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?
As a parent: 100% agree
So are you for or against mass surveillance veiled as “child safety”?
Should be pretty evident from the comment.
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.
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.
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?
Do the people you talk with use Signal?
Only used it when used to game with my kids. So no one I know uses Signal.
Matrix
Me and my people are moving to stoat. They’re having some growing pains right now, but I’m sure it’ll smooth out.
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
Wait 6 months, this will have changed nothing for Discord and they’ll carry on. Most likely in 2-3 years they’ll deploy the age verify for all users, not just users trying to access “adult” stuff.
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
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.
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.
It’s a sliding slope though. The initial reasoning is fair. But it will eventually spread to other features like (potentially) creating and owning servers or holding administrative and moderation roles
It’s the same with the chat control currently looking over EU. Nobody can say that they are against efforts to stop CSAM. The issue is that the efforts don’t limit themselves to fighting that. Likewise the age verification on Discord does not seem to be targeted or limited to certain content. They are leaving the door open to use it any way they want
After what happened in Nepal last year, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living. The powers that be saw a small country use it as a tool to affect change. To me, and tell me if I lm jumping to conclusions here, its obvious as to why this policy change is happening at all, to prevent the site from being used in that manner again.
After what happened in Nepal last, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living.
This…I do believe 1,000% that, when people use any form of applications to create a community that supports each other and brings goodness in generalization they will always shut any apps down, or another company such as Oracle, BlackRock, Vanguard will buy it out and trash the application, housing, property, food, and anything that seems to attract the public attention that makes the world just a little better. I truly believe these evil demonic overlords will do anything to make society live in utter depravity, non unification of anything, no community, isolation, fear, depression, and division. This is what they always want, and anything that brings us together, they will shut it down. I have watched this for years. How new innovating unicorn/startup apps will go about 3 years at most. And then Zuckface (Other crap companies such as meta) will try to somehow purchase an app to just crap on and destroy. Mediocre disgusting apps such as facebook, and instagram that has done more damage in a society than to ever help, will always progress and continue. Because it separates us, divides us, puts us in echo chambers, toxic and does nothing to benefit humanity. Things like discord, that creates a community to support one another, will always get shutdown or purchased by demon possy who will just eventually get the app to become a ghost town. I am curious to what app is next. We had TikTok and Discord on the chopping block. I am curious to what other apps are next for 2026.
Control the conversations in the digital third spaces. Crush ideas, punish those who are a threat to “authority”
Bug’s life is a perfect example.
What happened in Nepal and prevent what manner being used?
The youth used discord to coordinate an overthrow of the government, and used it to organise a vote for who to replace the leader with.
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.
hunting for alternatives
I’ve heard people mention Matrix, but I’ve not tried it yet.
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.
Y’all just aren’t thinking about the shareholders.
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.
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
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.
Revolt is Stoat now and it doesn’t even let me verify my email right now.
Yeah, they’re swamped! Glad I made mine around the IPO announcement…
What’s wild to me is that I’m not on corporate social media, and the outrage has absolutely exploded on Mastodon and Lemmy. I wonder how bad it has gotten on the corporate media sites, because there’s no way the algorithm hasn’t noticed it.
It reminds me of when OnlyFans (stupidly) told us all they weren’t going to allow porn anymore, as if that wasn’t the core of their business.
Ive been trying to migrate off since 2020
Communities I follow refuse to, and no other service is close to parity. Guilded was the closest until they allowed themselves to golden parachute with their Roblox purchase, so they’re now not longer worth considering
Teamspeak and teamspeak6 is a joke, anyone who prefers it is off their rocker
I’ve been following Revolt/Stout, River on FreeNet since I found it on FUTO, and others but frankly all alternatives I’ve found suck for varius reasons
Honestly I just tried stoat and setting up a server (it’s not hosted by me so maybe just a space) to try to get my friends to migrate to. We have ~20 some odd people and have lots of chats categorized by outdoor/indoor with channels for diy/gaming/cooking/ordering out and so far, stoat has a few limitations I miss from discord (editing category or custom emoji names, for example) and I have yet to try out the voice chat aspect of it but it looks like this is going to be the clear winner for my use case. I’m hoping they get a mobile app working for some of the more casual just want to chat and share interesting pictures of our day without sitting at the pc members but besides that I’m loving it. Maybe at some point I’ll try to look into seeing if I can self host, but for now it’s nice to know there’s something that feels just like discord from an organization of topics perspective that hasn’t gone down their path (yet?)
Definitely uninstalling discord. I hardly use it anyway.
I use it daily, but I’ve now deleted my account and will move on.
I dont put up with this shit.
If Gen Z had left Twitter when Musk ruined it this wouldn’t be happening.
