Technology

sadly people will forget about this next week

Y’all just aren’t thinking about the shareholders.

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.

Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their "support forums" on Discord.

It'll be the new Victorian age all over again. Morals and acting righteous up top and secret human stuff just underneath the surface. Just look at what is happening in the bad old usa today. This is not about protecting minors.

Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they're going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it's someone else's problem.

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

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?

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

Stop a calling this "age.verification" and start calling it what it is, "identity harvesting".

The absolute shitload majority of users will not care about this enough to stop using the product

Thats why it is important to have an alternetive ready people can switch to. If there is a backlash (for any platform) and a decentralized alternative is there this is the biggest chance to become the "norm". So thanks to all the people working on lemmy, peertube, mastodon, etc.

Definitely uninstalling discord. I hardly use it anyway.

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.

I mean I've wanted to change anyway since the enshittification started. I think the first thing was a paid avatar/profile decoration store. Annoying enough, but if they're decent cosmetics and not crazy prices I can understand. I still wish there was an internal, native seeing that would just remove all the visual teasing of paid options, but I can ignore it. (Mainly I hate trying to add an emoji to chat and just seeing pages of emoji from servers that I can't use on the one I'm on- which is already super annoying, but they put the regular result ones behind all those so you have to either scroll past them or manually switch to the default emoji page- that's just pure rage bait- default should be first, followed by the ones from that server that you can actually use)

But my main problem was when Nitro showed up.

Unfortunately, of the up and comers none are quite ready yet, and none have the full suite of functionality.

This change actually doesn't affect me at all, I don't really engage with any communities. I have one that I use just to mess with admin options and see what kinda choices there are and how it works, one server with a few friends (like 5 regulars counting myself) and one for some of my siblings that we only really use to play Jackbox remotely.

But I still resent the change and have wanted a good alternative ever since subscriptions started.

I found this little substack article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.

"I categorically cannot trust tech companies with that kind of personal data," wrote one frustrated user, with many hoping they might be able to convince Discord to do a U-turn with enough public pressure. Others went further. "What a great way to kill your community," added another longtime user, while some predicted "that’s game over for Discord" and remarked ruefully that "privacy on the internet is truly dead".

LOL. Just like Netflix price increases, or reddit third party apps thing, the protest will barely register in usage metrics and discord will carry on.

These companies have effectively infinite resources with which to test changes with user reference groups, model potential outcomes, and mitigate risks. It's pure hubris to suggest that you have a better understanding of Discord's user base than they do.

The vaaast majority of users will just do the video age test and never think about it again.

they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.

No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.

I keep researching alternatives, and every time I circle back around toward Matrix, despite criticisms. Part of it is a question of what everyone is using. I pretty consistently see that groups who use or used to use irc are now using Matrix additionally or as a replacement.

Part of me would like xmpp to be the best answer, but I've yet to see an implementation that handles public communities well, particularly for anything that functions at all like Discord. Matrix seems to be at least gaining voice/video chat support?

this is not at all what i'm seeing on discord, and I think it's worthy of note that the article's sample is Reddit posts in r/discordapp. Discord users who use Reddit in general have a systemic bias that's close to ours, as opposed to the majority that is young Discord users.

I've heard Matrix was involved in some crypto bullshit and military operations of some sort. I want an alternative but Matrix is just shady enough all around for me to stay the hell away.

As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.

Many of the communities I am in are pissed and these aren't even tech people, this is even worse than what reddit did.The thing that most people online hate is age verification, who thought this was a good idea, reminds me of when Tumblr decided to ban porn same level of stupidity.

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

XMPP is the way! There are dozens of us!

https://roguesecurity.dev/blog/xmpp

I was using discord with notifiarr for a notification platform for my jellyfin server/*arr stack. Shut all that down and setup a self-hosted instance of ntfy today. Works perfect, should have done it sooner.