Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
Speaking as someone who is currently planning to move a community away from Discord to something self-hosted, it’s not as easily said as done.
Apart from the need to run your own infrastructure, competing software is typically finicky and comes with caveats. Plus you have to worry about discoverability if you want to attract new users.
It’s doable, sure, but it requires a lot of planning and work. Honestly, it’s probably going to take us months to get our own service fully up and running.
Setting up Matrix/Synapse was extremely easy and done in a day. The self hosting part is not that hard and I would say migrating users would be the majority of your time. Plenty of VPSs online make obtaining infrastructure very easy.
It’s never easy but believe me it’s rewarding. Planning to switching to a self-hosted solution even more so (though it’s harder). However, starting it is the halfway through. I just wish your community members as understanding as you.
Good luck!