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.
☝️🤓 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
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.
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.
Me and my people are moving to stoat. They’re having some growing pains right now, but I’m sure it’ll smooth out.
If this is truly a concern, smash your phone, because all that is easily accessible.
I run graphene and have self control. You do you.
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
Yes it’s an important fight for survival. Which is why the dems will nominate a bunch of corporatists who have been scorned by trump. Let the “good” money back into politics and “save the kids” my benevolent billionaires who are noble and just!!
This is why we need to push for progressives, it’s the only card we have left. Look at the last year if you want to see what not playing gets you.
Average age of Lemmy is too low to remember the democrats always managed to support the war on drugs. Save the children indeed. Think of the children is just the go-to bipartisan reasoning for bad legislation
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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Don’t know what KOSA is. Also, Tipper wasn’t a politician.
I’m not both sidesing, but both sides…
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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
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.
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.
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.
As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.
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.
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
And compounding the issue is that there isn’t a better alternative to discord in terms of feature set and accessibility. Matrix is the closest, but its just… not there yet. There’s no option for people who care about privacy that isn’t a steep downgrade, and that just sucks.
As someone who barely used discord, what are these other features, is it not just a regular chat app?
For people that don’t like Discord, this change does probably nothing. I only start it when I need it. I do basic communication,I don’t buy anything and I don’t follow 18+ content.
For all purposes this change just decreases the likelihood of accidentally seeing pr0n.
It’s a sliding slope though. The initial reasoning is fair. But it will eventually spread to other features like (potentially) creating and owning servers or holding administrative and moderation roles
It’s the same with the chat control currently looking over EU. Nobody can say that they are against efforts to stop CSAM. The issue is that the efforts don’t limit themselves to fighting that. Likewise the age verification on Discord does not seem to be targeted or limited to certain content. They are leaving the door open to use it any way they want
hunting for alternatives
I’ve heard people mention Matrix, but I’ve not tried it yet.
It’s terrible. They’ve had years and years to get their shit together and they still can’t. It’s just horrendously bad.
I use it all the time. There are many mature clients, and matrix is a protocol, so I don’t know what you mean. Since the sliding sync implementations, I have found it really nice to use.
Don’t know what to tell you. I’m literally unable to read messages sent to me, they all show up as “unable to decrypt”. If I can’t even use the damn protocol then how many clients it has doesn’t matter.
And I have tried different clients.
And as far as I’ve read, this “unable to decrypt” affects a lot of users.
What server are you using and with which client most recently? It sounds like your device is unverified so untrusted or the key isn’t present.
To expand, “unable to decrypt” would affect a lot of users. That’s a good thing and exactly what you want it to do when not correctly trusted.
I’m using the default matrix server and I’ve tried with Element and FluffyChat. I’ve never used a different device to access Matrix. It has always been Firefox through Element, and then when that stopped working I switched to try to use FluffyChat which also did not work.
To expand, “unable to decrypt” would affect a lot of users. That’s a good thing and exactly what you want it to do when not correctly trusted.
No, you do not want this affecting every user who has done nothing to change their environment. The device is still trusted, else I wouldn’t be able to sign in and get new messages at all. Here’s a massive list detailing many of the ways this can happen and note that this goes back to 2022. So for 4 years now they’ve had numerous issues with thousands of users being able to decrypt messages sent on the only device they’ve ever used and it still isn’t fixed.
Maybe I came off as dismissive or just stupid, but I really did mean to be helpful. Of course you don’t want users experience bad interactions. I meant if those interactions were for an actual intended reason. So yeah, never mind.
Bummer you’ve had a hard time. I think they and the free software community are trying to put together a good solution.
Sorry, clearly I responded too harshly. Honestly I’m just tired of the suggestions to use Matrix, when myself (and several other people I know personally) have constant issues with it. I’ve tried to use Matrix for over 3 years now and I am required to use it sometimes, but every time I’m incredibly frustrated.
I think they and the free software community are trying to put together a good solution.
I agree, and I do think we need that, but sometimes the focus should be on usability before security. I know how much that sucks, but if you look at Lemmy you see the same thing. The focus was on usability first. Security came later, because (honestly) security is kinda pointless when every user can set up their own instance and intercept any posts they want. We’ll get there eventually with security, but if people aren’t using your platform then security is pointless.
Stoat.chat seems to be a more likely alternative. I love matrix, but I don’t think it can replace Discord. Not yet.
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.
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
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.
IRC :(
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 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…
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.
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.
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
Stoat seems like the only alternative, most of these are telegram clones,not discord clones, one of them is even abandoned
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.
So you are also following this Epstein timeline we are living in…
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
What are the others missing? In other words, what are the main features of discord that make it stand out so far above the rest?
Discoverability and moderated official servers
You need to be able to find say a public battlefield, minecraft, dayz, CivilizationVi, whatever community and subcommunities easily, so for minecraft you need to be able to find speedrunner, hardcore, smp, and so on groups
Active People to talk to
Chicken and egg problems. Gotta have signifcant quantities of people to attract more active people
Intuitive and easy joining, clean links.
Have to be able to say “oh we can hop on here and chat/discuss” to onboard new people from YouTube, Twitch, Owncast, whatever
The shared link cant be a string of letters and numbers because uninitiated correlate that with bad actors
This was something Guilded was starting to get right before they were bought out and shut down and it was massive for getting people to join
That’s an absolute failure of all of those products to not provide that environment on their own.
This used to be commonplace
Discord at its best was simply a hangout where you and your friends can talk to each other without needing to be playing the same game.
It became entirely too complicated and bigger than it needed to be. It’s a. Overblown IRC voice chat. And before nitro, it was exactly all it needed to be.
Now it shot itself in the foot like so many others by trying to be something that isn’t what made it great
I think its yet to be seen if they shot themselves in the foot or not
Remember Reddit?
Yeah they were dirt bags and still exist just fine aren’t they
I’d wager its more likely that the same scenario repeats than this being a catastrophic event for discord personally
Unfortunately
You are most likely correct that it’s too early to say. I don’t have a problem conceding that point to you.
I think Reddit did shoot itself in the foot though, regardless of if they are still around. I don’t know that they will ever be able to regain what it has lost.
As a Reddit refugee myself I can say that for me they absolutely fucked over the chance to have me return to their platform, and many if not most of other refugees I’m guessing would share a similar opinion
I tried to move my friend group away from discord to stoat or matrix. But a pig part of why it stands out is that people are used to it and don’t think privacy is a big enough reason to switch
Honestly I just tried stoat and setting up a server (it’s not hosted by me so maybe just a space) to try to get my friends to migrate to. We have ~20 some odd people and have lots of chats categorized by outdoor/indoor with channels for diy/gaming/cooking/ordering out and so far, stoat has a few limitations I miss from discord (editing category or custom emoji names, for example) and I have yet to try out the voice chat aspect of it but it looks like this is going to be the clear winner for my use case. I’m hoping they get a mobile app working for some of the more casual just want to chat and share interesting pictures of our day without sitting at the pc members but besides that I’m loving it. Maybe at some point I’ll try to look into seeing if I can self host, but for now it’s nice to know there’s something that feels just like discord from an organization of topics perspective that hasn’t gone down their path (yet?)
The only viable alternatives are Stoat or Steam Chat. Teamspeak is still dragging their feet when it comes to modern feature support.
I’ve read that Stoat is bad for self-hosting, something about calls/video broadcasting not being part of the docker image, and needing to compile from source with every update?
I spent most of my day searching, spinning up containers, and discussing with friends and users on my discord ‘server’ about what to do. I burned out after a few hours of frustration. I had Mumble up and running a year ago but that was a bit too techy for new users, and it’s not really the ‘community’ feature set that I’d want…
tried it last night and could not get voice to work, couldn’t even make a voice channel to TRY it
Definitely uninstalling discord. I hardly use it anyway.
I use it daily, but I’ve now deleted my account and will move on.
I dont put up with this shit.
