- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
It wont affect anyone lurking on programming discords because those dont have NSFW content… So basically same thing as YT? I dont know whats the big deal. Dont scan your face, dont give your id, continue using as usual
Let’s protect the children by scanning everyone’s face and ID and uploading them to a server that’ll get hacked five years from now.

There’s a disturbing amount of people thinking of the children
Disclaimer: I don’t like Discord and stopped using it years ago. And this announcement is just another step on the road to enshittification. It’s a shit corporation going public and becoming more shit in the process. Simply don’t use their shit.
However, it seems a bit rage-baity to claim that Discord will require age verification for all users. That simply doesn’t seem to be true. Age verification will be required for users who don’t feel the basic features are enough. Were I still dumb enough to use Discord, I don’t think I’d feel the need to go for the age verified account.
And said data will never be used for fake CSAM or a library for the powerful to handpick their next victims
I hear you, but what about: it actually will be used for those things?
Don’t worry, it will only require us adults to give ID’s.
They will only make porn of us, everything is fine then!
Five years? My, aren’t we optimistic.
Within 5 years, I’d say.
That sounds more like the Discord I know.
“Hacked” I’m convinced most of them are selling it, then claiming being hacked so they have plausible deniability when the alias/e-mail you ONLY used for discord starts getting spam+. Depending on if you linked your number, etc…
Well, looks like I’m leaving discord.
Maybe this bullshit will be the spark needed to move us all off Discord. It’s fine for voice-chat in games, don’t get me wrong, but I HATE how its replaced forums/wikis for so many games/mods/etc. Searching disparate Discord servers is like looking for a nonferrous straw-colored needle in a haystack.
Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.
I have just been using signal. Works fine.
Agreed. As if every company just having a subreddit wasn’t bad enough.
People are already looking to migrate to checks notes apps exactly like discord.
[cries]
I mean, I share the complaint of Discord having tons of unindexable knowledge locked away in it, but forums are not good replacement for my friend group. So yeah we kinda want a Discord alternative specifically.
deleted by creator
Does it work on Linux?
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For others who are interested:
Wire exists.
Obviously the problem isn’t you and your friends, the problems is services that use discord like it’s a forum, dispatcharr for example “oh do you want support? Join our discord”. Fine, I’ll figure it out myself.
My group of friends, like yours, we have a discord server with 9 channels, more than half aren’t used, and one of the channels is to share links.
What’s wrong with good old fashioned data base backed message forums? There are so many implementations available, I’m sure many are FOSS, and I’m sure there’s managed solutions as well. It’s a mature, tested, rock solid reliable technology that has existed pretty much since the inception of the internet, and can be easily incorporated into other tools and workflows - because there is 40+ years of development work with the concept.
Seriously, why?
Forums are great for being forums. Real-time instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing are all a very different use-case. They’re two entirely separate products, and comparing them is apples and oranges. People are looking to replace Discord with Discord-like services, because forums don’t fucking do what Discord does.
The big problem (and the reason everyone seems to compare the two) is that Discord started eating forums, as companies realized it was easier to create a Discord server instead of creating (and hosting, and maintaining) a support forum. And that’s a perfectly valid complaint. But that doesn’t mean forums are a valid replacement for Discord.
It is not comparing apples to oranges, there are many companies that use Discord as a direct replacement for help forums or product wikis.
Read the rest of my comment.
He is talking about forums because the main issue with discord is that it’s cut from the rest of the internet so nothing is indexed and a lot of platforms and services use discord like a forum (it isn’t).
No one wants our conversations indexed, and discord shouldn’t be a forum.
Exactly my point - And public help forums should be indexed, and should not be on Discord.
Sure.
But what are you replacing it with ?
I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it’s pretty far from the same level of comfort.
Don’t take that the wrong way though, I’m all for supporting open alternatives, I’m just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.
I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.
I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.
Were you trying Teamspeak 6? The UI is different, but the functionality is on par I believe. Not open source, but at least you can self-host.
Have they finally released screen sharing in ts6? I gotta say that the development of that project is pretty comical. Radio silence with the only communication being the community manager shitting on discord every other day while giving no updates on their own product.
Weird vibes.
You can selfhost TS6 now? O:
No. Recently I played a bit using a friends mumble server. And it’s a friend that is already privacy conscious. But these friends are not the norm. They are the exception.
Interesting to see Teamspeak evolved but still you have to pay to host a server so that’s a huge difference.
I did start a projects aiming to be a more decentralized/federated discord more akin to how IRC was back in the day. Time to revisit it, it seems.
A federation based discord would be amazing !
But still that’s a big challenge as voice chat will be costly to host.
Also out of curiosity do you aim for something that would connect through the fediverse ?
Didn’t have much of an aim beyond trying to cook it up from scratch as a personal research project. That includes the protocol, since I’m handling priv/pub keypairs in a creative way to facilitate both encryption and user identity verification.
Voice chat isn’t inherently costly to host, usually the server acts as a broker and then people connect P2P. Do you remember jitsi? It was used as an alternative to zoom during covid, it was a webpage like Google meet where you opened a room, and people joined with the link. Actually under the good the first one that joined the room acted as a host so all voice communications never reached jitsi’s servers.
Jitsi still exists btw, although I understand that a more integrated solution like matrix is preferable. Matrix IS the federated discord-like solution, although last time I read about it it had some issues with scalability and the typical foss Dev drama.
Stoat looks promising, open source
They won’t even send a verification email to my gmail account so I can sign up.
They were suffering with email issues due to the “hug of death” effect, try again now maybe it’ll work
Same :)
Hope this will mass exodus into Matrix, like it happened with Twitter / X.
Matrix will sadly never be a thing, much like XMPP never really became a thing (well, it was a thing until google pulled a play from the 90-00s era Microsoft of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). And each of those tried to replace IRC which still works and is perfectly fine.
As a matrix user and a former discord user (4 years ago), i can say that matrix just sucks compared to amount of features even 4 year old discord had.
Unless there will be an alternative social networks which do all the basic discord features like: large communities, channels, voice/video chats, roles, bots; and it does it all well, than nobody will move off discord.
People would rather tolerate significant anti-features if software has lots of features, than tolerate lack of features despite not having anti-features.
Matrix can literally do everything you just mentioned. It’s clunky, but it works.
It’s way too complicated for tech illiterate people.
It really is no different than discord. You create an account, download the client, log in and that’s that. You don’t have to self host it or use any instance that isn’t the main instance. Just go to matrix.org and sign up.
Thats why i said “and it does it all well”.
It does it well, it’s just clunky. It works perfectly fine, and I recommend it over discord ang day of the week. Except Tuesdays. Tuesdays I recommend IRC.
If it’s clunky, then it does not do it well for most users. All features might even work well individually, but the user experience is very important too for less tech-savvy people.
It is no more clunky than discord was a couple years ago. Setting up a server is very clunky, but the average Joe doesn’t have to do it.
Careful: Discord misuses the word “server” to mean community, so a lot of Discord users here might misunderstand and think you just said the average Joe doesn’t need to set up a community. (Of course, I’m sure you actually mean the average Joe doesn’t need to set up his own homeserver instance, which is true.)
Discord term Matrix term server space channel room discord.com homeserver (there are many)
How do you do voice calls/voice group calls in Matrix?
In element there’s a button on top of the chat. I press that and it’s calling.
doubt it. better off just setting up channels in libera chat on IRC and doin voice via teamspeak/mumble like we used to do it back in the day.
shit, someone needs to bring back ICQ.
IRC protocol is audio capable.
Matrix doesn’t have any of the same features discord has for voice and video.
How well does Matrix / Element work for screen sharing games?
I’m on discord for piracy and modding. Sure over the years i joined a few other channels. But most foss adjacent channels have matrix bridges. idgaf. If servers required my phone number i always just left the server. Discord wont get shit.
I would barely be okay with a bank or government website asking for this information, I sure as shit would not give it to a fucking chat app.

Discord said I’m certified teen full rizz all drip fr what’s up 67ers?
That’s cap.
frfr on god
Is this Belter speak?
Stoat it is lol (https://stoat.chat/)
This project looks interesting, i might try it. As i undesrtand, its designed around all of the basic discord features, and nothing else that nobody asked for.
The cool thing about being foss project, is if the developers for some reason become too greedy (lets be real, its true for foss), the next exact second there will be a new fork created, a new team formed, a new server hosted, and all of the users will move to it instantly.
Back to mumble, sigh
For those looking for an alternative, try stoat.chat or matrix
Already deleted!
Additionally, Discord will implement its age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult
from the official release.
I wonder if it’ll function like Twitch where you can get tons of people banned all at once by getting them to say they’re under 13.
Sounds like creepy spyware
it only sounds like that, because it is. :/
The only way to get around this would be to verify your age, which Discord says can be accomplished in one of two ways. The first is to “submit a form of identification” to Discord vendors (i.e. scan your physical ID), or to use “facial age estimation.” Discord says that the latter process happens fully on-device, as “video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.” For ID scans, Discord says that documents “are deleted quickly.”
Between the features that are limiting being almost entirely things I don’t want anyway (random friend invites are literally just fucking scams and ads to begin with), and the entire process being completed on-device… What is this, some slow news day? Everyone is losing their minds about this being some insane overstep like Discord is asking for a blood sample, or even a photo of your driver’s license.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every juncture possible. They already have the useful, farmable data, like geolocation, age/gender demographics and interests. They don’t want our government ID. They only want a “yes” or “no” from their app.
Must be a slow news day. Everyone’s blowing this up in headlines for cheap clicks.
I might consider the facial verification thing if someone fulfills a security audit that both verifies the photo is never sent, encrypted or not, and it does not stay on the device’s drive.
But yeah, part of me hopes some number of privacy focused companies will just abandon business in these locations and claim “It’s only a matter of time before they reverse course for security failures, we will just wait until then.”
Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every joint possible.
That’s 100% what it is. It also sincerely makes me not want to use Discord, because even if this is what governments want, it’s extremely bad for users.
I’m waiting for some government to outlaw collecting the information in general outside of official government agencies. I would love to see big tech squirm as they try to figure out a valid way to harvest the data in one country, but prevent it in another.
Honestly it sounds like an amazing way to rack of fine money due to violation notices.
That’s fine if that’s your personal response. This still feels like a misdirected and ultimately useless response though.
This is a government-created problem. Are we expecting widespread boycotts of Discord to change the government’s mind? Of course not.
If it’s extremely bad for users, then users need to change their government. Yeah, yeah, I know the excuses for not doing that, they don’t listen, we are all powerless, it is the way it is, yadda yadda. It’s a lie. We are powerful, they want us feeling powerless so we can’t challenge them. Fuck that, challenge them. Government exists to represent us, it can exist in perpetuity only with our active and ongoing consent and participation. If people in totalitarian countries can overthrow their governments, so can we, we don’t have to do it overnight, we don’t have to do it over this one single isolated issue, but we can at least start working against them, eroding the structures that support them. Fuck governments like these, figure out ways to twist their arm, make things more difficult for them, and eventually, if we keep at it, we’ll get what we want. We hold the power here, not them. We decide what kind of society we want to live in. We need to stop abdicating our responsibilities as citizens and actively fight against this shit.
By all means, challenge your government, but I’m not going to upload my ID to a database to use Discord. I can self host a thing that will accomplish the same goals without doing something that stupid.
That’s fine, and I hate Discord’s general situation too, and I can’t wait for a properly federated self-hostable open source alternative to take off. But it just seems a bit knee-jerk or straw that broke the camel’s back to throw Discord under the bus specifically for this. To be clear, you don’t actually need to provide ID, you can either continue using a limited account (it’s barely limited at all in any serious way unless you’re using Discord for NSFW stuff) or you can attempt to validate your face with a camera instead, which supposedly happens completely on-device. Either one is a totally reasonable alternative.
If you believe that photo validation lives entirely on your device, you might be surprised by how many times the tech industry straight up lies about this kind of stuff, but I don’t trust that for a minute.
Companies get away with nothing but a small fine that is far less than the money they make from breaking privacy laws, and you are still naive enough to trust things handed over to them is actually private when there is zero transparency on what is going on with their app to perform an independent audit?
Do you have any suggestions for a better/open-source alternative?
A few mentioned here, with them recommending mumble
Nice. Now when someone tries to make me use discord, I’ll have a better excuse than “I hate it”
















