Technology

Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their "support forums" on Discord.

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?

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.

"I categorically cannot trust tech companies with that kind of personal data," wrote one frustrated user, with many hoping they might be able to convince Discord to do a U-turn with enough public pressure. Others went further. "What a great way to kill your community," added another longtime user, while some predicted "that’s game over for Discord" and remarked ruefully that "privacy on the internet is truly dead".

LOL. Just like Netflix price increases, or reddit third party apps thing, the protest will barely register in usage metrics and discord will carry on.

These companies have effectively infinite resources with which to test changes with user reference groups, model potential outcomes, and mitigate risks. It's pure hubris to suggest that you have a better understanding of Discord's user base than they do.

The vaaast majority of users will just do the video age test and never think about it again.

Good.

Discord is overused for help forums and wikis, which makes them extremely difficult to search and dependent upon third party software to be maintained. I hope this will force people away from that behaviour and back to good old fashioned messageboards that have been working just fine since at least the 80s

Stop a calling this "age.verification" and start calling it what it is, "identity harvesting".

Many of the communities I am in are pissed and these aren't even tech people, this is even worse than what reddit did.The thing that most people online hate is age verification, who thought this was a good idea, reminds me of when Tumblr decided to ban porn same level of stupidity.

they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.

No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.

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

hunting for alternatives

I've heard people mention Matrix, but I've not tried it yet.

As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.

The absolute shitload majority of users will not care about this enough to stop using the product

After what happened in Nepal last year, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living. The powers that be saw a small country use it as a tool to affect change. To me, and tell me if I lm jumping to conclusions here, its obvious as to why this policy change is happening at all, to prevent the site from being used in that manner again.

I found this little substack article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.

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.

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?

Y’all just aren’t thinking about the shareholders.

I've been floating the idea of running Matrix on my NAS anyway, so thanks to Discord for finally pissing me off enough to prioritise getting off of the shitty platform.

Potential alternatives:

Guilded

Element

Revolt

Telegram

Mumble

Session

I was using discord with notifiarr for a notification platform for my jellyfin server/*arr stack. Shut all that down and setup a self-hosted instance of ntfy today. Works perfect, should have done it sooner.

It'll be the new Victorian age all over again. Morals and acting righteous up top and secret human stuff just underneath the surface. Just look at what is happening in the bad old usa today. This is not about protecting minors.

The EU has apparently decided that this has to be done for most public platforms by July 2026, so Discord may not have much of a choice and other platforms will likely follow: (Edit: I forgot, the EU strict age verification stuff seems to be limited to EU DSA's definition of "platforms" so as a text messenger I'm not sure Discord is part of it. But this'll still likely be coming to more services near you and perhaps Discord is just voluntarily joining the chaos..)

I could be wrong I’m not a lawyer, assume everything I write from here is bullshit, but see here:

https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say “Online services get up to 12 months to apply age verification, EU guidelines say” This was in July 2025.

EU guidelines in question seem to be: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-guidelines-protection-minors + https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226 Quotes:

“[…] the Union legislature enacted Article 28 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and the Council (6). Paragraph 1 of this provision obliges providers of online platforms […] to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors, […]”

“Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below.”

“In the following circumstances, […] the Commission considers the use of access restrictions supported by age verification methods an appropriate and proportionate measure to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors: […] an online platform accessible to minors has identified risks to minors’ privacy, safety, or security, including content, conduct and consumer risks as well as contact risks (e.g., arising from features such as live chat, image/video sharing, anonymous messaging)”

“Age estimation methods can complement age verification technologies and can be used in addition to the former,” (AKA the alternative to a literal gov ID check seems to be big data AI sucking up all user data to estimate user age.)

The in my opinion horrible solution the EU seems to have found to avoid sharing the physical ID for services that don't want to request one, is apparently this app: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui Which from what I can tell 1. it requires Google device attestation so all custom ROMs are out and to be a citizen you can apparently no longer own your device, 2. unless you use iOS or Android you're apparently not a citizen, 3. once everyone is used to using some citizen app like that, I feel like a fascist government could easily tie it to a social score or other authoritarian measures bewyond the age verification. 4. There is a privacy friendly alternative approach anyway, that most governments seem to conveniently be ignoring: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/13/california-law-online-age-checks-00606115

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. But spread the word, somehow press seems to be ignoring this.

this is not at all what i'm seeing on discord, and I think it's worthy of note that the article's sample is Reddit posts in r/discordapp. Discord users who use Reddit in general have a systemic bias that's close to ours, as opposed to the majority that is young Discord users.

Oh right, another account to delete.

Well, I hope that Revolt/Stoat picks up most people.