Submitted 13 hours ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
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
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.
☝️🤓 Discord said they’re going to delete the data!
The “someone” is referring to Discord, not you.
I dig your Netscape avatar
Discord said they’re going to delete the data!
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining
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?
Matrix
Do the people you talk with use Signal?
They’re already doing it to access the social security website.
Stop a calling this “age.verification” and start calling it what it is, “identity harvesting”.
Or “pre-planned doxxing”
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?
Conservatives have been using the “think of the children line” to justify Draconian overeach for years. All while simultaneously doing everything in their power to take away programs that help children.
Let’s not act like the dems don’t do some of the same shit.
And no I’m not both sidesing this shit…just saying that the dems/left uses this reasoning a lot as well.
political parties aren’t real. Their only purpose is market segmentation.
It doesn’t matter which teams win in sports, billionaires own all the leagues.
Absofucking- lutely!
My 12 year old has zero unsupervised access to the internet. Zero. “But they’ll suffer sociallly!”
Will they? My son has tons of friends and they play sports and Nerf guns. And, he can read. A whole chapter book, on his own, without prompting.
Suffer socially, ask the “incels” who have recovered if the internet access they had as teens “helped them socially”.
My kids had full internet use with only porn and advertising blocking, except for “homework time”, as well as no restrictions on video games (except for fucking Roblox). They recently graduated high-school at the top of their class and continue doing great in university.
They grew up to be nice, well-rounded young men who make friends easily, aren’t assholes, aren’t glued to their cell phones (which they had since they were little), don’t mindlessly watch TV, can easily switch tasks and “buckle down” when they have to, and have a great work ethic. They grew up with the attitude that internet/cell phones are tools, not rewards or distractions. Once they hit high-school I found I no longer needed to monitor them (and it was starting to feel creepy and invasive). When they had to study they studied, on their own without prompting or timers.
I had no worries because I know how to read papers, and there was (and still is) ABSOLUTELY ZERO evidence that doing so would be harming, but in fact the reverse is true.
Kids grow up to be like their parents. Don’t want them to be assholes? Then don’t be an asshole. Want them to grow up with a reading habit? Then read for yourself. It’s that easy.
It’s interesting to see that their friends who had strict internet/gaming rules ended up turning into complete shitheads they no longer associate with.
I feel like it will be more common to heavily restrict the tech access of children as people who actually grew up using the internet become parents.
I also plan to restrict my (future hypothetical) children from internet access until 13 or so, depending on maturity. So that gives me some optimism in that regard.
My nephew plays lots of on online games. My sister checks in with me to make sure that he is both playing games that are appropriate for him, and with people who are appropriate to play with. We’ve setup a discord specifically for him and his friends, and the account he uses is actually my sister’s account, on her own device, so she has direct control over what communities he’s on in discord, who he talks to, and what content he is exposed to.
He is not allowed to play public lobby games with out her supervision, or a trusted “chaperone” (one of many IRL friend and family members) being in the lobby with him. This is as much about protecting him from harmful content, as it is about teaching him proper gaming etiquette. He was showing some toxic behaviors (greifing mainly) and I shut that down pretty quick.
The conservative belief is that children are basically property and as such can be used for hard labor and kept from appropriate healthcare… But then when it comes to porn, Big Government has to do everything for them.
Nobody ever said it was a consistent ideology.
As a parent: 100% agree
And how do you , practically, do that?
Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.
Even in the ‘90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.
Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.
Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work. No parent has time for that. And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about, much less be able to monitor.
I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.
You went to a school where they had no controls over what you could and couldn’t access?
My school was blocking harmful content on their computers when i was there in the mid to late 2000s?
When i got home i had something called CyberSitter on my computer in my room that sent logs of all my internet usage as reports to my dad.
It took me until 16 when i went out and bought my own computer with my own money before i had “unfettered” access to the internet.
Were these tools impenetrable fortresses? no, of course not. but they were a damn sight better than the ISP level blocks and legislating the “good” companies out of existence that the UK (and others) Government is currently engaged in.
Not that any of this is really about “protecting kids” anyway
And how do you , practically, do that?
By paying attention to your child.
Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.
Yes, by paying attention to their children.
Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.
Yep, by paying attention to when the kid was on the computer and what they were doing on there.
Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.
If you give a child a tablet or phone, you should probably pay attention to what they are doing with it. You wouldn’t just give them a full tool box to play with unsupervised.
Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work
Yep, by paying attention to the kid.
No parent has time for that.
Bullshit. You need to pay attention to your kids, that’s a basic fucking part of parenting.
And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult
Maybe you should pay attention to your kid and not let them have unsupervised access to the whole Internet until they are ready for it?
because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.
Actually, you do have an ability to monitor who your kid spends time with, and when. It’s called parenting.
I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.
Let’s not pretend that phones and the Internet only started existing in 2026 too. I was a child in the 90’s, during the real “Wild West” days of the internet. If anything, parents have more tools and controls over what their child can access in 2026 than they did in 2000. There weren’t “child” cellphone controls when I got my first phone. My dad didn’t give me one until I both needed it, and was mature enough to have it. The parental controls on my old Window 2000 machine were laughably easy to defeat. Do you know what kept me out of trouble though? My dad paid attention to when I used the computer, what I was doing on there, and how much I was doing it.
Either parent your kid, or don’t, but it is not my job to make sure your kid is coddled on the internet.
Devices given to children can be configured to restrict access to unwanted things. Obviously, school networks already are.
The only uncontrollable thing would be kids seeing things via friends with less observant parents, but that is not a new thing.
No, it’s the not the same but there are options you’re ignoring.
By talking to your fucking kids lmao
Like, have a conversation with them. Treat them like a person, a real human being, with thoughts and feelings and basic decision making capabilities, instead of treating them like a wild animal that needs to be leashed.
Everyone immediately thinks “it’s impossible for parents to be aware of and block everything they don’t want their kids to look at on the Internet!”. But maybe the first step should just be talking to your kids about what you do/do not want then looking at on the Internet, and trusting that they’ll heed your warnings. Tight fisted control over what your kids can/can’t see on the Internet should be the last resort.
Exactly, how can you limit a child who knows internet and technology more than their parents? Like, if I was a child I don’t think they could limit me at all
You dont give children tablets and phone, full stop.
Exactly, it’s basically impossible to control as a parent, but just blaming the parents is a simple solution for many. Everybody loves their easy solutions to complex issues: left, right and center.
So are you for or against mass surveillance veiled as “child safety”?
Should be pretty evident from the comment.
Hear me out: parents are irresponsible, and also can’t watch their kids 24/7
I hear you. I guess shitty parents is a good enough reason to let a company monetize your PII for a bit before they (or one of their customers) gets hacked and dumps to the dark web.
Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their “support forums” on Discord.
I wish it was only limited to support forums. I’ve seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.
It’s horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.
🤮
Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?
It’s too bad the open source community couldn’t find some programmers to help them make an alternative.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
I deployed several docker containers using an image from this one guy. Later when I needed help with an image I realized the support is provided exclusively through a Discord server. To nobody’s surprise the guy is an asshole who shouldn’t interact with users.
Yes, thank you.
IRC still supports most of the FOSS core.
More modern alternatives include Jitsi, Matrix and Simplex. Mumble also works well for voice.
Teamspeak 6! Voice + Streaming. Selfhosting is also possible! You can also rent an instance from them for 4-5 bucks.
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.
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
One of my Discord friends has a stalker and can’t get anything but automated messages.
Like this: spiritual advisory pastor to serve only 6 months after molesting a 12-year-old for years
Morris’s attorney said the molestation was her fault because she was “flirtatious.”
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.
Guilded went to Roblox-only in 2025. I’d never heard of it until someone else mentioned it as an alternative.
Revolt is now called Stoat Chat. Some sort of legal issue apparently.
Anyway, for those who don’t know, it’s basically an open source clone of Discord. Definitely worth a look, probably where I’ll my stuff now.
yeah it’s the closest to a real discord clone, at least discord before they introduced screen sharing
IRC :(
No voice/video calling, no screen sharing, no persistent chat history.
Is IRC still a thing? I havnt used it since 2006. I’d love to see it again
Revolt is now Stoat
Element or any Matrix client will be more than enough I guess. It already passed many stepping stones and has all the functionalities which discord users might want + open source
Revolt is Stoat now and it doesn’t even let me verify my email right now.
I signed up yesterday and just got my verification a little while ago. I hear that they’re being swamped right now. I wonder why? 🤔
Trying to point my friends towards matrix/element, they already started a teamspeak server instead though >. >
The biggest issue is it didn’t seem like matrix/element has streaming video in voice chat, we use that pretty heavily as we’ll play different games and just hang and talk several streaming at a time.
Don’t - they sell your data to police and authoritarian governments
“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.
Man 100%. Every now and then you hear that Facebook is “hemorrhaging users” or “it’s all over” but most normal people just don’t give a fuck and use it because they’re already there and their friends are too. This’ll be no different.
I’ve been off Facebook for at least 15 years. I’ve been trying to move people away from it for so long, or at least getting people to stop sharing shit about their kids, but a lot of people use it as their primary means of communication, news, photo sharing, etc. I just don’t get it. I do think most people I know just have ghost accounts now, though. But for some, Facebook is their internet. When they send me Facebook links, I just don’t interact with it at all. I don’t know what they sent me because I refuse to click the link, and even if I did, Facebook is blocked by my firewall and DNS so I won’t even be able to see it without getting around my own network. I just don’t even respond.
hmm idk, i only know like 2 people in my life that all use Facebook heavily. i know it’s different in India though.
Facebook has seen stagnation or user drops in most mature markets, it’s still growing in growing markets. India especially represents like half of all Facebook now.
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?
Many of the communities I am 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.
There really isn’t a good alternative to Discord, sadly. Yes, I’ve tried Matrix
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
I’ve heard people mention Matrix, but I’ve not tried it yet.
Oh right, another account to delete.
If Gen Z had left Twitter when Musk ruined it this wouldn’t be happening.
The EU has apparently decided that this has to be done by July 2026, so Discord may not have much of a choice and other platforms will likely follow:
I could be wrong I’m not a lawyer, assume everything I write from here is bullshit, but see here:
mlex.com/…/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to… “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: …europa.eu/…/commission-publishes-guidelines-prot… + ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/…/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: github.com/…/av-app-android-wallet-ui Which from what I can tell 1. it requires 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. 4. There is a privacy friendly alternative approach anyway, that most governments seem to conveniently be ignoring: politico.com/…/california-law-online-age-checks-0…
Anyway, I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. But spread the word, somehow press seems to be ignoring this.
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 wasn’t a huge discord use but I just removed all the channels before deleting the app on every device.
Not going to make a huge difference but if everyone does it, maybe it will!
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’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.
I’ve been floating the idea of running Matrix on my NAS anyway, so thanks to Discord for finally pissing me off enough to prioritise getting off of the shitty platform.
The only viable alternatives are Stoat or Steam Chat. Teamspeak is still dragging their feet when it comes to modern feature support.
Discord was always an overhyped crap.
For someone that used discord only for video chat and the chat sidebar for D&D since we have players in person and a couple in other states, what would you all recommend?
Should we just switch to Zoom or something?
What features did they exactly disable for unverified accounts?
I hope this brings stoat.chat more attention. It’s promising, but not at the same level in terms of features.
Considering every discord user I’ve ever interacted with, this can only be seen as an ultimate good.
Fuck, discord, and everyone who uses that. You all deserve to live a nightmare.
biotin7@sopuli.xyz 54 minutes ago
I found this little article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
Haunt@thelemmy.club 41 minutes ago
Keeping it real