little customization, the Mautrix bridge could be modified to import an enormous JSON file to fully mirror an entire Discord server, instead of just grabbing messages in real time. It's already got the functions there to "send a message as xyz user."
Matrix or not, "take your Discord dump and clone it somewhere federated" would be huge for migrations like this. I really hope someone works on that soon 🙏
They've mentioned needing to accelerate the development of it on their Mastodon account in light of the Discord blunder, such as here, and they just had a user poll there that resulted in Discord-like grouped channels/spaces being the most requested.
Thank you!! Really looking forward to this, Movim is already pretty nice.
No prob! I'm excited for it too ^^
I just imported a server with bridge.
Every messages in your server's entire history, or just the channel layout?
I know the Mautrix bridge can create the channels for you, but their backfill feature was not designed for full archival, it can't really do that.
I didn't have a problem doing it. It took a while but it was fine. Some of the channels needed a little help, but it was just a matter of reconnecting them. Our server has been around for years too. Going to do an extra backup, but it was fine.
So it was all of your messages?
Can you explain what bridge you used and how you got the whole history moved over?
The bridge is the same one mentioned in the other link!
Yes, somewhere in the set up you need to set the import limit to -1 iirc then message the bot to import the whole thing, then once a message gets sent in each channel it populates.
Movim looks very promising and I haven't heard of it before, thanks for highlighting it. My group has been working to stand up a few Prosody (XMPP) servers but as far as client side the best we could identify was Gajim. This looks better.
We host an XMPP and Movim front-end that's accessible to all Slrpnk members using their lemmy login (it queries the same database), if you'd like to try it out before recommending it to your group. It's mentioned in our sidebar and in the monthly Meta posts (I guess that shows we might not be doing a terribly good job advertising it if you're not familiar with it 😅)
If Discord cared about this, they’d use the same identity platforms governments use. For example, in the US, id.me is a requirement for many federal services. While it does deanonymize me and there are privacy concerns expanding this tech beyond government services, I trust id.me to take my data security seriously. It has to have federal security requirements. If their data is breached, there will be repercussions and reparations.
Discord, on the other hand, uses random vendors. There were no repercussions or reparations for the previous leak. Discord said moving forward they’d require SOC2 Type II or ISO 27001 for vendors. Crucially, neither of these certifications matter a fucking iota for personally identifiable information and Discord itself will not be completely them so even if the vendors were PII secure Discord will not hold itself to the same standards. Discord does not care about its users; Discord only cares about the ad revenue this will open up.
I don’t even trust Id.me. If the government needs to securely identify someone they should be setting it up themselves instead of us trusting some random company that used to provide coupons to soldiers.
What, and lose an opportunity to funnel tax money to private interests?
Yeah that’s a totally fair response. Lithuania did it.
I don't even trust id.me. Why would I give my ID and photo or video to a corporation that is contracting with the Trump administration?
I thought the requirements came from the Biden admin but I’m not able to find evidence of this.
What you’re describing is the prisoner’s dilemma. In theory, none of us should interact with the current admin because if that happened they’d shut down. Of course if we did that, many federal employees and all of the contractors wouldn’t be able to feed their kids in a week or so, so it only works if we can guarantee a universal strike without scabs. But wait, we know people are actively joining ICE, so everyone with half a brain dropping government work doesn’t guarantee those without a brain won’t scab. If we have scabs, then future admin is left with a poisoned well and that existing possibly okay workforce is now on the breadline with an admin that’s not only hostile to breadlines but anyone who fights back. Don’t forget costs are currently skyrocketing for everything and electricity is about to be through the roof everywhere. In other words, many people have the choice of morals or food for their kids. Or healthcare if that resonates more.
Assuming you’re in the US, will you file your taxes this year? Since you’re not willing to give anyone contracting with the Trump admin your personal information, you’ll have to do them by hand. Even a CPA is technically doing work for the IRS who is part of the Trump admin even if he’s suing them. Are you allowing your employer to keep social security and Medicare taxes? If so, I think you might have discovered a reason why a rational person who is just trying to get by might intentionally support the Trump admin. If not, by god, you have stronger morals than I do and good luck with that jail sentence. Unfortunately, some of us have to participate in society even though we want to improve it.
Edit: I want to make it clear that my annoyance with your response is the Trump admin bit. If you had said “why trust a private company with my govt” I would have said yeah digital ID is hard that’s a really good point we needed trusted govt actors not capitalists to handle this stuff. My point about repercussions and reparations is something the Trump admin is ostensibly on board with so it doesn’t really matter what the greedy fucking billionaires do so long as they fuck each other up for breaking their own rules. That’s actually another great counter and something I’ve said elsewhere; the Trump admin is pretty anti consumer so you’d think here they’d fuck the little guy. A breach in this instance costs them face and money so they care a small amount, even more so if it’s cronyism. Either the world is going to end with Trump or there will be a world after Trump and I for one have to plan for a world after Trump where the US is dealing with all the other problems we’ve made.
Nope I don't trust them to use a US-based service. Also I don't think they're even allowed to as under EU law as all data held on users must be held on EU servers, so that solution wouldn't be a one size fits all.
I don’t think there is a one-size solution which is why I said Discord should use the same platforms plural that govts use. A solution for France isn’t going to be the same solution for the US. Because Discord is not actively attempting to use solutions (again plural) that have repercussions and reparations attached, like the ones governments use that require healthy standards, it’s very clear Discord does not actually care about this problem.
If they cared about handling of PII they should require ISO 27701
Oh absolutely. More importantly Discord needs to also follow the standard, not just require it of their vendors. Granted this source is the only place I can find they’re requiring that so that might not actually be true. It kinda reads like an AI summary.
They still have the AI shit that looks at your posts to try and determine if you are an adult.
Fuck that.
Like everything else everyone has ever posted outside the fediverse?
There's shitloads of AIs reading the fediverse, too. Absolutely doing the same infomining as the discord age bot - but it's not the moderators doing it, at least.
nods I suspected as much.
Never seen any search results through :)
They had it way before they announced, apparently. Because I ate a ban for apparently saying I'm 9 somewhere (I don't actually remember posting that, I suspect a certain someone got to my account to get me banned).
"For most users" the whole point here is to gradually get people used to having to show their papers to access the internet. We must accept nothing less than a total reversal here. Give them an inch each day and eventually they'll have their mile.
Does Discord even have an community relations department, because they suck. Seriously what a stupid decision to just announce age verification and then provide no additional details or context.
This
clarificationpathetic attempt at backpedalling, isn't much better either, they've still provided essentially no information on exactly what the process is going to be, and exactly how it is going to work. I also do not like the fact that they're basically just giving up on any attempts to implement this themselves, and are going with third party solutions. We all know that "third party solutions" means the lowest bidder, so this will be implemented poorly with no operational security, and absolutely will result in a data breach.I created my account at least 15 years ago so if they require age verification from me they're idiots.
Lmaoooo
Have you SEEN their UI? You know how over the past ten years we've been like "aaaaanny day now they'll fix it so it isn't awful..." And they didn't. And instead, we just sorta... got used to it?
Pffft.. like they listen to anything anybody else says. Community relations dept. Ha!
Discord's mobile app is the worst one I've regularly used. I've never had an app that crashes from 2 gifs.
Or couldn't accept keyboard input from the stock keyboard.
Or wouldn't let me use the touch interface to move around because the UI got stuck, so I can't read any channel until I restart the app.
Or wouldn't notify you for people responding in DMs randomly.
Or have a hard time displaying videos that were uploaded to their servers.
Or keep saved and embedded gifs cached, so you didn't have to reload them every time, wasting data and time.
Or didn't randomly play audio from videos whenever you swiped away.
Or had the context menu require an internet connection, so if you have low data, good luck editing your messages!
Oh, so it's even easier to game it and pretend to be "an adult". Simply avoid any minecraft and roblox communities to be an instant adult.
Big brother is watching you masturbate, for your own good, of course.
It's not permanent storage if they delete after safely selling to interested buys!
I wonder if this is what might actually push more people into "host your own shit" that's easy to shut down and migrate as needed.
They will never delete it anyway. They might park it in a different spot, sell it as well, then delete where they originally stored it. The new spot they part it might even have a degree of separation or so from the company. But they never delete information, don't ever trust they do.
DIscord: GUYs! You'll NEVER BELIEVE THIS!!! Instead of invasively reading out every one of your personal identifications and selling the data on your likes/dislikes, we can ACTUALLY just use an AI to tell if you're a child by how your interact with people!!!
Us: Maybe you could have the AI just stop the stalkers.
Discord:
Deleting posts is just setting visibility to 0. They still exist, and you should assume they exist forever.
Sorry but I’m not clicking a link ending in .ai
I’ll wait for another source.
What do you have against the British overseas territory of Anguilla? Ultra-specific geographical prejudice.
Archive link for the article: https://archive.ph/JN2sD
I’m good bro.
It looks like you're using a DNS server that archive.ph sabotages (1.1.1.1, 9.9.9.9, etc.) not that the website is unsafe. Also, if you're that concerned about your privacy I recommend using a VPN such as Mullvad (and their DNS server isn't sabotaged by archive.ph!)
Could this be it? I forgot I have the dns with a filter list to try block ads and trackers at the dns level.
Yes, that's likely it.
You would rather read an ad filled article than read the Archive version of it...?
I rather not read it at all if it comprises my security.
It’s an archive site, what form fields would you be POSTing?
So they haven't walked anything back, they're just adding in a motherfucking clanker as a middleman. What could go wrong?
Big corporations have absolutely laid waste to the internet. There's nothing left unspoiled at this point.
I don't believe them lol.
Like all other social media sites, they'll postpone it and bring it back when all the uproar settles.
What happens when the lie? Nothing. If they say they will delete something, but they keep it, nothing will happen to them. So of course they will keep all the information. Maybe shuffle it from here to there and then delete here.
Bro it might even be worse because they gotta watch your every move to implement this shit. I'm moving to fluxer.app
I've not seen anyone mention fluxer before, have you been using it long, is it as good as their website claims? Seems strange no one else has mentioned it in many of the discord replacement threads going around if its as good as the website makes it sound.
Its amazing bro for real, if you want you can join our community and see how good that is with your own eyes
They were watching already... Feeding it through an AI changes nearly nothing...
I'm afraid Fluxer might snap and turn money chasers too. Buy until they do, I might try it.
There is also GameVox
I think their business model is sustainable without massive privacy breaches like discord did in order to satisfy the investors. Its nice because its a really indipendent service that's also planning to add the ability for everyone to host their own decentraluized servers
Do you want to join the community i am building with a friend? Its a community about the fediverse
?? You don't get to walk back my fears. You can walk back the source, but you don't get to say "nevermind, you're not worried about this".
They haven't though.
They've just restated the exact same thing but then added on hollow empty promises of "this time we'll be better, I swear!"
Until they walk back the walkback.
Incremental rollouts has a successful track record :<
Oh look, so they're saying they're already training ai on all the data they have on us? Yeah I feel my privacy being so respected.
TOO LATE... I deleted my account. fk them.
wreaks of “fuck you got mine”… so an invasive AI scan has scanned your content and deemed you 18+… gross… but at least you don’t have to upload ID (to a company that literally just had a major breach of their ID data)
but
now a new user joins. they don’t have that history of interaction, so what are they meant to do? either upload ID or not be part of their community
My best guess is new accounts will be autolocked to 'teen mode' and you will have to upload ID if you want to unlock it
I was working as a support agent on Epic Games when they decided to limit everyone underage on certain functions on Fortnite. They now ask for your birthday when you open the game and if you are underage (the age varies by country) it will lock your account until you can prove you are an adult (using a 3rd party service)
I left as soon as I saw something asking for age verification in the client.
They aren't walking back anything. They just repeated their claim, that "most people won't even have to give their IDs, because our AI will read all your messages and decide if you're 18"
What the fuck that's even worse
I read thay Youtube is doing that with watch history so teens are watching videos about taxes, back pain, retirement benefits and such to appear old.
I deleted my account already.
hold up.
so y'all took the two hottest takes in online culture right now and decided to do both of them?
what the actual fuck is wrong with people these days. it's almost like everyone in silicon valley is fucking delusional.
I'll be honest, The UK introduced these age verification and ID issues and many places were forced to follow suit. Discord being one of them and I'm sure at somepoint it did pop up but I've never signed up for it and I've continued to use the software without issue.
My Xbox demands to see my ID so I cancelled my Subscription. If discord starts demanding it I'll be moving back to Teamspeak or Mumble.
Wait what? Xbox needs a subscription? To play the games you own? They are forcing you to prove your age to play adult video games now? Jesus Christ. We need to find workarounds for all of this, it's a privacy issue, and a property rights issue. We bought this stuff, it's ours. We can't be forced to ask for permission to use our own shit.
No, you don't. You can play the games you own just fine without one. They probably mean either the gamepass subscription or xbox live subscription.
migrate to matrix.
Already done.
I need to bring my casual friends and they will never install matrix. It is too alien too them with all this "instance/federation mumbo jumbo".
just tell them to use matrix.org with cometchat(?) I forgot the client name but that would be easier
Anyways, I'm trying to get people in specific vulnerable communities to switch to matrix. But the amount of people refusing to do so out of convenience (and even refusing to setup MFA or using different passwords for their online accounts, including discord) is staggering.
I get your point. But unfortunately the sad truth is, even IF we can convince techie nerds to switch, do you really believe we could convince the vast majority of the ignorant public? The answer is no. And even as a techie who works with computers on a daily basis, I have my reservations about Matrix. It is a slow, buggy, hot mess for the most part, and it's even more inconvenient when it comes to voice/video chat.
What I'm learning from this is that there is NO FEASIBLE alternative to Discord, let alone one the general public would be willing to switch to. I've now got the task of converting my friends to Signal as a temporary half-measure before we have a reliable alternative, but things aren't looking good.
I agree that matrix is a slow and buggy hot mess, but its issues mainly lie with scaling. As long as your instance is small it works well enough. Imo this is architectural and will never be fixed with synapse.
As for no alternatives for discord. I think the problem is that people have come to expect a certain level of QoS with hosted services that are expensive to maintain for hobbyists (cdn, load balancing, nat traversal, ddos protection, etc). I think this is fundamental to how we're abusing IP when it's way past its prime and on life support using middle boxes. If we want to reclaim this space, the best way forward would be something like NDN, but the transition would be astronomical that nobody wants to do it.
The cat has been let out of the bag. I'm still moving somewhere else once I figured out where with friends.
Yep. Too late, i fucking deleted that shit without hesitation or regret.
Never really used discord in the first place. I tried to join a few support threads for random gizmos that had no forums but realized that its a terrible place for support compared to forums. The whole UI was just chaotic to me as well.
I find it impossible to use for anything that involves historical / old information.
It's all live chat it seems, so if someone asked a question on how to do X within Y 8 months ago and that's what you are trying to find the answer to as well, it's practically impossible to find so you have to ask it again and hope someone is around with the answer.
It's a place that's only useful for live discussions on recent topics, which is quite limited in use.
downvotted for saying the truth, every software community should be OFF discord and setup a forum
It is bizarre how they all fled reddit when they got greedy, so ran off and set up on Discord instead. So now you get a procession of users with the same 4 questions over and over.
Yep to late deleted all my servers and Discord yesterday so no going back.
Yeah, so, "most users" won't have to post video selfies or their ID, but you'll still have to accept active spyware feeding information to an AI model that checks all your activity.
This is still equally as bad.
Keep looking for alternatives.
I discordially invited my account to go and delete itself.
same , never really used it but deleted it.
Who wants to guess if it unfairly targets minorities and LGBTQ+ users?
Already canceled Nitro. They done fucked up.
I guess I need to talk about my 401k at least once before March or something.
“Platform will use AI-powered age prediction based on existing user data instead of universal biometric verification”
So is this supposed to make us feel better?
That is even creepier and more stupid. This is why I am deleting my shit and going to move onto a different platform.
Roblox did the same, 5 million accounts getting flagged as 13-16 but the owners were 18+
Too late, already uninstalled like a week ago.
Not enough for me, I deleted my Discord account yesterday and what they're saying isn't enough to get me to cancel the deletion. I already hate using Discord enough as is, I don't want this Nazi bullshit to ruin it even more.
Too late. The dust has already settled.