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.
☝️🤓 Discord said they’re going to delete the data!
note
The “someone” is referring to Discord, not you.
I dig your Netscape avatar
Discord said they’re going to delete the data!
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining
What if they say it’s lemonade instead?
You know what that made me think of?
https://youtu.be/UWQoK506xkQ
That joke is NSFW, please present facial verification and ID now or you will be banned and reported to the authorities!
Pain fucking ass but deleted my Discord account. Sure wish had a decent alternative. I see a lot of suggestions just don’t which to try? Any that work great with Linux Debian?
Matrix
Do the people you talk with use Signal?
They’re already doing it to access the social security website.
Forget DHS or other government agencies, these companies have been shown to be untrustworthy stewards of our data from regular hackers.
I get that discord is used to groom kids and there is a very real risk to allowing children to use it unsupervised, but that means kids devices are the ones that need to be locked down, not the rest of the world.
No argument there. Just feels particularly relevant right now if you know what I mean.
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”.
Or “pre-planned doxxing”
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 your 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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And how do you , practically, do that?
Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.
Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.
Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.
Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work. No parent has time for that. And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.
I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.
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
And how do you , practically, do that?
By paying attention to your child.
Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.
Yes, by paying attention to their children.
Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.
Yep, by paying attention to when the kid was on the computer and what they were doing on there.
Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.
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.
Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work
Yep, by paying attention to the kid.
No parent has time for that.
Bullshit. You need to pay attention to your kids, that’s a basic fucking part of parenting.
And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult
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?
because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.
Actually, you do have an ability to monitor who your kid spends time with, and when. It’s called parenting.
I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.
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.
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:
- No dedicated personal phone until middle school, and it ain’t gonna be some top of the line iphone
- No “tablet kid” bullshit
- No unfettered YouTube access
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.
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.
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.
You dont give children tablets and phone, full stop.
Exactly, how can you limit a child who knows internet and technology more than their parents? Like, if I was a child I don’t think they could limit me at all
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.
It’s not impossible - parental controls can be used and school networks don’t HAVE to allow access to Porn Hub
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
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
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 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.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. F
For me this is the biggest probem about Discord and Discord alternatives why not just use Lemmy what’s the problem with Lemmy?
Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
As part of #3, I’d also like to add the ability to publish forums to the open web. That way, people can discover, archive, and access discussions without logging in.
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.
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.
As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.
I tried it recently, I used a temporary account for it. I think IRC is way more user-friendly: I wasn’t allowed access to anything , for no stated reason. So as far as I’m concerned, Discord is where information goes to die. Too bad some project hide all of theirs there.
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
Like this: spiritual advisory pastor to serve only 6 months after molesting a 12-year-old for years
Morris’s attorney said the molestation was her fault because she was “flirtatious.”
One of my Discord friends has a stalker and can’t get anything but automated messages.
I found this little article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
At what point are we going to take responsibility and take action collectively to punish these mainstream platforms ?
Keeping it real
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
IRC :(
No voice/video calling, no screen sharing, no persistent chat history.
Sometimes you need to accept using more than one piece of software. And IRC can have persistent chat history.
That’s why IRC isn’t and never will be a replacement for Discord. Most people don’t care to accept comprimises and friction and people developing the alternatives can not impose compromises on their users and expect general market adoption.
I really wish there was some real alternative that actually worked like lemmy communities for example where you wouldn’t need to self host but be able to use a server someone else made available to be able to create a community there. And search engine indexing, that would be a must imo.
Is IRC still a thing? I havnt used it since 2006. I’d love to see it again
It is. Also widely bridged with Matrix.
Yep, still on it.
Check out libera.chat, one of the most popular IRC networks today. Freenode suffered a hostile takeover and there was a mass migration away from it so I’d avoid that one
Revolt is now called Stoat Chat. Some sort of legal issue apparently.
Anyway, for those who don’t know, it’s basically an open source clone of Discord. Definitely worth a look, probably where I’ll my stuff now.
yeah it’s the closest to a real discord clone, at least discord before they introduced screen sharing
Revolt is now Stoat
Guilded went to Roblox-only in 2025. I’d never heard of it until someone else mentioned it as an alternative.
Guilded is dead. Their website redirects to a thank-you page of some sort. I remember trying it out ages ago and I thought it was pretty decent competition for Discord and had a lot of the same features, but ultimately it would have been susceptible to the same kind of fuckery that Discord is giving us right now. These private companies only want to extract value out of their users.
Guilded is dead
and it was roblox’s property anyway
Oooohhh.
Good…uhm riddance?
Revolt is Stoat now and it doesn’t even let me verify my email right now.
I signed up yesterday and just got my verification a little while ago. I hear that they’re being swamped right now. I wonder why? 🤔
Trying to point my friends towards matrix/element, they already started a teamspeak server instead though >. >
The biggest issue is it didn’t seem like matrix/element has streaming video in voice chat, we use that pretty heavily as we’ll play different games and just hang and talk several streaming at a time.
Don’t - they sell your data to police and authoritarian governments
That is not what the post says. They sell encrypted messaging to government organizations. It’s basic SaaS and allows them to fund themselves.
Element or any Matrix client will be more than enough I guess. It already passed many stepping stones and has all the functionalities which discord users might want + open source
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.
“I categorically cannot trust tech companies with that kind of personal data,” wrote one frustrated user, with many hoping they might be able to convince Discord to do a U-turn with enough public pressure. Others went further. “What a great way to kill your community,” added another longtime user, while some predicted “that’s game over for Discord” and remarked ruefully that “privacy on the internet is truly dead”.
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 !
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.
If you call that sanitised…
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.
They’re right. Have you used reddit before and after that? Many decent users just disappeared, at all, and the new users replacing them are not nearly as decent. So in terms of usability and utilitly the website died. It is like titktok. No less no more, but with text posts.
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.
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
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:
- Have private chats with one or multiple individuals.
- Start audio or video calls through those chats, and screen share/stream in them.
- I’ll also mention the ability to send not just text, but images, videos, embedded GIFs, files, so on.
- in servers you get the same thing, broken into text and voice channels (the latter allowing the full range of audio, video, and screen share).
- in servers each user can be given roles to determine which channels they can see and use, or edit, among various other permissions.
- Pinned messages, @ mentions for roles.
- Though I don’t use it much anymore, the option to effectively subscribe to a channel on another server to have messages from there propagate over (e.g.: a uni club server announces an event and you see it on another server in an events channel)
- also servers don’t have any upper limits on members, at least not one I’ve ever seen hit
- Bot integration via API.
- oh, also it all works on desktop or mobile (because it’s mostly just a web app, but still)
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.
hunting for alternatives
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).
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.
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No audio calls
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
They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top
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/v1.12.5
Its only available in DMs not groupchats
Oh 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’ve been forwarded this pretty neat summary of the current alternatives (Mastodon thread) :
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.
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.
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 think they and the free software community are trying to put together a good solution.
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.
they
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.
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.
I like Cinny
Im using SchildiChat on Android
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.
Oh right, another account to delete.
