Discord Alternatives
- Stoat;
- Matrix;
- Rocket.Chat;
- Zulip;
- Discourse.
Beginning with a phased global rollout to new and existing users in early March, users may be required to engage in an age-verification process to change certain settings or access sensitive content. This includes age-restricted channels, servers, or commands and select message requests.
Unless they trade me a face scan of each Discord employee and member, I’m out. Enough is enough, nothing is free.
I love how photo-based age verification scanning is the worst of both worlds - it destroys your anonymity, but not in a way that makes it easier to run a community where you can ban a person by their digital ID since they can just make a new one with the same face since facial recognition is too crude for that.
Seeya ✌️
Well, the day it asks me for ID/face scan is the day I delete my account. Their days are numbered.
You think they’ll let you access the account settings to delete the account without scanning your face first?
If they don’t they would open the door to people committing spam or abuse intentionally to receive a suspension as the next best thing. I know I’ll do it if they don’t let me delete my account.
They won’t let you send messages without finishing verification
Then I’ll email their support and be rude to them until they get fed up. I’m sure I can be nasty enough in some way to get them to suspend me no matter how bad they want me.
If they want to be spammed with gdpr takedown requests sure…
Just log in with a third party client where people in the Issues are complaining about being banned. Or use your Discord token and spam their API with illegal calls until they ban your account
It seems like the restriction should be lifted for accounts without verification after 5 years. After all, you’re not even allowed to sign up if you’re under 13, so by 5 years you have to be at least 18.
“Content filtering” is just corporate jargon for subjective censorship, dynamically and discriminately restricting access to knowledge. I abhor all censorship.
Care to make a remix of “7 Words You Can Never Say on TV” for blahaj? YOU might abhor all censorship, but your admins don’t, and I’m inclined to agree with them.
Yeah … A complete anything-goes free for all is always going to devolve into a nasty cesspool dominated by the worst actors who have driven everyone else away. I get it, there’s a lot of awful censorship out there, but on the flip side you need to have at least some rules to prevent the otherwise inevitable descent into the worst environment possible
Discord was always an overhyped crap.
I think a big thing that made it catch on was the ease of joining. Just send someone a link and boom, they’re in the intended server. No immediate registration process, no buttons or commands to use, just a single click and entering a username. For all that I dislike Discord about, they did that part really well
Turns out purpose built human traps are effective at trapping humans.
What alternative should we all switch to?
Also thinking AI fake IDs will end up being an easy way around this.
Drop anything that’s not opensource and federated, except if you want to live the enshitification process over and over.
Matrix might be the closest to Discord. XMPP should also be considered.
I’m still trying to understand why XMPP isn’t more widely used. Probably the whole no single centralized service thing like most other federated protocols/services
XMPP biggest issues:
- The absurdly and laugably slowness of the protocol evolution on critically needed features: it was bleeding edge years back. The XSF totally screwed up the VoIP extension management. Google dropped a working out-of-the-box solution on the table in 2005: “Take it and use it! You’re welcome!”. They took 4 years to improve it before declaring the extension stable. Only then did clients start implementations, and bummer: the spec was not perfect, there were a lot of hiccups and “client A can make calls to B but not C” issues, because, who would have guessed, the only way to improve a spec at some point is to test it out there, and not stare at it and make some minor changes. By the time, most XMPP users of the time who wanted VoIP had moved on to others tools, XMPP went from at the top to very late. They’re doing it again with MIX (next gen rooms): the first draft is from 2015. It’s still “experimental”, though some servers team started implementation (such lack of patience…)
- An ocean of servers/clients with no consistency. You get to Matrix, and you have Element for all platforms. It can be native code everywhere, but it’s the same look and feel. You can tell your pops “just install Element”. In the XMPP world, there is no equivalent, though Snikket seems to be going there (consistent UI across platforms): all clients are different, different UI, platform specific with different set of features, some are a 1 guy project. If you’re not guided by a tek-savvy person, you have no idea where to start.
With all that said, I run a server for our family and its resources consumption is barely a blip on the radar. The lightest Matrix servers are an order of magnitude hungrier. And the difference increases with scale!
XMPP is the absolute best solution to multiply small servers, a very good thing for a healthy federation.
Appreciate the info, thanks for taking the time to reply. I loved when Google was using XMPP for their chat just because that meant I could chat with people who insisted on using their Google accounts, without having to use one myself
I hope people using fake IDs to bypass it becomes common knowledge. Felony or not it’s effective and the ID verifying part isn’t.
Zulip is great for text based communities, but doesn’t have built in voice or video.
This is the point where you need to teach a short, sharp lesson to companies by burning it to the ground.
One of my friends hit me with the “they already know everything about me” line on this one and literally said they’d give Discord “anything”, so I don’t think I’m gonna convince my group to move y’all. At least my best friend is educated enough at this point to be interested in moving so I’ll still be investigating options.
Goodbye, Discord. It’s been real.
It seemed mostly fake to me. The dead giveaway was all the tech support forums that pushed themselves onto Discord. That makes so little sense it MUST be fake.
I am almost 70. I will just use a pic of good ol Harold. Will be funny to see if it accepts him.
Not if I read it correctly: not uploading anything (and fuck you Discord) means I won’t get invited to view adult content, right? That’s it? And we’ll all be teens forever?
Pfft. Whatever.
For now… maybe 6 months or a year and everyone might need it. That’s the way everything seems to be going.
Maybe. That’d be an easy goodbye though.
I agree, already made a post in my server to follow me on X, Y, Z etc and how they were recently hacked 70,000 IDs leaked so they can’t be trusted.
Back to post order catalogues.
only changes for the unverified:
- Channels, servers, and commands set to age-restricted will be inaccessible
- DM requests deemed “sensitive” will be inaccessible
- “Sensitive content” will be blurred
- Won’t be able to become a speaker in “stage” channels, a special type where a few videoconferencers have a meeting where anyone else can watch and type but not videoconference; verified watchers can be invited to speak
- DMs from unfamiliar users will be routed to a separate “warning”
nothing else
I think this is business as usual…
Youtube age restricts pro-Palestine stuff and the government age restricts the Epstein files, so I can imagine this would target political or LGBTQ spaces, which are some of the worst spaces to require ID for. There’s a local political server I’m in, which due to this I’m strongly urging to migrate to Matrix with Discord bridges, and am offering to help with.
I’m strongly urging to migrate to Matrix with Discord bridges, and am offering to help with.
Bravo. I know Matrix isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve been using it for a few years now and would like to see it gain some traction.
I absolutely refuse to put the Discord app on my phone and using Matrix bridging for Discord messaging (only works with messages, not voice/video).
Server owners must apply an age-restricted label to any channels that contain sexually explicit content involving adults or content involving adults that is shared solely for the purposes of sexual gratification.
nothing else needs to be age-restricted, and age restriction of topics you mentioned would be big news for discord. pluralkit’s home is discord and has great influence there, and the lgbtq+ community definitely has a larger presence than the plural community
This here says that Discord can automatically age-restrict channels and specifically mentions channels focused on sexual content in a different section, implying that this is not the only “mature” topic they will age restrict.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005292701-How-to-Access-an-Age-Restricted-Server-FAQ clarifies that Discord would only do that for servers that otherwise violate the Community Guidelines’s provisions on adult content, whose only mention of which I quoted above.
That doesn’t look like clarification to me. It explicitly mentions sexual content then gives a vague “age-restricted themes” and “18+ content” that they can apply arbitrarily like YouTube did with “Hind’s Hall”
I disagree, but we’ll see what they do with it
Can someone help me figure out if matrix/element would work for what I need? So far it looks decent, but my main issue is figuring out integrations/bots.
Is there a way to integrate something like PluralKit there?
I have many friends have that ported their bots from other platforms to Matrix, but these are technically capable people that created bots to begin with so YMMV.
Matrix does have a bot API, but there is not even close to as robust an ecosystem of bots to choose from. Whatever you want is probably possible, but depending on your needs you may have to write it yourself.
That makes sense. Thank you!!
Is Matrix a self-hosted alternative to Discord? I’ve been looking for one but the closest I can find is RocketChat, which is meant more for corporate environments. I’m going to be launching a radio station for Lemmy soon and I need a suitable solution for chat platform that I can integrate with my website (and eventually app).
Matrix is sort of a mishmash of things, not a fan of the UX but it has federation and encryption and isn’t Discord, and also has bridges to various platforms
