Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
Discord probably did the math and are willing to take a hit to the user counts (much like reddit did when they closed the apis), as the vast majority will stay and keep “threatening” to leave. There’s at least the hope that the ones who quit now will establish communities elsewhere, on a (hopefully) better server platform.
Enshittification is not single step. It’s more a “boiling a frog”-kinda process.
Discord itself was a big step of enshittification from the very start when communities moved from individual platforms to Discord servers.
Sometimes I like to remember when Nitro was like 5 bucks and gave a bunch of stuff, and now it is 10 bucks gives less AND they still try to sell me fucking cosmetics…
I dropped my Nitro when they announced a possible buyout/IPO
Discord probably did the math and are willing to take a hit to the user counts
I very much doubt whoever thought about doing the math did so, and if they did, that said math made it out of their department. This kind of decision is much more likely to have been a C-suite darling that no one dared speak against or the equivalent thereof.
I’m saying thoughtful organizational decisions are less common than we’d like.
Are there any viable alternatives? Last I looked they all kinda sucked
I wanna start by saying I’m not a power user, I only use discord as a glorified chat manager for my immediate friends. That said, Stoat is everything I like about discord with a nicer ui and a public server seach function. I made an account when discord started ads and I honestly feel like it’s a little further than Lemmy was when I came here from reddit.
Right now sign up is slow because of the huge influx of users. That said, the team is handling it well and being very transparent about it which is refreshing.
I think they’re already too big to fail. They captured the entire market. There’s no real competitor with any kind of noticeable fraction of the market share.
The closest thing to a competitor are business products similar to slack or teams. None of those have anything close to feature parity like high quality streaming at no cost.
I would gladly host something myself, but I can’t do it all. IMO this needs a lemmy equivalent with decentralized hosting or something.
Reddits stock performance since that decision isn’t likely anything that anyone would want to emulate.
Here’s hoping this gets more software off the discord support teat. No, you do not need real time chat, you need searchable, permanent presence. Discord support is such a red flag I immediately move on even if it’s OSS. If you can’t do real doco and you can’t stand up a forum (Discourse is nice I hear) then what chance do you have of being competent.
Also, IPO incoming, expect it to get worse.
Also, IPO incoming, expect it to get worse.
Is it? Ah, well that would explain it.
I will go onto discord servers looking for answers that a searchable forum or wiki is better suited for. First thing I do is use discord’s shitty search tool, and if it works I type my question and the found answer again in the relevant chat for future searchers and get the fuck out of there.
Account deleted. Fuck em. Was already pissed with their restrictions with nitro.
Good! locking away potentially helpful Q&A, discussions, and guides on Discord is fucking stupid.
I hope this means people will slowly start going back to forums. Highly doubt it though.
Why do adults have to suffer because parents don’t know how to control their kids?
Because it’s not actually about the kids, the kids are just the excuse. That’s all they ever are.
Maybe people will finally realize discord isn’t the place for your projects documentation to exist
I miss the days of forums and hate having tobfo to discord for support on stuff
Wait, what are people using it for? I use discord for shooting the shit with people about video games and politics.
That’s fine. Unfortunately people are using it to coordinate open source software development. I don’t know how people do it. You have to use the search box and scroll through hundreds of chat messages to find some code you need. It doesn’t show up on google. It’s just horrible.
That is mind blowing to me. I wouldn’t even think of it for anything meaningful.
I’ve seen so many IT projects, associations, communities of minorities using discord in lieu of wikis, forums, documentation, etc. I personally know a marginalized community with a dire need of visibility, information and stuff that has everything locked behind their discord server and everything is about to be lost. It’s both extremely sad and a huge “told you so years ago”
anything communication wise its versatile.
If its an age-restricted project, sure.
Worried about the children while protecting thousands of paedophiles that raped children. (The governments, not discord)
Regardless, fuck discord and instead of “threatening” an exodus, why doesn’t everybody register with xmpp or mumble and figure it out from there. Crazy staying on discord from here on.
The problem is finding a good alternative immediately. I don’t mind to hop and check out multiple services, but some of my friends wants to just install one thing and be done.
My checklist is not too much either, but for some reason video calling is not something included with the lot of them.
We really gotta get started on building that
We really should have been already but now’s good too
deleted by creator
Yeah, but if accounts are made on mumble for example, the migration will happen there quicker. Then if that doesn’t suit many, others are an option. I’m guessing whichever platform benefits from this will happily make any changes that are currently missing.
TIL people actually pay for nitro lol.
I’ve probably paid around 100€/$ in total (been occasionally using and gifting Nitro since 2019 and regularly for about a year). I’ll definitely stop it and using Discord if they follow through with this.
People always ask why even paying users exist - simple, I am a paying user myself, and by that I hold the power to actually cut their revenue rather than just leave the platform.
I pay for nitro because I love discord and love supporting it. I will cancel if they go through with this nonsense.
That’s too late.
Once they do it, they won’t reverse their path. They have to know they’re losing people now, before they commit. You can always start again after they change their mind.
This thread just reminded me to cancel mine. Good riddance IMHO. I should’ve done it back when they started spamming me with “quests” (aka ads) for Amazon and random fucking gatcha games. Between the privacy stuff and the pressure to monetize, there’s next to no way it’s gonna get better.
Sadly I think the end result of this won’t be people leaving discord, but people giving up liberties because it’s easier than fighting it
And they’re banking on that, it’s part of why they intentionally gave zero warning…1 month is nothing.
With more time a dedicated set of people could pull the alternatives up into solid real options
Or kick up such a huge ruckus that discord back down and undo it.
This was a very intentional and malicious choice to go “oh, yeah we’re doing this next month, kthnxbye”
Fundamentally the problem with leaving discord is no other platform has fucking remotely any kind of quality of life close to discord. Matrix is a flaming pile of shit that basically is an insult the very concept of user friendlyness. It also is missing about 70% of the features your avg gamer/internet deweller actually wants.
Teamspeak 6 is a barely functional trash heap that still doesn’t have a bunch of quality of life your avg normie expects. There’s been open feature requests for years that are unlikely to ever manifest.
Stoat is a half finished poorly managed train wreck that would be good if the devs actually had anything resembling a decent pace of development. Feels like Wayland moves faster then them for basic functions they should have had two years ago.
Discord is basically 5 apps in one and you can’t convert people to go from 1 universal app back to like 5. It just won’t happen.
You need actual cross platform support for voice chat on desktop ios and android, text chat, screen and window sharing, gifs, emojis, dms, group chats and THEY HAVE TO BE SIMPLE AND UNDERSTANDABLE to computer illiterate normies.
And that’s just the basics. People expect customization and personalization. You need to be able to jump around, colab, hop in and out of calls and basically have digital mobility. Which while it sucks from the outside. Inside discords walled gardens it’s a VERY open space.
Matrix gets close but it’s just so user unfriendly and 90% of clients have one or the other half of the feature set people expect.
It’s just a mess.
do it cowards. leave now.
My community just setup a Matrix instance and we’re migrating everyone over. Several already cancelled their subscription.
I actually ran into a colleague in a random room, who is also leaving Discord.
It’s pretty nuts, there’s a big exodus going on.
I sure did fucking sucks and they didn’t make it easy. First had to delete all servers first then delete my account. Fuck Discord.
I deleted my Discord account last night. Good riddance.
Don’t threat
Speaking as someone who is currently planning to move a community away from Discord to something self-hosted, it’s not as easily said as done.
Apart from the need to run your own infrastructure, competing software is typically finicky and comes with caveats. Plus you have to worry about discoverability if you want to attract new users.
It’s doable, sure, but it requires a lot of planning and work. Honestly, it’s probably going to take us months to get our own service fully up and running.
Setting up Matrix/Synapse was extremely easy and done in a day. The self hosting part is not that hard and I would say migrating users would be the majority of your time. Plenty of VPSs online make obtaining infrastructure very easy.
It’s never easy but believe me it’s rewarding. Planning to switching to a self-hosted solution even more so (though it’s harder). However, starting it is the halfway through. I just wish your community members as understanding as you.
Good luck!
They won’t. They never leave, at least not enough to make a difference. I’ve long since given up hoping in people to do the right thing.
Someone on Reddit claims reddit will do the same soon. I wonder if it’s govt pressure.
I assume it’s UK/EU’s expanding social media laws that are driving this, in addition to Discord’s imminent Initial Public Offering coming in March. They’re trying to clean house to show how profitable they can be, the same way Reddit created their walled garden by restricting third-party connections prior to their IPO.
It’s bog-standard enshittification to please the shareholders.
Lots of governments want it. But its no excuse doing it in a stupid way. For example EU IDs should have a function that just verifies someone is over 18 without any other info being send. At least the German one does. But its not being used.
It’s not being used because the real goal is to make it impossible to use the internet without handing over your ID, so that governments can know exactly what you do online. It goes along with all the attempts to ban or backdoor encryption including VPNs. They want to read every message and know who sent it and to whom.
potentially. it’s going to become more of the norm as more nations enforce stuff like this to “protect the kids” coughget your id and know what you’re doing onlinecough
Also keep in mind Discord is just about to launch their IPO in March so the timing lines up.
The EU is going to pass a law to enforce this, discord is just getting ahead of the imposition. That’s why France and Spain have been on the news regarding social network regulation for under 16.
So when you have to setup a system for 27 countries plus some members of the eurosphere you just do it for everyone and be done with it.
I could just be me being a doomer, but I doubt any significant exodus will happen. People really about to drop discord? Right…
I’m with you.
Considering that age verification will only be mandatory to browse NSFW content, and that without it you can still join servers and keep calling during gameplay as per usual, my bet is that exodus won’t happen. There is going to be part of people who will verify, and the unverified half either gonna leave or keep using discord just without NSFW.
Reddit exodus, unfortunately, barely had any impact. Bluesky had a good influx of new users, but it didnt kill xitter. Doubt that there anything going to happen with discord.
Yeah I think people will just strive to keep their servers sfw
Yeah I think these articles are trying to push people to leave discord and not actually reporting a real trend. Even on lemmy where people are far more likely to be halfway out the door or wanting to leave discord its still a low amount saying they left.
Across the 20 servers im in i’ve seen 0 movement. People arent even talking about it.
