Technology

The EU has apparently decided that this has to be done for most public platforms by July 2026, so Discord may not have much of a choice and other platforms will likely follow: (Edit: I forgot, the EU strict age verification stuff seems to be limited to EU DSA's definition of "platforms" so as a text messenger I'm not sure Discord is part of it. But this'll still likely be coming to more services near you and perhaps Discord is just voluntarily joining the chaos..)

I could be wrong I’m not a lawyer, assume everything I write from here is bullshit, but see here:

https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say “Online services get up to 12 months to apply age verification, EU guidelines say” This was in July 2025.

EU guidelines in question seem to be:

1. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-guidelines-protection-minors and

2. https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226

Quotes:

“[…] the Union legislature enacted Article 28 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and the Council (6). Paragraph 1 of this provision obliges providers of online platforms […] to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors, […]”

“Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below.”

“In the following circumstances, […] the Commission considers the use of access restrictions supported by age verification methods an appropriate and proportionate measure to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors: […] an online platform accessible to minors has identified risks to minors’ privacy, safety, or security, including content, conduct and consumer risks as well as contact risks (e.g., arising from features such as live chat, image/video sharing, anonymous messaging)”

“Age estimation methods can complement age verification technologies and can be used in addition to the former,” (AKA the alternative to a literal gov ID check seems to be big data AI sucking up all user data to estimate user age.)

The in my opinion horrible solution the EU seems to have found to avoid sharing the physical ID for services that don't want to request one, is apparently this app: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui Which from what I can tell

1. The EU app seems to require Google device attestation so all custom ROMs are out and to be a citizen you can apparently no longer own your device,

2. Unless you use iOS or Android you're apparently not a citizen,

3. Once everyone is used to using some citizen app like that, I feel like a fascist government could easily tie it to a social score or other authoritarian measures bewyond the age verification.

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. But spread the word, somehow press seems to be ignoring this.

Oh right, another account to delete.

Well, I hope that Revolt/Stoat picks up most people.

XMPP is the way! There are dozens of us!

https://roguesecurity.dev/blog/xmpp

If Gen Z had left Twitter when Musk ruined it this wouldn't be happening.

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

Discord was always an overhyped crap.

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.

I am already learning about matrix protocol which is seeming like a good alternative. https://matrix.to/#/#all-topics:matrix.org

Definitely uninstalling discord. I hardly use it anyway.

I'm truly surprised that lots of people don't like it. I expected most will just silently obey the new orders of our overlords.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC

So far, I have stumbled upon Stoat, a project called Sharkord, the Matrix network and the XMPP network.

Xmpp is both secure and snappy. Stoat doesn't federate but the interface is really Discord-like.

Some kind of XMPP based Stoat would be nice.

The practice of making a "free" thing so you can whore your MAU numbers out to private equity to keep the lights on should be wholesale abolished.

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?

I'm already making backups and deleting all the posts and DMs I made on discord. Yes I know they probably have everything backed up, but there is always a possibility that they lose that shit or don't fully back up everything. I am not interesting in playing along with their bullshit.