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.
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.
Since the 90s every few years you have had to move. You get over it eventually. There will be stragglers that will always hold on to the old one, they will be the last to the new platform. It’s happened before and it will happen again.
If only…
I abandoned WhatsApp for Discord after meta got its greedy hooks into it. Do they think people won’t just make a new account elsewhere and move on? Millennials have done it every two years ever since MySpace imploded after Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch bought it. We have been conditioned to let our accounts go.
(Also text messaging, group chats, phone calls, and video calls are things that come standard on smartphones without need of an app. Texting stupid memes to everyone I know has never been easier. Maybe it’s my age, but everyone I regularly talk to on discord is also in my phone. Oh noes, I’ll have to “text” instead of “chat.” The horror.)
How did you use Discord in place of WhatsApp? I found Discord incredibly slow to start up, buggy as hell and a pain in the ass to even jump to specific chats quickly in the UI and that was before they made it worse with the new UI.
I hate SMS and vastly prefer a real chat platform, in the US it’s messenger/insta and in EU and much of Asia it’s Whatsapp, line in Japan, kkaotalk in Korea, WeChat/weixin for China, and so on. Discord never crossed over to regular people in my experience for the most part (is the hot girl you met on it?).
I was in the military. Chat apps made it easy to keep up with friends and family even when we weren’t all in the same country. (Poor international communications is definitely a downside of standard phone services). But all of us all are back stateside now and it’s mostly been a gradual slide towards texting for my social group.
Already looking into alternatives. My friends and I are going to switch asap. They aren’t that tech savvy, so it’s pretty much up to me to find a good alternative and teach them how to use it. I don’t mind tho lol
Please, try Stoat.
That’s the one I’m leaning towards
Does Stoat have voice chat?
It does, though screen share and web cameras are labeled as “coming soon” for now
I am just not going to participate in that verification shit, and, for now, I will just not see that stuff anymore.
Exodus to another discord-clone. Great.
We need more than a discord clone. We need something that is structurally capable of avoiding these kind of top-down attacks. We need something decentralized. I think something using the matrix protocol would be a good fit
Matrix is good but not as simple as discord. Lots of users aren’t going to like it.
why is nobody talking about teamspeak 6? Is it bad?
Yeah. In my experience it’s more complicated than Discord but not as complicated as the fediverse. But either way, even if we can use this as an opportunity to boost its popularity among techy people then that would be a win in my books. Hopefully one day someone will come along and make a front end for Mstrix thats as frictionless to use as Discord
You’re more likely to see Wayland suddenly stop having in fighting and all simultaneously. Agree on every protocol going forward. Matrix having a frictionless client that is feature parody with discord.
It’s just not something that is likely ever going to happen. Matrix as a concept basically makes such a thing impossible.
Do it, pussies. I remember when sites would actually topple when they made poor decisions.
do it cowards. leave.
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.
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.
They plan on using an AI to read all your conversations as well. You wabt that?
Just quit. Why bother trying to stay?
i used to be quite proficient at using selenium.
though IIRC they require phone numbers for the sign up process now?
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.
Please do.
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?
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.
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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…
Yeah, no voice chat is a bummer. I haven’t tried, but my first instinct was, that’s a VM right there.
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Stoat doesn’t have screen sharing. Teamspeak 6 does though
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Please, im already erect. You don’t have to keep selling it. Ts6 it is.
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Stop! Youre gojng too fast! Your gonna have to learn how to make it last longer!
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Teamspeak isn’t open source… Use Mumble or Matrix instead.
Go ahead
Stoat is an open source Discord alternative. You should check it out.
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.
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.
I deleted my Discord account last night. Good riddance.
Someone on Reddit claims reddit will do the same soon. I wonder if it’s govt pressure.
potentially. it’s going to become more of the norm as more nations enforce stuff like this to “protect the kids” coughget your id and know what you’re doing onlinecough
Also keep in mind Discord is just about to launch their IPO in March so the timing lines up.
I agree, except that it’s the data broker corporations that are really behind this.
The EU is going to pass a law to enforce this, discord is just getting ahead of the imposition. That’s why France and Spain have been on the news regarding social network regulation for under 16.
So when you have to setup a system for 27 countries plus some members of the eurosphere you just do it for everyone and be done with it.
Lots of governments want it. But its no excuse doing it in a stupid way. For example EU IDs should have a function that just verifies someone is over 18 without any other info being send. At least the German one does. But its not being used.
It’s not being used because the real goal is to make it impossible to use the internet without handing over your ID, so that governments can know exactly what you do online. It goes along with all the attempts to ban or backdoor encryption including VPNs. They want to read every message and know who sent it and to whom.
I assume it’s UK/EU’s expanding social media laws that are driving this, in addition to Discord’s imminent Initial Public Offering coming in March. They’re trying to clean house to show how profitable they can be, the same way Reddit created their walled garden by restricting third-party connections prior to their IPO.
It’s bog-standard enshittification to please the shareholders.
Worried about the children while protecting thousands of paedophiles that raped children. (The governments, not discord)
Regardless, fuck discord and instead of “threatening” an exodus, why doesn’t everybody register with xmpp or mumble and figure it out from there. Crazy staying on discord from here on.
The problem is finding a good alternative immediately. I don’t mind to hop and check out multiple services, but some of my friends wants to just install one thing and be done.
My checklist is not too much either, but for some reason video calling is not something included with the lot of them.
We really gotta get started on building that
We really should have been already but now’s good too
Self-hosting a matrix instance might be an okay alternative. And because its decentralized its not really possible for it to have top-down age verification imposed on it, if it ever does get popular
Yeah, but if accounts are made on mumble for example, the migration will happen there quicker. Then if that doesn’t suit many, others are an option. I’m guessing whichever platform benefits from this will happily make any changes that are currently missing.
Or just use Steam - which the average Discord user has already installed. Supports Chats, Groups, Voice Chat, Streaming, Discussion Boards that are discoverable, solid 2FA authentication… only thing missing is Video Calls, which they could implement easily when looking at what is already there.
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My game plan here is that I’m moving everyone I can to Stoat. It’s not likely to go the corpo route any time soon. From there I plan on figuring out a matrix server and streamlining the process for my less dedicated friends the same way I did jellyfin.
… Steam is basically a family owned business it’s literally the exact example of what a perfectly acceptable large business is.
And fuck I ain’t here cause I know something wrong. The fuck you get that idea from. I’m here because reddit doesn’t have a good app that’s literally it. I would happily go back to reddit if i could have my old app back.
Lemmy has fuck all for communities, basically no users, and the majority of it is just regurgitated from reddit anyways. I could give less of a rats ass about the whole open source thing. It’s neat and all from a novelty perspective.
But frankly the hard on for open source this self hosted that is a massive nothing burger. Closed or open sources. What ever is the easier and more convenient option wins full stop.
Lemmy won cause the apps were more convenient.
I don’t think that Valve has that game plan, as they have proven again and again for about 20 years now. Having no shareholders really keeps them grounded. But you’re right, a completely FOSS solution that is easy to use would be preferable - but in the short term Steam communities might get an upswing.
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The problem with steam is that it will eventually go the same way.
At the moment the internet is being used by big tech similar to a sheepdog rounding up sheep. Hopefully most will refuse this and move platform, that platform will eventually attempted to be broken down and register a few more users etc. If you have younger siblings or kids, they’re fucked. Unless you educate them about their privacy and how important it is.
Well, Valve hasn’t done so for about 20 years now, how long do people have to give a company that has proven again and again that they are not in the game for extracting maximum value out of their client base? I’d love for a FOSS solution to pick up the slack, but none are currently in a state where they can pick up millions of non-technical minded users in a heartbeat. Valve has those users already, so they are able to provide a solution NOW, not in a few years.
Should Valve eventually start enshittifying, which would require going public first, maybe there will be a readily usable FOSS solution. For now, it’s one of the easiest routes out of Discord (and the content on the Steam Forums is scrapeable over the web, so it’s pretty easy to transfer out, not like discord)
