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.
TIL people actually pay for nitro lol.
I’ve probably paid around 100€/$ in total (been occasionally using and gifting Nitro since 2019 and regularly for about a year). I’ll definitely stop it and using Discord if they follow through with this.
do it cowards. leave now.
My community just setup a Matrix instance and we’re migrating everyone over. Several already cancelled their subscription.
I actually ran into a colleague in a random room, who is also leaving Discord.
It’s pretty nuts, there’s a big exodus going on.
Any guides? Been looking at Element but that set up is intimidating.
Are you self hosting? I just set up an instance today and it was extremely easy following the instructions for the ESS Community edition on github.
I was going to run it on an old gaming PC i been using for piHole. I was thinking a VM as I couldn’t find a premade container and don’t want public stuff running on the machine directly. I was still trying to work my way though reading the docs but got hung up on understanding Kubernetes before starting the setup. I also got sick of fighting Virtual Machine Manager pool location permissions last night.
If you plan on federating, it can end up being pretty resource heavy, so consider either not federating or planning ahead.
What’s the federation like? Haven’t decided on it yet. Realistically I may convince 10ish people to join so I’m not sure it be worth the hassle.
I’m not trying to say that you can’t/shouldn’t federate with others. You don’t need to federate everything, all channels, etc, nor should you IMO. I found out really quickly that the small server I had set aside for it was not up to the task when I decided to sync up the matrix.org main channels. You need lots of ram, FAST storage, and a good internet connection at bare minimum.
Don’t even have to go that far. Just stop paying for Nitro. They’ll get the picture when their revenue stream dries up.
yeah until their IPO goes live and then they will just force ads into the whole thing…
At which point, the only option left is to leave or enjoy rapid enshittification.
I sure did fucking sucks and they didn’t make it easy. First had to delete all servers first then delete my account. Fuck Discord.
Anyone want to script through the signup process and feed the damn thing a bunch of AI generated faces?
Typically when a signup page is difficult to automate, you can use a library meant for automated testing within a browser—like Selenium. Also, disposable emails services come in handy—like mailsac. If they block all the disposable email services, you can also use your iCloud+ custom email domain (if you have it) with the Allow All Incoming Messages setting turned on—then you use randomly generated user handles for each signup. A better way would be Gmail accounts so that they blend in more, but I’m not sure how to script through Gmail signup when they often require a phone number verification step.
Not sure about the easiest way to recycle your IP, in case they monitor signups that way too. I’m sure there’s a way to overcome that too via VPN.
If 2% of Discord users did this 50 times, that would make half of Discords user profiles and face recognition data completely fake.
i used to be quite proficient at using selenium.
though IIRC they require phone numbers for the sign up process now?
Good! locking away potentially helpful Q&A, discussions, and guides on Discord is fucking stupid.
I hope this means people will slowly start going back to forums. Highly doubt it though.
Discord really is a plague for the open internet yep
I just want to be able to web search shit from forums like I used to be able to 10+ years ago.
So sad to see things literally get worse for no good reason. Same with search engines.
“No good reason” homie you ever use a forum?
Discord is so much better for real time conversations. The biggest problem is to the point of this thread, discoverability is non-existent, you have to join the discord to be able to search for what you need.
Yeah but real time communication is not what this comment was about. The issues is that its being used as a social hub that replaces forums entirely. So when people ask questions about a topic they will do so in some shitty discord channel and the information (both question and answer) will be lost in the un-searchable, un-taggable, un-indexable discord black hole.
Discord should be used for shitposting and hanging out with your gamer buddies, because thats what its designed for. Not as a fucking database of valuable information that will be lost forever.
It actually is, you’re just not connecting the dots.
The people use discord already to game and talk with buddies, developers of various apps/services then use it for similar and answering questions or troubleshooting issues in real-time.
Forums are archaic and difficult by comparison, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the situation either, but I understand how and why we got to this place, and what would solve the problem is if that data was indexed in a way that search engines could use them, but because you have to have a discord account and join the server and have access to that particular section because of how discord is designed it is not really possible.
I actually freaurntly find helpful information in discord servers using search, but again, agree that it is not designed well for what its been forced into by network effect and convenience.
Edit: I’ll also point out forums aren’t permanent either lol, like 99% of forums I used to frequent are completely gone.
Discord is only good for live conversation. Forums are good for information consolidation and general long term discussions about anything.
Actively troubleshooting an issue in discord is easier then making a forum post and going back and forth that way, which is why it has moved to discord organically.
Discord is SLAMMED, I say!
Whoa, not slammed, but SLAMMED? Wow.
Discord age restrictions prevent an underage user from viewing - but not sending - nude pictures.
This isn’t to protect kids. It’s to enforce increasingly authoritarian control over the web.
Any source for this ?
The official announcement is quite vague and since the feature isn’t out it’s hard to know how it will work exactly.
Also, I assume the biggest risk isn’t for teens to send nudes “unprompted” but to let adults contact them and ask for them.
This for example is very vague :
Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.
So if a teen can only interact with other teens on dedicated spaces it should make it harder for perverts to ask for stuff.
And if an adult tries to pretend to be a teen he will only see blurred content ?
I’m sure many will think I’m trying to defend Discord on this but I’m not. Again we dont really know how this update will work. I’m just trying to make sure we dont spread misinformation.
There will be plenty of time to criticize Discord when they push this update.
What I’m sure of is that discord was definitely a platform of choice for many bad people to hunt and groom teens.
Personally, it’s the fact that discord says they will delete my verification data :
Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
In most cases ? Really ? Is that supposed to look trustworthy ?
So if a teen can only interact with other teens on dedicated spaces it should make it harder for perverts to ask for stuff.
There is no age verification to prove you’re a teen. The age verification is to prove that you’re an adult.
Please read the end of my message.
If you are a teen “by default” you will have all the restrictions of a teen until you prove you are an adult.
So an adult with ill intentions should either be :
- A teen by default and therefore have many limitations.
- An adult that have limitations in reaching to teens.
Again it’s what the very vague statement of Discord says. We also have no clue how their “inference model for age classification” works either…
So an adult could just create two accounts, one to access teen spaces, where they don’t verify their age l and one for accessing adult spaces, where the age gets verified?
Please read the Discord official post.
one to access teen spaces,
That account will be tagged as a teen account until proven otherwise. Therefore any message or DM he will receive will go to a special inbox with most likely warnings to consult it.
Please, again, I understand that the pitchforks are out for discord, I’m just asking you to take the time to read the official discord post from top to bottom.
There will still be unknowns until they release the update but your question is already answered by their official post.
Basically, as long as an account hasn’t done an age verification it’s assumed to be a teen. And that means all the limitations attached to that. So you can create 10 accounts if you want either :
-
You have proven you are an adult on that account you remove the limitations to what you can do but your messages towards teen accounts will most likely go to that special inbox they mention. No clue exactly how hidden and how much warning are attached to that inbox.
-
You have no proven your age and your account is limited like any other teens account. You won’t be able to see “sensitive media” whatever Discord means by that I dont know.
What I really wonder is what they will allow in term of interactions between the two groups in details. They are very vague on many aspects of it.
But multiplying your accounts on discord doesn’t look like a valid workaround to their system.
The point I am making is about protecting teens from adults. So teen-per-default means that adults can freely talk to teens, which should be prevented. Either allow no teens on your platform, or teens have to proof that they are teens first.
Adults (and teens for that matter) are pretty good at obfuscating grooming.
So teen-per-default means that adults can freely talk to teens, which should be prevented.
That’s not my understanding.
I get your point but by default if Discord thinks you are a teen it also implies all the limitations associated with that status. Which means some media will be blurred and some commands cannot be done.
An adult can keep his “teen default status” but he also keeps all the limitations associated with it. Which I suppose doesn’t mean they can “freely” talk to other accounts as you state.
Notably the DM that a groomer would send will end up in a special inbox for all teens or for that matter “default teen”.
-
Yet again XMPP is ignored in the comments🥲
Everyone pile into matrix and the element client. Got to make it more popular
Don’t threat
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!
They won’t. They never leave, at least not enough to make a difference. I’ve long since given up hoping in people to do the right thing.
I run several communities on discord with hundreds of people in them. I can’t just leave.
I want to leave. but I can’t force people to move to a new app just for one community.
its a complicated issue for those that use it for communities. we are working on trying to move off.
Who could have seen this coming?
Thats the problem. You can go through all the pain to move to an alternative, but eventually it enshitifys too. You could go open source, but those solutions rarely have the polish to get the large quantity of users needed for niche communities. And most users won’t understand why they are better anyway. So it’s just a horrible cycle.
Discord probably did the math and are willing to take a hit to the user counts (much like reddit did when they closed the apis), as the vast majority will stay and keep “threatening” to leave. There’s at least the hope that the ones who quit now will establish communities elsewhere, on a (hopefully) better server platform.
Enshittification is not single step. It’s more a “boiling a frog”-kinda process.
Discord itself was a big step of enshittification from the very start when communities moved from individual platforms to Discord servers.
Sometimes I like to remember when Nitro was like 5 bucks and gave a bunch of stuff, and now it is 10 bucks gives less AND they still try to sell me fucking cosmetics…
I dropped my Nitro when they announced a possible buyout/IPO
It probably also says something of the ones that stay: they can keep getting further exploited. And these are the ones they want.
Yep. It’s why trumpers are such a lucrative scam target. It’s a self selected group of easily deceived victims.
Same tactic used by scammers sending “bad” messages - it’s at least partially in purpose to single out the good marks.
I agree, but, I see some parallels, a Reddit competitor that solved some of those issues, was hardly functional when they killed APIs. There was no competition. Look at us now baby! Still not competition, but, at least there’s an alternative.
I hope I can say the same about discord in a bit. There’s really nowhere for anyone to go, without losing a lot of features. Well, hopefully, talented people are going to migrate to these platforms to bring an alternative to discord.
Discord probably did the math and are willing to take a hit to the user counts
I very much doubt whoever thought about doing the math did so, and if they did, that said math made it out of their department. This kind of decision is much more likely to have been a C-suite darling that no one dared speak against or the equivalent thereof.
I’m saying thoughtful organizational decisions are less common than we’d like.
Are there any viable alternatives? Last I looked they all kinda sucked
I wanna start by saying I’m not a power user, I only use discord as a glorified chat manager for my immediate friends. That said, Stoat is everything I like about discord with a nicer ui and a public server seach function. I made an account when discord started ads and I honestly feel like it’s a little further than Lemmy was when I came here from reddit.
Right now sign up is slow because of the huge influx of users. That said, the team is handling it well and being very transparent about it which is refreshing.
I love Stoat’s UI but video streaming is an absolute must for My use case and last I checked they said it wasn’t a priority
Ahh that’s fair.
I’ve been hearing good things about https://spacebar.chat/. Stoat (formerly Revolt) is out there as well. Matrix is another possibility, but it’s more for individual channels rather than whole servers, so doesn’t fit some use cases.
Does it have video streaming yet?
Sounds like it’s experimental at the moment:
Voice/Video when?
Currently there is experimental voice/video WebRTC support in Spacebar. UDP connections are not currently supported.
This is a very difficult feature to get working, especially given that we must implement it the exact same way as Discord.com for client compatibility, so if you find any bugs please open an issue in Spacebar server.
We would also be incredibly thankful for any assistance.
https://docs.spacebar.chat/faq/
So might not be ready for primetime. Voice is pretty critical to how I often use Discord. Video less so, but still important.
I think they’re already too big to fail. They captured the entire market. There’s no real competitor with any kind of noticeable fraction of the market share.
The closest thing to a competitor are business products similar to slack or teams. None of those have anything close to feature parity like high quality streaming at no cost.
I would gladly host something myself, but I can’t do it all. IMO this needs a lemmy equivalent with decentralized hosting or something.
Reddits stock performance since that decision isn’t likely anything that anyone would want to emulate.
Here’s hoping this gets more software off the discord support teat. No, you do not need real time chat, you need searchable, permanent presence. Discord support is such a red flag I immediately move on even if it’s OSS. If you can’t do real doco and you can’t stand up a forum (Discourse is nice I hear) then what chance do you have of being competent.
Also, IPO incoming, expect it to get worse.
Also, IPO incoming, expect it to get worse.
Is it? Ah, well that would explain it.
I will go onto discord servers looking for answers that a searchable forum or wiki is better suited for. First thing I do is use discord’s shitty search tool, and if it works I type my question and the found answer again in the relevant chat for future searchers and get the fuck out of there.
Don’t threaten, do you wussies.
I’m not threatening, I’m gonna do it. We’ll see how my game jams go after this. I doubt my entire community will follow me.
How hard is this type of service, as a self hosted docker app, to develop?
Wouldn’t most of the underlying codec and streaming technologies be more or less extendable into a platform?
These guys have been at it for several years now. Check out their GitHub, look at the components.
I’m trying to modify their dockerfile a bit so it runs in my container manager and uses my reverse proxy, instead of the one they included, and it creates more containers for this one application than I have for all my other projects combined.
All of which is to say: “pretty hard” is the answer. It is pretty damn hard to build this stuff.
I got the self hosted version up and it looks like it’s a much older version than their current iteration which was a kick in the teeth. Nothing discouraging quite like “Well you can self host if you don’t mind a worse version of the product”. Like my dudes I’m trying to take some pressure off of your server…
Stoat doesn’t have screen sharing. Teamspeak 6 does though
Teamspeak isn’t open source… Use Mumble, MediaMTX or Matrix instead.
How hard is it to create discord?
A lot of the technical difficulty in that type of app usually centers around scale. If you only ever have 10 users in a channel it’s not so hard. When you have 10,000 or 50,000 things start to get more tricky.
Still as per usually for small scale (and slightly larger too) there have been options for a long time. The main difficulty is in getting other people to use your proposed option.
Stoat is an open source Discord alternative. You should check it out.
There’s also https://spacebar.chat/, which I’ve been hearing some buzz about, but not really here; not sure if that’s because there are known problems with it or what.
Edit: it looks like voice and video are just experimental right now, so might not be a good replacement for many: https://docs.spacebar.chat/faq/
Don’t think much needs to be developed.
Matrix has been out for a while… but admittedly i have not checked it out myself yet.
I’ve been trying it out with a group of people. (On Linux and Android)
It’s pretty bad still. The concept is solid but each client and server has their own way to go about things. Most are missing desired features like calling and screen sharing. Some even lack group chat…
Reactions and custom emojis are sent through an unencrypted side channel. Rich formatting such as code blocks are inconsistent across clients.
You’re pretty much stuck using the mainline client element to get the best discord lite experience. But it’s still pretty junk at hq screen sharing and group calls. It’s missing audio capture and a decent audio filter essentially.
Please do.
