Topic: the new discord thing

Hey there folks, im sure you have heard about the changes discord are making regarding age verification by the end of the month. I wont get into the debate of why its good or bad. My whole thing is I am personally wondering how nsfw furry servers are reacting to this news, and how they are preparing for it. Is there also a discord alternative? I hear some are fleeing the site but I couldn't tell you where. Cool, thanks!

There are people scrambling to find or even make possible alternatives, but nothing stellar really currently exists, unfortunately. Discord really was the best, which is why everyone was on it. Honestly I could go on a whole rant about monopolies and corporate competition and whatnot, but I'll cut it short. Your best bet is probably Teamspeak afaik, but that place has alot of problems.

Idk but the change absolutely sucks balls. Like I understand WHY it happens but I absolutely do not want to send discord my ID yet alone image.

Sure I'll probably keep discord just to talk with the couple friends I have in there but yeah Ig something like Teamspeak or Guilded will come handy too (iirc my friend couple years ago mentioned Guilded was goated but I could be 100% wrong and it's actually ass).

Roblox and Reddit are already using the same 3rd party biometric ID service Discord clearly intends to use so you should get used to it.

Sucks pretty bad imo. I know for a fact a lot of people have already cancelled their nitro so they may end up walking it back but seems unlikely at this point in time

oneohthrix said:
Roblox and Reddit are already using the same 3rd party biometric ID service Discord clearly intends to use so you should get used to it.

Tbh discord only matters to me because its the only place I have deeply connected to my furry side, so if reddit roblox Instagram etc use it then like yeah it still sucks for privacy but I dont do anything nsfw on any of those things.

Apparently teamspeak has now maxxed out its hosting capacity in many regions due to the new influx of users fleeing discord lol. Although there like... can't be that many I dont think. I think teamspeak probably just has such a low user base prior to this that it just can't keep up.

its always them trying to say theyre "protecting the children" when theyre just finding an excuse to get a stronger chokehold on peoples personal information

thegoonguardian said:
its always them trying to say theyre "protecting the children" when theyre just finding an excuse to get a stronger chokehold on peoples personal information

yeah i mean theres gotta be a better way. Its hard for me to think of a specific solution but im just one person and there should be thinktanks for this kind of stuff, they need to get to work or smth

gasinmad said:
yeah i mean theres gotta be a better way. Its hard for me to think of a specific solution but im just one person and there should be thinktanks for this kind of stuff, they need to get to work or smth

thinktanks existing for this kind of stuff is literally part of the problem, they're thinking up all of the ways to make excuses to get everyone's data

The solution is parents putting away the ipad and actually parenting their kids

donovan_dmc said:
thinktanks existing for this kind of stuff is literally part of the problem, they're thinking up all of the ways to make excuses to get everyone's data

The solution is parents putting away the ipad and actually parenting their kids

The iPad generation (rolls eyes). I grew up in a time where people went outside and played. I had video games, but that's it. My first smartphone wasn't until I was 20 or 21

donovan_dmc said:
The solution is parents putting away the ipad and actually parenting their kids

I absolutely agree and initally i was going to lead with something like that, but then i realized that would require a widely recognized cultural shift on how we parent children as a society, and i dont know if thats a realistic goal or not. but yes i think thats like... the no brainer solution.

I'll add the context that this is only required when access mature channels/servers, messages, & settings; you can use Discord without verifying for everything else. On top of that, they already have age estimates, so if they already think you're an adult, you won't have to verify; they've said they believe the majority of users won't need to verify.

Not to excuse or defend this, of course; it absolutely sucks. Just want to make sure we're all on the same page.

aacafah said:
I'll add the context that this is only required when access mature channels/servers, messages, & settings; you can use Discord without verifying for everything else. On top of that, they already have age estimates, so if they already think you're an adult, you won't have to verify; they've said they believe the majority of users won't need to verify.

yeah i heard about this. will they use how you type as a guide because if its simply age of accounts, id have to ID verify for mature channels because my account was made in 2024 lol.

gasinmad said:
yeah i heard about this. will they use how you type as a guide because if its simply age of accounts, id have to ID verify for mature channels because my account was made in 2024 lol.

I'm pretty sure it's a lot more involved than just an account age, but I don't know the specifics; I first heard about it from this, though it's mentioned on the official post too.

Stoat (Formerly Revolt) has been listed as a solid option, with its main issue being just that it's still a work in progress made by some nerds in their own time. I've also been hearing stuff about Matrix, and of course Team Speak.

So yeah, there are alternatives. It's just you'll need to accept that they're not going to immediately be as good as Discord was.

aacafah said:
I'll add the context that this is only required when access mature channels/servers, messages, & settings; you can use Discord without verifying for everything else. On top of that, they already have age estimates, so if they already think you're an adult, you won't have to verify; they've said they believe the majority of users won't need to verify.

well, I mean YouTube/Google thinks that I'm under 18 on my main account, despite the account itself being 18 years old, as of September. so, like I'm not sure we can really trust the age estimation stuff to be super reliable.

also, I'd reckon that estimation requires you have the "use my data" stuff turned on in your privacy settings, so...

eclipse_lunablade said:
Stoat (Formerly Revolt) has been listed as a solid option, with its main issue being just that it's still a work in progress made by some nerds in their own time.

We have been testing the waters with Stoat.
It's technically functional, but it seems to be both a little buggy and a little laggy.

dba_afish said:
well, I mean YouTube/Google thinks that I'm under 18 on my main account, despite the account itself being 18 years old, as of September. so, like I'm not sure we can really trust the age estimation stuff to be super reliable.

I was unaware Google used age estimation on anything, so I can't comment on that.

dba_afish said:
also, I'd reckon that estimation requires you have the "use my data" stuff turned on in your privacy settings, so...

I'd assume that's solely for using your data for their own purposes (e.g. to train some machine learning thing); I wouldn't assume that'd be required for them to just ask what age you are. In any case, the majority of people probably never turned that off.

aacafah said:
In any case, the majority of people probably never turned that off.

funnily enough i turned it off for the first time like 2 months ago

https://age-verifier.kibty.town/

There's ongoing efforts to get around the age verification. While I won't comment on these in particular, I do believe that consenting adults should be able to view and interact with consenting adults however they want without being expected to give their face and/or ID to Palantir-linked clankers. (And by the way, this came up shortly after an Israeli CEO joined Discord. Wonder what he's connected to?)

I also like Stoat, though it really needs to shape up within the next few months.

Looks like K-id verified users have all been unverified again, bypasses or not. Not surprised considering how widespread workarounds have been.

eclipse_lunablade said:
Stoat (Formerly Revolt) has been listed as a solid option, with its main issue being just that it's still a work in progress made by some nerds in their own time. I've also been hearing stuff about Matrix, and of course Team Speak.

So yeah, there are alternatives. It's just you'll need to accept that they're not going to immediately be as good as Discord was.

I'm skeptical about Stoat, considering how flimsy elements like their media proxy are. (Plus, my friend got permanently banned from the site for sending some annoying markdown messages :P)

Matrix is questionable for large servers but overall the more robust and secure option.

aacafah said:
I'm pretty sure it's a lot more involved than just an account age, but I don't know the specifics; I first heard about it from this, though it's mentioned on the official post too.

I don't think they're satisfied with the local on-device verification k-ID uses. Like the comment you linked mentions it being "purely client-side" but they were trying a different, very not client-side service on a limited test group in the UK at the time they wrote this. You used to see a notice in their FAQ only a few days ago.

I know, that part is outdated, but I see no reason why the age estimation part isn't still accurate.

donovan_dmc said:
The solution is parents putting away the ipad and actually parenting their kids

dba_afish said:
well, I mean YouTube/Google thinks that I'm under 18 on my main account, despite the account itself being 18 years old, as of September. so, like I'm not sure we can really trust the age estimation stuff to be super reliable.

This probably isn't entirely unintentional considering accounts can be passed down - I have a friend who has a 20-year-old Steam account they obtained from a family member, they definitely didn't sign up to Steam when they were under 10 years old.

eclipse_lunablade said:
Stoat (Formerly Revolt) has been listed as a solid option, with its main issue being just that it's still a work in progress made by some nerds in their own time. I've also been hearing stuff about Matrix, and of course Team Speak.

So yeah, there are alternatives. It's just you'll need to accept that they're not going to immediately be as good as Discord was.

Any Discord alternative may just end up with the same problem anyway, they're just ahead of the curve. Many governments around the world, irregardless of political alignment, are pushing legislation for it. A point will be reached where everybody will be complying, or using services that operate outside the law and will likely have plenty of other problems with them.

faucet said:
The small websites and forums that preceded mass media (and still exist for niche communities) would usually have a good moderation team that responded to stuff fast, or would probably be a website you would never let your children near in the first place.

I mean, I don't really think this is true all that true. maybe this us just my personal experience colouring my perception, but smaller communities definitely are not immune to letting bad behavior slide.

dba_afish said:
I mean, I don't really think this is true all that true. maybe this us just my personal experience colouring my perception, but smaller communities definitely are not immune to letting bad behavior slide.

Maybe "good" was a wrong choice of words here, because you're absolutely right, they had plenty of faults. I've sadly even experienced similar situations to your anecdote.

My intent behind it was moreso that the moderators were generally volunteers that were interested in engaging with the community, rather than underpaid workers that probably have PTSD because they have to sit down all day watching beheading videos and CSAM that gets reported. Maybe the outcome would be far from reasonable, but if you reported something, somebody would usually have looked at it within 48 hours - now you'd be lucky if a human even looks at it at all on large social media websites.

A few years back (before Elon even owned it) I came across a Twitter account where somebody was live-posting slitting their wrists, threatening to jump off their balcony and kill themselves, etc. I reported it to Twitter's safeguarding email (I honestly have no idea what they could've done, but I felt like I should do something) and about 9 months later I got a response saying the posts aren't against their rules and no action has been taken. I checked the account and the posts were still there, followed by about 8 months of inactivity. If they responded within a day or two saying "There's nothing we can really do" I would accept that, but 9 months to just ignore it is absolute insanity. I really hope that person is okay.

I recommend reading up on how the frontend of the age verification (persona) is linked to US surveilance agencies and other shady shit.
"Protect the kids" has always been an umbrella to push in evil things

jklcolenslash said:
I recommend reading up on how the frontend of the age verification (persona) is linked to US surveilance agencies and other shady shit.
"Protect the kids" has always been an umbrella to push in evil things

Heard about that. Insane how blatant it is, too. The hackers that found it out really didn't need to hack much of anything. I have so many feelings about it that I couldn't possibly write down, but the best way I can summarize it is "blinding rage". There really needs to be an organized protest against this shit.

BTW this means age ID will likely spread to every popular platform, including any it the future that will usurp Discord. And don't think your safe if you're not from Thee U.S.! The feds love spying on foreign nationals.

aacafah said:
I'll add the context that this is only required when access mature channels/servers, messages, & settings; you can use Discord without verifying for everything else. On top of that, they already have age estimates, so if they already think you're an adult, you won't have to verify; they've said they believe the majority of users won't need to verify.

Not to excuse or defend this, of course; it absolutely sucks. Just want to make sure we're all on the same page.

Doesnt this also apply to starting video conferences in general as well as pms, alot of people do use discord for watch parties or as an alternative to picarto or twitch. Also applying indirectly to people trying to sale commissions or other art services as any potential customer would have to ID themselves just to ask basic questions in pm.

Here are three alternatives I recommend:
Element X (Eclipse already mentioned Matrix)
Session
SimpleX

EDIT: Matrix is no longer recommended for UK users due to the so-called Online Safety Act.

ryu_deacon said:
Doesnt this also apply to starting video conferences in general as well as pms, alot of people do use discord for watch parties or as an alternative to picarto or twitch.

I'll admit I hadn't thought about that (as I don't really use anything but text chat nowadays), but I'd assume it's on the same rules; if the channel is marked as age-restricted, it applies, & if it isn't, it doesn't.

ryu_deacon said:
Doesnt this also apply to [starting pms.] Also applying indirectly to people trying to sale commissions or other art services as any potential customer would have to ID themselves just to ask basic questions in pm.

I think you misunderstood; only a message detected as containing age-restricted image content would require verification (assuming they weren't already auto-estimated as 18+), & it'd just be hidden with the same sensitive content filters you can see in the settings. Unless you're asking a question about a mature image, you don't need to verify to chat in the DMs, & even then, you could just link it indirectly & without an embed.

faucet said:
Any Discord alternative may just end up with the same problem anyway, they're just ahead of the curve. Many governments around the world, irregardless of political alignment, are pushing legislation for it. A point will be reached where everybody will be complying, or using services that operate outside the law and will likely have plenty of other problems with them.

This, this, a million times this. This is why I don't want to prop up Stoat as the alternative to Discord (although I'm very ok with listing it as an option); while they are FOSS (free & open source) & support self-hosting, they don't support federation, so like Discord, their platform is entirely owned by them except for isolated self-hosted instances that can't communicate with the rest of the platform. Every platform that is entirely controlled by a single entity will be a target for regulators & face the same pressures that led Discord to try to get ahead of the curve before regulators make them do this. Either Stoat never reaches a similar size to Discord (& therefore is unlikely to reach profitability, & consequently financial stability), or they do & we have a repeat of this trainwreck; it's inevitable.

This is a problem with the majority of alternatives. Either it's a service entirely hosted by 1 big target, it supports self-hosting without federation and therefore each server/host/provider is entirely disconnected & you need to create an account for each individual provider - which I'd argue makes it not a great competitor to Discord; slight over-simplification, but imagine needing to sign up to each individual server you're a part of, or both.

Matrix is the only one that I'm aware of that doesn't have this problem because it supports federation. As an example, email is federated, so you can send & receive messages from a Yahoo! email account using a Gmail email account with zero extra work, & - more importantly for our purposes - if 1 platform goes down, is compromised, or whatever, the other is unaffected. Ergo, if the same thing that happened to Discord happened to some big Matrix provider, you could just use a bulk export/import tool for your servers/spaces, spin up your own instance, & as long as you had access to your original account (as with this case), you'd just switch the old server with the new one & continue as if nothing changed at all, & if you didn't, you'd be able to edit the server to use a new account stored on your self-hosted instance, switch to that for all your servers, & be done with it. Taking down 1 provider doesn't affect the rest, just like with email services. Of course, there's nuance & trade-offs, but this is far more sustainable than any other Discord alternative I've heard of. Hell, there's even tools that let you connect Discord & Matrix channels together, though that's not a perfect solution; it's just a great example of the benefits of the open & federated nature of the Matrix protocol that it lets someone using Discord to use a Matrix channel, & the messages appear perfectly seamless from Matrix.

That said, I've heard that Matrix isn't user-friendly though I haven't tried it myself yet, & it being FOSS means a Discord-like client is all it takes to fix that, and it has other tradeoffs, so I'm not saying it's perfect for everyone; I'm just saying if I switched to anything else, I wouldn't be getting comfy like the problem has been solved forever.

Well, good news. Discord has cut their partnership with Persona, and Persona has been required to delete everyone's data. Not sure if this means they'll be axing their worldwide age verification, but it's a small win.

eclipse_lunablade said:
Well, good news. Discord has cut their partnership with Persona, and Persona has been required to delete everyone's data. Not sure if this means they'll be axing their worldwide age verification, but it's a small win.

Souce? This is wonderful news!
I might still make a TeamSpeak account just incase shit starts to go south with Discord again, which I bet $10 will happen. Still, great to see people still have power over major corpos (and the feds, it would seem). I see this as a pretty massive win, actually.
I doubt Persona will delete any of their data, though given the nature of their opperation. Thankfully for myself, I never gave them anything.

Fuck Persona, Plantir, etc. and this 1984 bullshit.

thebraixentrainer said:
Souce? This is wonderful news!

Here's an Ars Technica article on the Discord / Persona affair that confirms the relationship between the two firms has been terminated. It does not imply Discord is walking back from moving forward with global age verification next month, however:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-and-persona-end-partnership-after-shady-uk-age-test-sparks-outcry/

thegoonguardian said:
its always them trying to say theyre "protecting the children" when theyre just finding an excuse to get a stronger chokehold on peoples personal information

This! The whole thing is a Pandora's box. Even putting breaches and privacy issues aside. It also offers a new option for censorship. Also don't forget that most of the states pushing things like this are all but explicitly, and quite gleefully, doing so in hopes that adult and mature sites block the sites in their states. It's a means of censorship itself. We really need the courts to step in. As legally questionable the laws are themselves, using them to do what they couldn't is expressly so. Protecting children can be used (abused) for just about anything.

I'd normally never post anything and just lurk, but I figure I'd add some things since I've been following the Discord alternative topic a lot since they announced the global age verification rollout.

aacafah said:
This, this, a million times this. This is why I don't want to prop up Stoat as the alternative to Discord (although I'm very ok with listing it as an option); while they are FOSS (free & open source) & support self-hosting, they don't support federation, so like Discord, their platform is entirely owned by them except for isolated self-hosted instances that can't communicate with the rest of the platform. Every platform that is entirely controlled by a single entity will be a target for regulators & face the same pressures that led Discord to try to get ahead of the curve before regulators make them do this. Either Stoat never reaches a similar size to Discord (& therefore is unlikely to reach profitability, & consequently financial stability), or they do & we have a repeat of this trainwreck; it's inevitable.

The bad part about Stoat is that even if you do self-host it, the mobile and desktop client code needs to be modified and rebuilt to point to that self-hosted instance because they are hardcoded to point to the main instance as of now, so unless the developers change that, it's a nonstarter for the average user coming from Discord trying to connect to anything other than the official instance. Federation isn't in their roadmap nor a priority, but they are open to it in their developer faq. I'd be a lot more willing to support Stoat if they commited to federation on their roadmap, but they don't seem like they are too focused on that at the moment.

aacafah said:
This is a problem with the majority of alternatives. Either it's a service entirely hosted by 1 big target, it supports self-hosting without federation and therefore each server/host/provider is entirely disconnected & you need to create an account for each individual provider - which I'd argue makes it not a great competitor to Discord; slight over-simplification, but imagine needing to sign up to each individual server you're a part of, or both.

I totally agree, self-hosting with federation is a must at this point, it's the only real way to break this cycle of needing to switch chat platforms when one decides to make things worse for the users. Several fragmented servers that aren't able to be federated is a worse user experience overall than Discord and I just cannot see that ever taking off.

aacafah said:
That said, I've heard that Matrix isn't user-friendly though I haven't tried it myself yet, & it being FOSS means a Discord-like client is all it takes to fix that, and it has other tradeoffs, so I'm not saying it's perfect for everyone; I'm just saying if I switched to anything else, I wouldn't be getting comfy like the problem has been solved forever.

At least from my personal experience, Matrix isn't very user friendly, and I say that as someone who is willing to put up with a lot of jank in FOSS software, but some of the big issues are the user experience in general. I've seen people say to not join the main Matrix.org homeserver since it's too big, and has too many users which contributes to a centralization issue, but then the issue becomes finding another to join. That can be very confusing to new users coming from something like Discord, since homeservers aren't super discoverable right now, and you have to go out of your way to look for them.

I'd also personally be pretty hesitant recommending it right now in general after reading the findings of this cryptography reseacher on Matrix's e2ee library. I'm no security expert or cryptography expert, but Matrix.org's handling of this disclosure is concerning to me and they seem to have a bit of a history with stuff like this according to the researcher. I've been really hoping that Matrix could be an alternative for a while now but I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

One new alternative that I've been keeping an eye on and found to be very promising is called Fluxer. It's a FOSS project and has federation as a priority in the feature roadmap, and the developer says that the feature is in development. They also want to have the option for forums and threads to be shared outside the platform so search engines can find them, avoiding becoming an information blackhole like Discord has.

As for now though, it's pretty close to being 1:1 feature wise to Discord from what I've been able to find looking into the project and even the UI is almost the same from what I've seen in screenshots, but the main instance and website infrastructure are being hit pretty hard with all the new users, just like Stoat, the developer wasn't expecting it all so soon, so I haven't been able to try it myself yet. The docs for self-hosting are a work in progress but are being worked on according to the developer. It does look a fair bit more feature complete than Stoat from the feature lists having things like video and screensharing already, but it's still very early days and it's probably not something I'd recommend switching large groups to just yet since they are still trying to expand their infrastructure to better handle more users and if you need a mobile app, currently there is only a PWA but they have mentioned being in contact with developers that have experience making mobile apps.

The developer has been pretty transparent about development and open to feedback so far from what I've been seeing, and they even removed their CLA when people were expressing concern about the potential of them taking everything closed-source later, so I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of this alternative being a good replacement eventually with how far it already is in terms of overall features. I just hope that the federation feature is a bit more discoverable and just an overall better user experience than Matrix currently is for people coming from Discord.

Another one is Spacebar.chat, but right now it doesn't have federation, and the only mention of it that I could find is that their community discusses it, but that's all I could find on the feature. I know very little about it other than that, and that it's a cleanroom reverse engineering project of Discord's backend server and api.

I also noticed that Matrix.org has commented saying that they will have to add age verification to the Matrix.org homeserver for regions that require it, Stoat blocks age gated channels/servers in the UK and other regions that have age verification requirements but doesn't scan for NSFW content like Discord's media filter stuff does, and Fluxer looks like they are outright blocking signups/access from those regions for the main instance. None of this impacts federation for Matrix as far as I'm aware, and I'd imagine that Fluxer's federation when added wouldn't be impacted by this completely since they also mentioned self-hostable relays for federating instances as well.

thebraixentrainer said:
Souce? This is wonderful news!
I might still make a TeamSpeak account just incase shit starts to go south with Discord again, which I bet $10 will happen. Still, great to see people still have power over major corpos (and the feds, it would seem). I see this as a pretty massive win, actually.
I doubt Persona will delete any of their data, though given the nature of their opperation. Thankfully for myself, I never gave them anything.

Fuck Persona, Plantir, etc. and this 1984 bullshit.

Personally I don't think TeamSpeak 6 is going to be good enough to fully replace Discord for a lot of people and definitely not TeamSpeak 3, but just like some of the other options, it could be an ok backup solution for smaller groups until a better long term solution pops up. Hell I've even considered using Steam's chat and voice features for now as a temporary solution. However, I'm pretty sure both Steam chat and TS6 don't have long lived text chat, and TS6 looks like you need to be in a voice channel to use the text feature among other limitations, but it's possible that will change.

nordicwerewolf said:
Idk but the change absolutely sucks balls. Like I understand WHY it happens but I absolutely do not want to send discord my ID yet alone image.

Sure I'll probably keep discord just to talk with the couple friends I have in there but yeah Ig something like Teamspeak or Guilded will come handy too (iirc my friend couple years ago mentioned Guilded was goated but I could be 100% wrong and it's actually ass).

Guilded is no longer an option. It was bought by the Roblox Corporation back in 2021 and shutdown back in late December of last year, and it almost certainly would have ended up with all of the same issues that Discord is now having, based on Roblox being behind it and seeing all the age face scanning stuff there on Roblox.

I find that a lot of open source federated services tend to end up overly complicated, which then ends up putting users off of the idea altogether. We just saw this play out with Twitter alternatives, where Mastodon was being pushed hard by the more technical people, before giving way to Bluesky as another centralized service. I mean, most users really don't want to think about whether the instance they're currently on is federated with the instance their friends are on, they just want to be able to message their friends. Then, when instances get overloaded and shut down user creation, or even federation requests, that makes things even more frustrating for the end user. At the end of the day, most people just want to know that they will be able to send a message to their friends, or set up a server with their friends, with as little friction as possible.

That's why I'm expecting something other than Matrix to win out at the end of the day. It's probably going to require some big investments, just like with Bluesky, but I just don't see us getting away from centralized chats for the vast majority. At least, I don't see us doing that until the whole world wide web comes crashing down into a bunch of national nets, which feels more and more likely over time as laws diverge.

If this had happened months ago, Guilded would have been a solid #2 option, but since that crashed and burned right before this there really isn't anything solid, so I'm very much in a wait and see mode.

drkfce0 said:
This! The whole thing is a Pandora's box. Even putting breaches and privacy issues aside. It also offers a new option for censorship. Also don't forget that most of the states pushing things like this are all but explicitly, and quite gleefully, doing so in hopes that adult and mature sites block the sites in their states. It's a means of censorship itself. We really need the courts to step in. As legally questionable the laws are themselves, using them to do what they couldn't is expressly so. Protecting children can be used (abused) for just about anything.

realistically theres no real method to actually protect the children other than the parents actually being parents, but i guess its easier to just violate the privacy rights of everyone equally. even if they enforce all of this the best case scenario is that the people theyre trying to "protect" are gonna migrate onto even sketchier sites, which is arguably worse because that would put them in much more danger due to the mainstream sites that are being blocked at least having some semblance of security/safety.

kyureki said:
I find that a lot of open source federated services tend to end up overly complicated, which then ends up putting users off of the idea altogether.

I agree that it's a frequent problem; if you're making something extremely open, you'd likely also make it highly configurable, & it's a tough challenge to do that while remaining accessible to more technical users. However, I don't think that's an unavoidable problem; in fact...

kyureki said:
We just saw this play out with Twitter alternatives, where Mastodon was being pushed hard by the more technical people, before giving way to Bluesky as another centralized service.

...isn't Bluesky federated? Says in their docs here you can have an independent node for your account & post data, & it says that you can self-host this node "here":[]. Seems like that's the part of the reason why it uses domains for account handles. ...actually, come to think of it, I guess email also partially uses the domain name for your account identity too.

kyureki said:
I mean, most users really don't want to think about whether the instance they're currently on is federated with the instance their friends are on, they just want to be able to message their friends. Then, when instances get overloaded and shut down user creation, or even federation requests, that makes things even more frustrating for the end user. At the end of the day, most people just want to know that they will be able to send a message to their friends, or set up a server with their friends, with as little friction as possible.

And there are those pesky trade-offs I alluded to earlier. Yeah, even federated services want to have a big, reliable, & accessible provider to onboard users and provide stability for the majority of them (on top of it typically being important for creating a revenue stream)... but at that point, you're shouldering the cons & complexity of both monolithic & distributed providers, so it's no surprise most don't even bother with trying to support distribution. Tbh, that's part of why I'm leery of federation being on a service's roadmap instead of part of a preexisting release; I'm very familiar with how software development todo lists only ever grow longer, & when faced with adding something that limits potential monetization, won't yield fruit until other people take up the mantle to become service providers & developers for the fledgling ecosystem, and is just nightmarishly difficult, time-consuming, & complex all on its own... I can 100% empathize with that promised time when you actually knuckle down & do it being perpetually "right around the corner" until either it's left languishing at the very bottom of the pile or it quietly slides from the list entirely. Not to say that will happen, or that having faith is bad or unwarranted; just to remind that the adage of "don't buy into something on the promise of what it will be; buy into it because of what it is" doesn't solely apply to consumer products.

kyureki said:
[...When] instances get overloaded and shut down user creation, or even federation requests, that makes things even more frustrating for the end user.

That's another reason not to force a single alternative right now; whatever it is, I doubt it will get there as a result of a spike of users fleeing some other platform, and I think spreading out that wave across multiple services would help soften that blow. Even ignoring the risk to stability, I don't think a flash in the pan from a different service faceplanting is going to breed a stable & sustainable userbase (just ask Threads; remember that?); I think only something like the more natural growth Bluesky had will actually foster long-term success.

kyureki said:
That's why I'm expecting something other than Matrix to win out at the end of the day. It's probably going to require some big investments, just like with Bluesky, but I just don't see us getting away from centralized chats for the vast majority. At least, I don't see us doing that until the whole world wide web comes crashing down into a bunch of national nets, which feels more and more likely over time as laws diverge.

I'd say that it could happen eventually, but as a direct result of this? Probably not, & maybe not with Matrix. After all, let's not forget email, the most popular, long-lived, & reliable internet protocol (aside from maybe HTTP?), is also federated. That's what actually what I see as the end state of a mass-adopted chat protocol; instead of 1 big provider or a decentralized web of equally small providers, you'd have maybe a half dozen colossal providers, a couple dozen notable mid-sized providers, & a million individual & business self-hosted providers, all using the same protocol.

jons0 said:
[...]

This was really interesting to hear, thanks for sharing! I had only heard Fluxer's name before, but I'll definitely be adding it to my list of future recommendations; here's hoping things go well for the developer. That anecdote definitely inspires some faith in their conviction (although I'd again encourage people not to lean on that when deciding whether or not to switch to it), so I'm encouraged.

I vaguely remember something about Matrix having a security vulnerability at one point, but a lack-luster response to it certainly isn't helping engendering confidence, so thanks for the heads-up.

Finally, just to put some other options out there, if you only have a single(/couple) server(s), with a relatively small number of users who would go with you, and one of you is technically-inclined, Mattermost could be a viable self-hosted option, though admittedly not one that's enjoyable to use; it's more of a Slack alternative targeted at businesses than a Discord alternative targeted at general users. That said, that also means it's a lot more reliable than grass-roots options; seeing as they sell their hosting services (& more feature-fulled versions, though they take confidence-inspiring pains to avoid vendor lock-in) to organizations & businesses (y'know, the type of business-targeted operation where they don't even list the price up-front), and their current & primary clientele is the government/military, they're a lot more likely to be providing security updates in 10 years than the competition. Not ideal, but again, there's no perfect alternatives right now, only acceptable & unacceptable options; what's best for you is going to depend on your circumstances, your use case, & your faith in the product. If you have/are a weirdo who already has their own home server - lucky; I can't find the time to set mine up properly - it might be worth looking into.

gasinmad said:
Tbh discord only matters to me because its the only place I have deeply connected to my furry side, so if reddit roblox Instagram etc use it then like yeah it still sucks for privacy but I dont do anything nsfw on any of those things.

Roblox is blocking developers from accessing the same project, unless they "verify" their age (yes it's mainly AI schitzo selfie methods), and based on Roblox's recent posts, they even block different age groups from interacting with each other, so you cannot work on games together with someone outside your age group.

It's truly a dystopian situation, where people are not allowed to express their creativity together, even if they give up all their personal information.

I mean... hate me all you want, but... Roblox doing anything to actually try & keep an eye on who those kids are talking to? A step in the right direction from how they've previously addressed concerns for child safety on their platform. Let's see if the leeches will stop using illegal fake money to screw over the frequently underaged developers that make them rich next; I've got money on no.

Roblox doesn't give two shits about literal child predators that literally publicly admit they are abusing their own systems after they finally banned them; I don't think they have much concern for fostering creativity.

...y'know, not to sound heated or anything.

aacafah said:
I mean... hate me all you want, but... Roblox doing anything to actually try & keep an eye on who those kids are talking to? A step in the right direction from how they've previously addressed concerns for child safety on their platform. Let's see if the leeches will stop using illegal fake money to screw over the frequently underaged developers that make them rich next; I've got money on no.

Roblox doesn't give two shits about literal child predators that literally publicly admit they are abusing their own systems after they finally banned them; I don't think they have much concern for fostering creativity.

...y'know, not to sound heated or anything.

roblox's moderation was so abysmal dogshit that they summoned the number one child predator of all time, jeffrey epstein, if we're going off of the transaction records that show the purchase of robux AND assuming the purchases made on his card weren't made by someone else

aacafah said:
I mean... hate me all you want, but... Roblox doing anything to actually try & keep an eye on who those kids are talking to? A step in the right direction from how they've previously addressed concerns for child safety on their platform. Let's see if the leeches will stop using illegal fake money to screw over the frequently underaged developers that make them rich next; I've got money on no.

Roblox doesn't give two shits about literal child predators that literally publicly admit they are abusing their own systems after they finally banned them; I don't think they have much concern for fostering creativity.

...y'know, not to sound heated or anything.

Roblox should just burn at this point, lmao. Shitty games made by shitty people hosted on a shitty platform run by even shittier people. A modern Sodom if I've ever heard of one.

thegoonguardian said:
roblox's moderation was so abysmal dogshit that they summoned the number one child predator of all time, jeffrey epstein, if we're going off of the transaction records that show the purchase of robux AND assuming the purchases made on his card weren't made by someone else

The Big E played Roblox? Lmafo that makes too much sense. Wonder what his favorite game was? Also need to know what his account was named. Would be crazy to find out I played a game with him once.

cadynn said:
Roblox is blocking developers from accessing the same project, unless they "verify" their age (yes it's mainly AI schitzo selfie methods), and based on Roblox's recent posts, they even block different age groups from interacting with each other, so you cannot work on games together with someone outside your age group.

It's truly a dystopian situation, where people are not allowed to express their creativity together, even if they give up all their personal information.

oh no! the children can't make glorified gacha games and pay to win Cookie Clicker clones to scam other children! whatever will they do?

aacafah said:
I mean... hate me all you want, but... Roblox doing anything to actually try & keep an eye on who those kids are talking to? A step in the right direction from how they've previously addressed concerns for child safety on their platform. Let's see if the leeches will stop using illegal fake money to screw over the frequently underaged developers that make them rich next; I've got money on no.

Roblox doesn't give two shits about literal child predators that literally publicly admit they are abusing their own systems after they finally banned them; I don't think they have much concern for fostering creativity.

...y'know, not to sound heated or anything.

PREACH.

dba_afish said:
oh no! the children can't make glorified gacha games and pay to win Cookie Clicker clones to scam other children! whatever will they do?

I make large multi-year project games with no p2w. It's not the majority of developers, however the idea of creating games is what Roblox is about at its core.

Being able to express your creativity in a game engine, just like Unreal and Godot. I find the Roblox Studio graphics, speed and coding language to be the best on the game engine market. Although the recent moderation changes have been making it difficult to have a safe future of my life projects.

cadynn said:
I make large multi-year project games with no p2w. It's not the majority of developers, however the idea of creating games is what Roblox is about at its core.

Being able to express your creativity in a game engine, just like Unreal and Godot. I find the Roblox Studio graphics, speed and coding language to be the best on the game engine market. Although the recent moderation changes have been making it difficult to have a safe future of my life projects.

The reason they have the power they do is because they did actually do something valuable. Roblox is probably the best balance of engine capability & ease of access; simple to learn engine, a wealth of premade assets, free hosting, netcode, and theoretically moderation, a robust platform of fellow developers all looking for collaborators... It's extremely attractive. Unity is popular because they're about halfway there.

Problem isn't the pitch, it's what they do once you're hooked. Remember, you can always switch to another engine; your skills are transferable.

eclipse_lunablade said:
Well, good news. Discord has cut their partnership with Persona, and Persona has been required to delete everyone's data. Not sure if this means they'll be axing their worldwide age verification, but it's a small win.

Finally got around to looking into this a bit more. Apparently they're srill going full steam ahead with age ID, they're just not working with Persona anymore. I think they're doing it in house now? Even if that is the case that still leaves the door open for another company involved with Palantir to appoarch them. Hopefully people are still willing to keep the fight going long enough that Discord walks back global age ID completely. I actually have a bit of hope for that now.

People should be making a bigger stink about this stuff in general, honestly. There should be protests and campaings to educate normies about this stuff, especially in places where it's manditory like the UK. I'm not just talking about age ID either but other elements of what I've dubbed "Snowdenslop". People don't realize what kind of power they have until they use it.

dba_afish said:
oh no! the children can't make glorified gacha games and pay to win Cookie Clicker clones to scam other children! whatever will they do?

you can get devex money from making roblox UGC slop without being an adult, they didn't change that. they effectively segregated "ID verified adult" users and "middle schooler OR possibly child molestor" users into their own groups.

Gonna chime in with the following: Do not trust any platform you don't entirely control or that doesn't genuinely fight for you. And don't rely on that, the only site that's fought for me with full transparency instead of caved to prudes with too much money is Baraag. Telegram pretends to but Durov sucks the dicks of Russian censors at least twice a day. Fluxer? Basically a clone of pre-age verification Discord down to policy and therefore shit because Discord's policies are shit. Stoat? Buggy and broken and hosted in the UK, which is probably one of the worst places in the (vaguely) free world a social app of any kind can be hosted thanks to vile age verification laws, pearl-clutching porn laws, and Chat Control cancer on the horizon. Matrix? Have fun finding a client that works well and losing your messages to decryption failures, plus the matrix.org instance is prudish and unfit for the furry community.

And the common theme? Have fun getting everyone to move.

I'm not saying not to use any alternatives (except Fluxer, fuck Fluxer with a rusty cheese grater), but be aware that this is just gonna happen all over again in a few years.

Have contingency plans. Back stuff up. Keep your close contacts multiple places, and have multiple points of contact. The only way to fight back against this shit that works is to be too numerous to stamp out and to disobey en masse.

aacafah said:
The reason they have the power they do is because they did actually do something valuable. Roblox is probably the best balance of engine capability & ease of access; simple to learn engine, a wealth of premade assets, free hosting, netcode, and theoretically moderation, a robust platform of fellow developers all looking for collaborators... It's extremely attractive. Unity is popular because they're about halfway there.

Problem isn't the pitch, it's what they do once you're hooked. Remember, you can always switch to another engine; your skills are transferable.

Haha, anything but Unity. The installer is completely broken on my PC.
I'm actually going to explore Godot and Unreal when it aligns with my school classes.

Although I have a personal connection to Roblox beyond just the engine, so I'll never look at Roblox Studio as just a practical engine.

aacafah said:
Problem isn't the pitch, it's what they do once you're hooked.

ehh... I dunno, it's a monetised, closed source walled garden, a combination engine and platform, it's kinda, by default, gonna have predatory dynamic with its userbase. if you have a system like that the only way that you're not going to have problems is if your development team and/or your user base is, like, constantly ready for a full-scale revolt in response to any amount of greed from the company executives.

_{but, I mean, that's also that monetisation strategy is kinda the direction the entire gaming industry, heck, the entire software industry is going anyway, with so... ʚ(ϵ ⁰~⁰)϶}

dba_afish said:
ehh... I dunno, it's a monetised, closed source walled garden, a combination engine and platform, it's kinda, by default, gonna have predatory dynamic with its userbase.

I was more speaking from the perspective of the user, & I'd say there are service providers that aren't completely evil, or at least can be. After all, there's a difference between an adversarial relationship and a predatory one.

Regardless, there's a stark difference in the company/consumer dynamic between Apple & Roblox. One's infantalizing & arguably predatory, one's actively exploitative & potentially malicious.

dba_afish said:
ehh... I dunno, it's a monetised, closed source walled garden, a combination engine and platform, it's kinda, by default, gonna have predatory dynamic with its userbase. if you have a system like that the only way that you're not going to have problems is if your development team and/or your user base is, like, constantly ready for a full-scale revolt in response to any amount of greed from the company executives.

_{but, I mean, that's also that monetisation strategy is kinda the direction the entire gaming industry, heck, the entire software industry is going anyway, with so... ʚ(ϵ ⁰~⁰)϶}

Roblox does have the issue of the top game devs (the ones that produce monetized soulless slop, often in Visual Studio for some reason) not caring about anything but money and status. That is indeed why Roblox corp can do whatever they want as the majority of those revolting are irrelevant to their business strategy :(

aacafah said:
Regardless, there's a stark difference in the company/consumer dynamic between Apple & Roblox. One's infantalizing & arguably predatory, one's actively exploitative & potentially malicious.

... is it bad that I can't tell which is which that you're referring to?

watsit said:
... is it bad that I can't tell which is which that you're referring to?

As terrible as Apple is, and though their level of net evil is likely higher due to their greater reach, I don't have reason to believe they're complicit in enabling and supporting child predators. (Save if you count alleged child labor violations for rare earths.)

Dammit, I think I agree with you now.

watsit said:
... is it bad that I can't tell which is which that you're referring to?

Don't be silly, Apple doesn't actively exploit their users.

...that's far too much work for them, their exploitation is far more passive.

Now, that devex BS, & the literal built-in stock market for children to gamble on? That's active exploitation; they really work for it, Apple could learn a thing or two from 'em.

...but I think we've solidly gotten off-topic at this point.

jons0 said:
I'd normally never post anything and just lurk, but I figure I'd add some things since I've been following the Discord alternative topic a lot since they announced the global age verification rollout.
The bad part about Stoat is that even if you do self-host it, the mobile and desktop client code needs to be modified and rebuilt to point to that self-hosted instance because they are hardcoded to point to the main instance as of now, so unless the developers change that, it's a nonstarter for the average user coming from Discord trying to connect to anything other than the official instance. Federation isn't in their roadmap nor a priority, but they are open to it in their developer faq. I'd be a lot more willing to support Stoat if they commited to federation on their roadmap, but they don't seem like they are too focused on that at the moment.

I totally agree, self-hosting with federation is a must at this point, it's the only real way to break this cycle of needing to switch chat platforms when one decides to make things worse for the users. Several fragmented servers that aren't able to be federated is a worse user experience overall than Discord and I just cannot see that ever taking off.

At least from my personal experience, Matrix isn't very user friendly, and I say that as someone who is willing to put up with a lot of jank in FOSS software, but some of the big issues are the user experience in general. I've seen people say to not join the main Matrix.org homeserver since it's too big, and has too many users which contributes to a centralization issue, but then the issue becomes finding another to join. That can be very confusing to new users coming from something like Discord, since homeservers aren't super discoverable right now, and you have to go out of your way to look for them.

I'd also personally be pretty hesitant recommending it right now in general after reading the findings of this cryptography reseacher on Matrix's e2ee library. I'm no security expert or cryptography expert, but Matrix.org's handling of this disclosure is concerning to me and they seem to have a bit of a history with stuff like this according to the researcher. I've been really hoping that Matrix could be an alternative for a while now but I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

One new alternative that I've been keeping an eye on and found to be very promising is called Fluxer. It's a FOSS project and has federation as a priority in the feature roadmap, and the developer says that the feature is in development. They also want to have the option for forums and threads to be shared outside the platform so search engines can find them, avoiding becoming an information blackhole like Discord has.

As for now though, it's pretty close to being 1:1 feature wise to Discord from what I've been able to find looking into the project and even the UI is almost the same from what I've seen in screenshots, but the main instance and website infrastructure are being hit pretty hard with all the new users, just like Stoat, the developer wasn't expecting it all so soon, so I haven't been able to try it myself yet. The docs for self-hosting are a work in progress but are being worked on according to the developer. It does look a fair bit more feature complete than Stoat from the feature lists having things like video and screensharing already, but it's still very early days and it's probably not something I'd recommend switching large groups to just yet since they are still trying to expand their infrastructure to better handle more users and if you need a mobile app, currently there is only a PWA but they have mentioned being in contact with developers that have experience making mobile apps.

The developer has been pretty transparent about development and open to feedback so far from what I've been seeing, and they even removed their CLA when people were expressing concern about the potential of them taking everything closed-source later, so I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of this alternative being a good replacement eventually with how far it already is in terms of overall features. I just hope that the federation feature is a bit more discoverable and just an overall better user experience than Matrix currently is for people coming from Discord.

Another one is Spacebar.chat, but right now it doesn't have federation, and the only mention of it that I could find is that their community discusses it, but that's all I could find on the feature. I know very little about it other than that, and that it's a cleanroom reverse engineering project of Discord's backend server and api.

I also noticed that Matrix.org has commented saying that they will have to add age verification to the Matrix.org homeserver for regions that require it, Stoat blocks age gated channels/servers in the UK and other regions that have age verification requirements but doesn't scan for NSFW content like Discord's media filter stuff does, and Fluxer looks like they are outright blocking signups/access from those regions for the main instance. None of this impacts federation for Matrix as far as I'm aware, and I'd imagine that Fluxer's federation when added wouldn't be impacted by this completely since they also mentioned self-hostable relays for federating instances as well.

Personally I don't think TeamSpeak 6 is going to be good enough to fully replace Discord for a lot of people and definitely not TeamSpeak 3, but just like some of the other options, it could be an ok backup solution for smaller groups until a better long term solution pops up. Hell I've even considered using Steam's chat and voice features for now as a temporary solution. However, I'm pretty sure both Steam chat and TS6 don't have long lived text chat, and TS6 looks like you need to be in a voice channel to use the text feature among other limitations, but it's possible that will change.

Guilded is no longer an option. It was bought by the Roblox Corporation back in 2021 and shutdown back in late December of last year, and it almost certainly would have ended up with all of the same issues that Discord is now having, based on Roblox being behind it and seeing all the age face scanning stuff there on Roblox.

ahh that sucks :/

dba_afish said:
oh no! the children can't make glorified gacha games and pay to win Cookie Clicker clones to scam other children! whatever will they do?

[Sigh] Kids these days with their lazy over reliance on tec platforms and such; back in my day all we needed to do to scam other kids was photocopy/counterfeit Pokémon cards or run a lottery with impossible odds or sell chips/candy at wildly inflated prices

Edit: also that time I just straight up delt blackjack games in the lunchroom. Didn't even have to cheat, just used 3 decks and the game already favors the house