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.
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”.
Y’all just aren’t thinking about the shareholders.
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.
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.
The absolute shitload majority of users will not care about this enough to stop using the product
sadly people will forget about this next week
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 found this little substack article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
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
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.
Definitely uninstalling discord. I hardly use it anyway.
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.
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.
