I know Discord is enshittifying and I’m all for switching to open source instead.
But everyone’s reason for leaving seems to be:
“Discord wants my ID for age verification and I don’t like that.”
And the new apps will be subject to the exact same laws.
Are users just not realizing that (and therefore in for a rude awakening), or am I missing something?
A great deal of the internet is still the wild west that it once was, and should always have been. You think something like IRC is ever gonna be subject to this crap? I suspect it’s only ever going to be imposed on centralized, corporate, painfully mainstream platforms.
IRC: “Oh you want this server to verify age? Whoops now its hosted in another country and run by an anonymous admin, too bad so sad”
I don’t actually live in a country that has mandatory age verification for social media, and AFAIK even the US still doesn’t have it. Discord is doing this because they want the data, not because it’s the law.
Either way, the recent Discord data breaches have proven that they cannot be trusted with this data.
Many very small services will just not bother with compliance. And the risk of enforcement on them might be low.
If you use a federated alternative, you can switch to a server that doesn’t bother with compliance without losing your contacts.
Many of the laws don’t specify how the age check should be done. There are more privacy-friendly ways to comply, like running a server for your friends or family and already knowing they’re over 18.
Another thing that crossed my mind is that the 5€ i invest for having emotes is probably the same money required to host my own matrix instance and thus even a better investment of the money
You’re missing something. Those laws are regional. Discord is applying them globally.
Not because they should or because there are transparent legislative demand but because they want to be ripe for purchase as soon as they go public.
Right. They’re probably being paid to collect this information for their own use, and for sale.
Heard this of Matrix despite it being a decentralised network. Only Matrix servers hosted in the UK will be subject to ID verification laws unless other countries implement the same laws. The Matrix Foundation will not be able to force age verification requirements on remote servers unless they somehow built it into their source code, which is open.
Didn’t it also say that if you self-host a private server for yourself (and mayne friends and family), you’d not have to ID verify. And it can federate, so…
Not that it’s that useful for people like me who are not (yet?) savvy enough to self-host stuff but it should be an option.
Laws are enforced by making some legal entity either comply to them, or be punished (via fines for example).
There’s a limited extent to which laws can still be enforced on a service that’s hosted outside of the countries with those laws, but the point of open source and decentralized alternatives to Discord is that they’re harder for governments to force into enforcing these kinds of laws.
Yeah… when the point is hit where the ID stuff needs to be implemented, you’re too big a site to avoid going into the shitter anyhow.
Honestly, if this decentralization push as a result of the corporatization of social media means we end up with websirtes smaller and run by individuals like the web used to be 20+ years ago… you know, I’m totally fine with that.
I’ve been on lemmy since early October when the reddit ban-hammer smacked me down… and I do not miss the “sturm un drang” of that site one bit.
If everyone switches to disparately hosted Discord alternatives, maybe they will think twice about passing such laws because they will be impractical to enforce. I think the biggest reason they are getting passed now rather than ten years ago is because it has become somewhat technically feasible with the level of centralization the internet has devolved into, they can actually expect that people will put up with it rather than just leaving the platforms that comply.
I bet you that the instance size counts. Matrix has many instances you can pick from. You can also self-host or get a managed instance (someone hosts the system for you). And all of this can be done in jurisdictions that don’t have shitty laws.
So, no, it’s definitely not the same.
And the new apps will be subject to the exact same laws.
Hm? I don’t see how the government is going to force me to enable ID age verification on my self-hosted Stoat instance… 🤔
In a hypothetical situation where you get a law passed in your country, where it’s mandatory to perform age verification on all social media apps, it’s simple.
No verification? Jail time. Will they go after you? They could, if someone pointed them towards your server. (I think they even have to, at least in our country, the government has to persecute a crime they are made aware of if I remember my college law courses right)
In some states, if I understand it right (based on a quick googling, might be false) failing to do verification for porn can be considered as a felony. It’s a slightly different example (porn vs. social networks), but if the laws are written in the same way, there’s not really much you can do about it.
Completely anonymous hosting that’s in no way tied to you (through IP, credit card, location, domain, logs, etc) is difficult. While you’d still probably be fine if you have a private-use server, you’d still give anyone who doesn’t like you and knows about it a pretty easy way how to make your life a lot more difficult. This of course heavily depends on how would (will) the laws be written in your country, but give the track record of lawmakers understanding tech, there is a chance that even small self-hosted stuff would catch flak. If it’s written in such a way to not be i.e limited by user count, then there’s not much you can do.
A lawyer would probably be able to talk you out of it, but you’d still be charged and it would suck (and be expensive) to deal with.
So, yeah. “How could the government force me to enable it” boils down to “jail time”. I mean, it’s basically a similar question like “how could the government stop me from using Telegram or VPNs”, and IIRC there are some examples for that already.
EDIT: Not having public sign-up enabled could be a way around it, since random people can’t make an account there, so you’re basically doing age-verification by a veto. However, if someone under-age got into your server, they then have a leverage on you, since they are there illegally (in the hypothetical scenario).
It’s not just they are doing age verification, but the method they are using to implement it. ID collection is not privacy respecting, and further to that, they’ve already had a major data leak, including said IDs. For the facial scan method, they claim that it will be on-device only but given that it’s closed source software, they could change this at any time.
Seemingly, everyone are missing that Discord are very likely to go public soon https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-06/chat-platform-discord-is-said-to-file-confidentially-for-ipo.
My guess is they will announce going public themselves as soon as they have normalized their ID collection and age verification AI programme. Big papa Microsoft or the like will buy Discord and make it an evergreen AI data set training ground.
irc master race.
Different jurisdictions, different laws. So it’s not true that the new apps will, necessarily, be subject to the exact same laws.
But, even if the new apps will be subject to the exact same laws, they may have a different implementation of age verification that better aligns with your privacy or other concerns.
Neither of which precludes many users just not realizing. Not everyone thinks deeply about legality, privacy, security, equity, etc.
Discord being a bigger company, I’d think the switch just for this reason could be seen as a protest which should help pressure them into pressuring relevant parties. Though I agree people should also pressure their politicians directly too.
And there’s also the possibility people were already annoyed at the platform for multiple reasons and the facial recording situation was the breaking point, giving a broader message to it.
Discord being a bigger company, I’d think the switch just for this reason could be seen as a protest which should help pressure them into pressuring relevant parties. Though I agree people should also pressure their politicians directly too.
If by the bolded “them” you mean Discord… they are not doing this because laws. Those apply in some countries only. Unless you want to argue they are preparing for more countries implementing this.
They (Discord) will not pressure anyone because this is something they want to do.
Them = Discord indeed
And if it’s their intention and not from others, them I think the second paragraph still stands.
