So anyone who knows some good altenatives that are either FOSS or EU based?
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.
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 am already learning about matrix protocol which is seeming like a good alternative. https://matrix.to/#/#all-topics:matrix.org
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
Wait 6 months, this will have changed nothing for Discord and they’ll carry on. Most likely in 2-3 years they’ll deploy the age verify for all users, not just users trying to access “adult” stuff.
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!
note
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
That joke is NSFW, please present facial verification and ID now or you will be banned and reported to the authorities!
What if they say it’s lemonade instead?
You know what that made me think of?
https://youtu.be/UWQoK506xkQ
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?
Only used it when used to game with my kids. So no one I know uses Signal.
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.
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.
Minnesota recently used their tax on billionaires to expand education and provide free lunch to children so while the party isn’t perfect they are not at all comparable.
What makes them so similar is first pass the post it guarantees a two party system and the practice of gerrymandering creating safe seats. The worst Democrats are the ones with the safest seats. If you want positive change start there.
We’re talking about trying to pass legislation in the name of “think of the children” logic. KOSA is a fairly recent one that is from the dems.
Oh I know but anytime someone starts saying that they’re very alike I need to remind people that they really aren’t because these upcoming elections will be a fight for survival
Off the top of my head I can only think of Lieberman and honestly the ESRB was a reasonable compromise.
Tipper gore? KOSA
What’s tipper gore got to do with anything in the last thirty years? And kosa was bipartisan and died in the house.
30 years is a blink in time. You do realize laws don’t magically stop being potential issues after a few years right?
The Patriot Act which was bipartisan was passed almost 30 years ago now (25 years ago) now.
KOSA was introduced by a Dem.
You’re reaching to pull a both sides. Regardless republican platform positions harm children, Democratic ones feed them.
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You’re mostly correct, but Dems are not left in any political paradigm with the slightest awareness of the existence of non-American countries.
As a parent: 100% agree
As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
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.”
One of my Discord friends has a stalker and can’t get anything but automated messages.
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
Would absolutely advise against telegram. They have your phone number and you have 0 privacy. There is 0 support. If you are banned - there is nowhere to file complaint and you just lose all your contacts.
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.
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.
Guilded went to Roblox-only in 2025. I’d never heard of it until someone else mentioned it as an alternative.
IRC :(
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? 🤔
I keep getting my verification mail, try to verify, and it tells me that something failed.
Yeah, they’re swamped! Glad I made mine around the IPO announcement…
This is a free to use platform, just saying:
Meet Pavel Durov, the tech billionaire who founded Telegram
Pavel Durov was born in St. Petersburg in Soviet Russia.
The tech entrepreneur cofounded the encrypted messaging service Telegram with his brother Nikolai in 2013. The brothers were born into a family of intellectuals, according to a biography on the Digital-Life-Design Conference website. Durov spoke at the conference in January 2012.
Durov is now worth $17.1 billion, according to Forbes. Much of his fortune comes from Telegram, which he said hit 1 billion users in March 2025.
Nope. Never use telegram.
You can get banned out of the blue and just lose all the contacts.Never touching that
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.
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That is not what the post says. They sell encrypted messaging to government organizations. It’s basic SaaS and allows them to fund themselves.
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?
They must have come up with some sort of plan to merit losing some nitro users for harvesting personal information.
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
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 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!
