I don't think discord is going anywhere. Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown. Look at Reddit after the API switch up.
The reason my friends and I moved to Discord in late 2015 or early 2016 was because it blew the competition out of the water at the time. The audio was so much better. I think screen share and face cams may not have been supported at the time, but it later was and was higher quality and a better experience than Skype or Teamspeak, IMO.
Now though, that might just be table stakes for a new service now that WebRTC is standard and the codecs have gotten better too. I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat (text, video, and audio) to take off. Right now, all of them have notable flaws. I also think many of them try to compete with the community aspect of Discord, which I personally don't use and thus and am a bad judge of quality. Just a way to chat with people I already know.
I think discord will stick around, yeah, but it's competitors will also grow a lot more until someday, maybe in 5-10 years, Discord finds itself withering away in favor of some new app.
The thing is Discord isn't finished with upsetting people - it still has to do a lot more stuff to get more net income for their IPO. How they will do that without seriously annoying users is hard to say. The more they annoy their users the more the users flee, boosting the value of the competition.
Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's - where followers & networks are valuable and can take a long time to aquire - and twitter's competition was able to scoop up a huge number of outraged users despite even that. Granted - I think Twitter's changes annoyed people much more than Discord's.
> Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's
More importantly, Discord's communities are silo'ed, private by default, and administered and moderated by human beings with almost no oversight from Discord proper.
There is no equivalent on Twitter. On Reddit, going dark makes you subject to administrative subreddit takeover. But if someone runs a Discord community that they want to migrate to another platform, they could easily lock the entire server to posting and post a link to the alternative community. Done.
It isn't siloed though, not truly - not in the way Teamspeak or Mumble used to be, at least. Discord's global friends list is what will keep people from abandoning it in droves, unfortunately, and until Teamspeak et al sort that out it isn't changing.
EDIT: Maybe I completely forgot how Teamspeak works. It seems like there is a global friends list, but I can't remember that it was a thing back in the day (10+ years ago).
The friends list is inconsequential. It's for sending private messages to people you already know and met from a Discord server. Long running group chats are an aberration, people just start up micro-discords instead.
And that is what Discord alternatives will have to solve - the ease of setting up a new Discord "server" by any old random user is hard to beat in terms of convenience. Matrix is the only real alternative on that front.
However, if you have an established community and have at least a little hosting knowledge among the staff, the moat is shallow to nonexistent, and it's just a matter of how much of a pain in the neck Discord decides to be.
The discord servers my friends and I use are just for shit posting and using voice among like 10 of us. If it becomes annoying we can move to the next thing. We're all millennials. We can run whatever server if needed it's not a big deal.
If you meet somebody mid match in a game like Valorant or Overwatch, it's simple to give them a username and they can add you and you then choose to group voice call vs inviting them to a private server, especially before you know them very well.
Teamspeak, as far as I know, doesn't have a way to solve this.
I'll admit that this use case didn't really occur to me, because the signal to noise ratio is so damn bad in matchmade games these days. If I want to play a game on voice call with strangers, I go to the community space first and then organize a team there.
That being said, after thinking about it, I actually have done what you're talking about before - just not on Discord. When I find someone, I simply add them on Steam, PSN, or whichever account the game uses.
There's also really nothing to a community beyond its mods, its users, and maybe some bots. Reddit creates a record of EVERYTHING and in many ways those years of discussion are the sub more than the current users or mods alone. Discord is nothing like that, if you could get everyone on the same page a Discord clone would work just as well, and relatively seamlessly.
tl;dr Discord has a moat, but it's not very wide or deep.
That's not true. Plenty of Discord communities have dozens of channels with long-running post histories, pictures, FAQ content, beginner guides; server roles and titles, permissions, custom emoji, stickers, etc.
Migrating all of that stuff to a new service (which may not even support it all) would be a huge pain.
Reddit never faced the same pressure. The API thing pissed off mobile users, but all of the Reddit alternatives, such as Voat, were hyper polarized politically and were not good destinations for most people. They collected the "worst parts of Reddit" rather than providing a place for the majority of users.
The same thing happened to Twitter. Bluesky is very polarized and constantly gets poked fun at because of it, even by left-leaning folks. Threads was a much more neutral and inviting space that doesn't force you to wear a particular set of politics on your sleeves.
Discord has a few (small) alternatives that aren't alienating or off-putting.
Reddit's api migration did not put a dent in their MAUs but it sent 250k users to the alternative platforms like Lemmy and pumped a ton of donation money and contributors into the ecosystem. Now Lemmy has maintained 50k MAUs for over 2 years and has gotten 100 times better as a product. So reddits API change grew its competition from a hobby project to an actual competitor.
I don't think Discord is going anywhere, but people always vastly overestimate the power of market leaders. Reddit didn't see a big change in MAUs but it did see massive declines in the amount of time spent on reddit per user and posting activity.
I could see Discord going the same way - declining interest from users while they keep it around for the few 'essential' communities/friends on the platform, but very little tethering them to it if a disruptive competitor comes along.
We get these articles everytime there is some controversy. We had articles about how Gitlab was crushed under the load of new users after Github was acquired by Microsoft, and yet Gitlab is further from being the market leader today than it was back then.
It's clear age verification is coming from a changing legal environment around the world. Discord may be preemptively moving, but any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content.
"Any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content."
Maybe but I just don't see this as a certain thing. The US may implement nation-wide age verification laws someday but it is a long ways from happening. Other discord-like software may be self-hosted by individuals, making enforcing age-verification difficult. There's nothing wrong with this. People would rather have a private place to chat as opposed to a place where your data will be observed by a big company and potentially sold or given to a hostile goverment.
Most of this has to do with GitHub relying on a benefactor with a de facto monopoly in order to subsidize their massive business failures and loses. I'm sure if GitLab never IPO'd and was in bed with a trillion dollar corporation the situation might be more comparable.
All you're doing is making a profound argument why GitHub should be divested from Github, WhatsApp from Meta, or AWS from Amazon. It's clear many tech companies would not be in dominant positions without the massive advantage of their respective monopolies.
These companies need to be broken up radically and it needs to happen soon.
Old world decay model, new world is twitter or facebook. Mass user exodus to a point a platform is a genuine wasteland, this means bots get deployed to prop up metrics. The money doesn't come from users, but the beleif of access to them via a platform. As long as there is a appearance of consumer data/attention you can access, then everything is fine re: revenue. Dunno how discord will fudge things though, since discord doesn't quite (historically) fit traditional social media models so maybe you'll be right in the end.
Yeah, I'm 39 years old, I don't need to flee age verification. I just am not interested in having an account on a chat service that would do this. I don't want my driver's license and biometric information to be stored in servers who-knows-where in a country with weak privacy regulations.
Journalism isn't twitter. A reporter just reports the facts, and nobody wants them to do more than that. If they started inserting their assumptions or making conclusions from the facts, that is no longer "news" that is an opinion piece.
Write some random stuff some user on reddit thinks, people call it bad journalism. Don't write it, people call it bad journalism. Poor journals can't win.
Wow Teamspeak is still around and looks like they are succeeding again. Teamspeak and Ventrilo used to be such a mainstay of the video game community. I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. It does look like Teamspeak has taken a note out of discord and slacks notebook and have gotten more advanced chat room options now.
1. To DeDoS a Teamspeak server, it's enough to DeDoS a single server. You may not even need to do that, it may be enough to be such a nuisance that their host kicks them out. To DeDoS a Discord server, it's necessary to DeDoS the entirety of Discord, which is much, much harder, and also much more likely to put you in legal hot water. Discord is the Cloudflare of gaming.
2. Discord servers aren't real servers, they're tenants in an application, effectively "rows in an SQL table", not standalone containers requiring their own tech stack. This means they can be offered for free. You also can't abuse them for E.G. crypto mining, like you can with a VPS where a Teamspeak server can be hosted. Free increases adoption, which makes people a lot more likely to pay for extra features. It's the standard "the rich subsidize the poor" model, common to so many web applications.
3. No technical expertise necessary to set a server up. Bus factor is basically equal to infinity.
4. One service, one account, one interface, many servers, many groups, many people. There's no weird workspace switching and per-workspace DMs like in Slack (not sure how TS does this). If you log in once on a new device, all your server memberships are there, and everything just works. You may be in dozens of servers, and they're all behind the same single login.
Those 4 features are table stakes now, like it or not. If you want to be a real, long-term Discord competitor and attract real users, you have to figure out how to get those 4.
1. Yes and no. Discord "guilds" have their metadata and chat messages managed by a single shard somewhere in GCP. However, voice is managed using servers hosted by ID3, a much smaller provider. If you find the right websocket server you can repeatedly take down voice instances still.
2. Emojis are just lines in a database, and yet they still charge a fee for that. The reason why it's free is because that's the selling point. Also, that sharded "guild" is actually part of a sharded container that still has a cost to run, and manages the write-lock for the data in that "gimme".
The whole tangent here feels weird since I _choose_ what to run on "my" VPS. Noisy neighbors have been a solved problem for decades.
3. This is actually the killer feature, centralization sells because of network effects. You're only on Discord because your friends are on Discord.
4. Teamspeak has this with myTeamspeak now. You've been able to have multiple sessions for a long time, but now it's in a nicer interface.
The main issue is that Discord is a fantastic tool that does everything right except the stuff people really don't care about. (Even if a vocal minority says they do).
If you want to run a community with SUPER easy access to everything from live video chats with a hundred members to forums, excellent access controls, integrations for absolutely anything especially if you also use bots from the marketplace, Discord is there and it's free, and it always works.
You saw this in WoW and other MMOs. People would DDoS a rival during their raid night to cause havok, or if they were going for a world/guild record. People would also DDoS the server if a streamer was on that server. People are weird.
> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to.
Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.
In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.
Yeah and even some of us IT people weren't enough into video games to care about hosting voice chat. Like I ran the middle school Minecraft server but not a Teamspeak for it.
As that IT person I’ve set up a few alternatives over the years (and they’re still up, certs and all). Matrix stuck with a decent group of people, but the group I hung out on Discord with refused to move. I definitively bailed after the ID news but the guys didn’t follow (to Matrix, or Jitsi, or TeamSpeak, or Mumble).
I’m kind of salty about making a fruitless effort I’ll admit, but I feel like unless there’s an effortless, perfect, free program that replicates the (voice) channel functionality and screen sharing features people are not going to leave Discord. Even if it does treat its users like shit.
I miss those guys but I refuse to take part in that abuse, and I’m angry about it.
Its just works to get your groups of friends together - up until the point the damned thing starts to asking them "papers please!" a they start leaving.
It looks like Teamspeak covers the "group of friends who voice chat each other" use case (Discord DM groups) but not the "IRC replacement" use case (Discord servers). As far as I can tell, the licensing for Teamspeak 6 (the version that tries to be competitive with Discord) is set up such that anybody who joins the server (as opposed to anybody actively using it) uses up a slot, so the licensing fees for larger servers would be cost prohibitive. Additionally, the text chat functionality is way worse than on Discord. There's no way to just have a chat channel, you can only view and use the text chat when you're in a voice call in a voice channel.
Reportedly they are plan in IPO & the latest identity verification crap they are pushing seems to be related.
So yes, it looks like the money has run out and rather than pushing for direct monetization they try to turn to shadier stuff - get as much personal data as possible to either make the company look juicier for either an IPO or an acquisition.
Because a Discord server is very easy and free to set up, and has nice features like screensharing that weren't commonly handled well at the time. Before that, we used Skype or AIM or iChat if we even wanted audio at all; Teamspeak was more for "serious gamers."
Younger people don't know how to operate a computer anymore. Even back then a lot of teens had no problem hosting Minecraft or TeamSpeak servers but we regressed so much thanks to locked-down computing like smartphones that this knowledge is now lost and teens will pick Discord because you can just click yourself "a server" in a minute (doesn't help that "server" is false advertising and Discord knows it themselves because they don't call them "server" in their developer docs).
Discord offered more features. Voice chat was part of the initial sell for the platform, but these days most users don't even use the voice functionality and instead use it for long-running hypermedia chats with retained history.
I spun up a self hosted teamspeak server last weekend for my friends and I using their docker container.
Its going to take some getting used to. Seems weird that they have a hard cap on 10MB file upload sizes if its self hosted. Also the screen sharing wasn't working quite right
Maybe a good opportunity to reduce screensharing (unless pure video content). A lot of people are sharing webpages through video. That's subpar (except for the shared pointer)
Discord has the momentum but overall I just find the experience awful. It would be nice to use anything else at this point. Joining a server with greater than a handful of people is just a nightmare and practically unusable.
Isn't this usually cause the admin went overboard? Like a server of 10 people has 30 channels, one of which is a lobby you have to clear first, and 10 bots telling you that you leveled up or whatever.
The hardest part about joining a new-but-small-but-not-that-small Discord server is convincing the server admin to turn off the stupid "click this button to spam the channel with a gigantic dancing emoji to welcome newcomers".
It kills any ongoing conversation, and imo, convinces newcomers that people don't so much chat in that Discord as they just press shiny buttons.
I think it depends on how the servers are setup. Chat channels with 1000s people participating are typically worthless as the signal to noise ratio ruins it.
But when the majority of conversations are happening in forums/thread style channels then it works well. You can still have some more niche chat style sections where typically 2-10 people participate
Chat channels are also fine for lots of people when its not about conversations but more just about sharing things. Like a "Share what you build" or "memes" channel work well as tons of messages are fine as you only care to see a few anyway.
Also limited size voice channels can be good aswell 5 people max.
My thought is that it just doesn't make sense to have a product which serves both communities of 1,000+ people and a small group of <50 friends. You end up making far too many compromises.
I used to just engage with my friends. Now it feels like a really noisy reddit. Sure I could leave all of them, but that is kind of my point. There is an identity crises for the product.
What I am saying is that discord as a product has an inferior experience for small communities because it tries to cater all. It's just not a fun product to use.
> Like so many things from history, this is all Britain’s fault. The farcical UK Online Safety Act is forcing all social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to require age verification checks before its citizens can access them
I guess no other US state or country has demanded age checks, great journalism from kotaku...
The things in politics have a habit of spreading outside of country's borders, as politicians in other countries just go "huh, that's nice kind of oppresion, and their population didn't totally revolt so maybe we should try"
Lots of people support these age checks. The many tech companies delivering too much filth to young audiences with no easy controls shot themselves in the foot on this one.
1. If all platforms introduce age verification by law, then no platform gets unfair advantage by not having them.
2. Age verification obviously allows them to gather even more data about users.
3. Age verification creates the illusion of there being "a safe internet" which is extremely important to parents who give their children iPads so that the kids shut up and fuck off, while the spread of brainrot can continue undisturbed.
That same Peter Thiel-tied verification that Discord is using, Persona, is also used by many other services right? Anyone know who else uses them so I can avoid them?
This can be seen possibly as even more invasive in this case, given the larger social aspects of VRChat as well as apparently this being done for more than a year by this point.
A well known path....bluesky saw it with twitter. Reddit with digg. /. with digg are the ones that come to mind. Interesting to see if this works out better.
Those aren’t out yet, you’ve highlighted the one feature request which I hear repeatedly from our users too. That’s good news, it helps me to see we really are ready for prime time because there are so few concerns left. iPhone didn’t have copy and paste for years and still they were top adopted phone despite it because of all the other value.
It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?
Yes, the self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers. Teamspeak can be hosted for free but has client restrictions that can be overcome with a license.
On a related note, Mumble self hosted servers can also register with a centralized server if the server owner wishes to have it listed for public use. This is optional as the server owner can also just advertise the connection details on a website and/or in Discord. Mumble [1] has no concept of a license to operate however. There is a light-weight version of the Mumble server called uMurmur that can run on a Linux router or RasPi but the channel configuration is statically defined ahead of time on uMurmur. The full blown version is just called Murmur and by default uses sqlite but it can also use a database like MySQL or MariaDB for storing persistent data like user registrations, channels, bans, and server configuration.
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Mumble is fantastic for voice chat. Its text features are very basic, though, so people fleeing Discord would probably want something additional to handle that. Maybe Matrix.
A single location is a good selling point. Being able to jump into a voice chat, and still post things in a shared text chat is a good feature. Mumble should work a bit on that.
Since I don't know stream audio programming, C++ or gUI programming but am well versed on the shortcomings of mumble vs discord, perhaps I can bust out the llm.
> self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers
I doubt license authorization and an entry in a list are overwhelming their servers.
Yup. It would be the centralized servers getting overwhelmed with many more voice channels if they did not anticipate the growth demand. I was just explaining how the self hosted servers tie into their centralized systems in that they are decentralized but still phone home.
""If you think Skype and Teamspeak had a baby and it hand all sorts of super powers that is parents didn't have," Citron said. "What was basically a skunkworks project appears to be the most promising product we've built."
For much of this year, the company has been working on Discord. The networking infrastructure is built in Erlang, a technology that Ericsson created in the 1980s for telecommunications. The system is spread across nine data centers around the world. The company has done tests to make sure that the latency is good.
Resmini also noted that esports competitors - or professional gamers who play games for money prizes - were worried about security. With Skype, it's easy to get somebody else's personal internet protocol (IP) address because the communication happens peer-to-peer. Citron said that Discord works through server infrastructure, so it's impossible for anyone to obtain another player's IP address."
Perhaps the peers cannot obtain each others' IP addresses but the person running the Discord server has all the peers' IP addresses in addition to their payment details
There are few if any meaningful limits on how this data can be used, how long it can be retained or where it can be transferred.^1
Apparently this centralised architecture does not matter to Discord users until something like "age verification" comes along
1. The legal compliance exception obviously allows for "age verification"
Example of Discord privacy policy pre-"age verification":
What's actually happening? From the commentary here on HN I thought everyone was going to have to upload an ID or something. I use a Discord server to chat with some old high school friends, and wasn't wanting to upload my ID to them. But this update[0] from Discord says they're not requiring everyone to, and that "the vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age." So I'm assuming I won't have to, after all. Do we know who will, when, or why?
They have a ML model based on shrug emoji that decides if you’re in the automatically approved bucket, the face verification bucket or the ID verification bucket. If face verification fails or you’re in the high risk bucket you’ll need to send them ID to access adult content, i.e. any channels manually set to nsfw, anything their classifier deems nsfw and anything in servers deemed nsfw. Discord would like to imply that most users are in the automatically verified bucket and only like porn is flagged nsfw, but it’s entirely in their control to tighten these screws when they reckon that the controversy is over (and they’ve already been trialling more mandatory ID verification on UK users, before starting the global rollout)
My guess would be that for most people they already have a pretty good idea if you are an adult.
Like my account was created years and years ago not long after it was released so unless I was under 8 when I did so the odds are pretty good I am at least 18.
But to further my guess of why they are not bugging you is because they are not YET bugging you. By that I mean then want to make it seem like they only want to "save the children". That, in a lot of cases they basically already know you must be over 18. But in my opinion that is only to lessen the blow and not annoy everyone at once. Many escape ID requirements and continue to use the app and if all goes well not enough people push back or quit and a high enough number of people continue to use the app that it makes other people either use the user hostile app or not easily connect and communicate to a large community.
But also in my opinion once people calm down and move on they will continue to push more demand for user ID. It will be a slow push but knowing who you are is too valuable. There will be excuses as to why they need it and eventually there will be a reason why you a user of over a decade will also need to prove you are who you are.
One positive note I am actually old man wrinkly balls. I have been there for the rise and fall of many sites. Maybe it will happen for discord as well only time will tell. Cheers
Age verification is required for age limited servers and channels. The vast majority are not age limited and will remain available without verification. As has happened in the past, more of the remaining channels will turn off age limiting as it becomes more invasive, in favor of moderation and tweaked community standards (no more porn in #shitpost). I'd expect the remaining bits will leave, with most of the members not wanting it to be linked to their real id.
Australia recently locked under 16s out of social media and it seems like the social media companies used heuristics to determine if accounts were owned by under 16s... so I assume Discord will do something similar.
I'm in Australia and have not been prompted to verify my identity for any service (I'm assuming that one of the heuristics is average age of "friends" but I have no idea).
This new ID policy is to get into servers tagged NSFW, like OF creator communities. The new policy says by default, you can't get into those servers without uploading IDs.
So, for the vast majority of servers, like your high school friends, local Pokemon Go servers, work alumni, etc, they'll still work fine without an ID upload.
I don't think any of us are going to be able to get enough of a sample size to know if their age estimation tool is working well or not. You can know the age of your real life friends, but beyond that it's just going to be self report.
Seems like a missed opportunity to move away from proprietary solutions entirely. Teamspeak is self-hostable, but it is proprietary, supports limited numbers of users on the free tier, and presumably send telemetry to the proprietors even when "self-hosted."
Going by how little it is spoken on here I assume it is a localized phenomena, but the word of Fluxer.app is spreading among my spaces and it is open source and selfhostable and federation in the future.
The official instance and full time dev is funded by a cheaper discord nitro like premium sub.
It very recently became public and since that makes people think it is vibe coded I recommend reading the making off blog post https://blog.fluxer.app/
It isn't yet 1:1 with discord, no phone app yet, but it is by far the most discord like discord alternative (closer than Stoat), but open source and selfhostable.
Is there really no open source version of these that people can selfhost?
There are multiple free providers for AI moderation models (openai and xai), you can get a vps with 1tb of storage for pretty cheap, just setup an image optimizer/downscaler with Go or Rust so its fast and you can handle probably 10,000 people pretty easily.
I guess the main reason that discord is good is because of the centralization as it allows all your servers in one place and super easy link sharing and signup.
Decentralized social and chat should be present in this new era, clawbot showed that people are willing to spinup and selfhost useful things even if they are not overly technical. I think we could see a new wave of similar things happening for things like social media and chat.
I think you overestimate the capability and willingness of the average Discord user to go through that. Majority are not technical, they have no idea what self hosting is, what a VPS is, etc.
Also self hosting creates an issue of balkanization. Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. The closest we can probably get is the Mastodon model.
You underestimate how much people hate age verification. Literally everyone I know on Bluesky that uses Discord has been talking about wanting an alternative. I'm slowly getting people on Fluxer, which is the closest thing to a Discord clone out there.
I agree that most Discord users do not want to self host. However,
> Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort.
This is already the model. Everyone has "their own" discord server, and you have to connect to it manually via an invite. That would actually be the exact same usage.
You can connect directly to other discord users with no mutual servers. You can make chats and calls with users with no mutual servers. You can make group chats and group calls with users with no mutual servers. You can screenshare in these calls, stream to the group, etc, all just by being Discord users. No need for a server.
Clicking a link (discord's approach) is very different from downloading a different piece of software and setting up a new account for each gaming group
Normally I'm a lurker here but I gotta put in a good word for this project: https://sharkord.com/
It's still super early in development but it's already been amazing to have a self-hosted 3rd space for my friends and myself. The "living room not a convention center" focus is exactly what I find missing in most of the other options.
There is Mumble for a free software option similar to TS. Works well in my experience. I've hosted a server for friends for around a decade now I think.
yeah i remember using mumble over 10 years ago for game chats, but you cannot compare the UX and design of something like mumble to discord for the average person.
My worry is that discord will require the ID of everybody at some point or another.
Now that they are going public I think every real user will have to identify themselves. The way they do it I think will be a staggered rollout of requests. So they use the guise of this algorithm to state that no everybody will need to verify but when it’s your turn to provide your ID they just wait for the next instance and lock the account to teen level until you do it. Given they say they will do ongoing monitoring to place an age group, this I don’t think is far fetched and increases the value of the profiles for the shareholders.
This would make a mass exodus nearly impossible too as too many people already sit in the side of it’s not a problem if it does not effect me. The result is it will effect just not enough people to cause such a large exodus.
I don’t think this spect is talked about enough. Companies that enshitify don’t do it all at once. It’s bite by bite.
I'm already using Matrix for a number of open source communities. It's fine as far as it goes.
However, from a community space point of view, it seems to be more similar to IRC than Discord. Much like an IRC server, there's a public list of channels and you join them individually. There is voice and video chat, but as far as I can tell it's only person to person without any voice and video conferencing like Discord has, and I've never actually tried them to see how well they work.
Some organizations, such as Mozilla, run their own Matrix server in order to corral the community into one place, but more often than not I see communities creating a single channel on the primary matrix.org server, and "expand" by adding more channels, IRC style.
As an IRC replacement, I think it's perfect. But if you are expecting something more similar to Discord in terms of functionality, you'll likely be looking elsewhere. Stoat is what I see most frequently touted, but I can't speak to it personally.
Absolutely stupid: what makes them think teamspeak will not implement the same age verification in future. Running from one platform to the other will never be justified
I don't think discord is going anywhere. Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown. Look at Reddit after the API switch up.
The reason my friends and I moved to Discord in late 2015 or early 2016 was because it blew the competition out of the water at the time. The audio was so much better. I think screen share and face cams may not have been supported at the time, but it later was and was higher quality and a better experience than Skype or Teamspeak, IMO.
Now though, that might just be table stakes for a new service now that WebRTC is standard and the codecs have gotten better too. I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat (text, video, and audio) to take off. Right now, all of them have notable flaws. I also think many of them try to compete with the community aspect of Discord, which I personally don't use and thus and am a bad judge of quality. Just a way to chat with people I already know.
I think discord will stick around, yeah, but it's competitors will also grow a lot more until someday, maybe in 5-10 years, Discord finds itself withering away in favor of some new app.
The thing is Discord isn't finished with upsetting people - it still has to do a lot more stuff to get more net income for their IPO. How they will do that without seriously annoying users is hard to say. The more they annoy their users the more the users flee, boosting the value of the competition.
Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's - where followers & networks are valuable and can take a long time to aquire - and twitter's competition was able to scoop up a huge number of outraged users despite even that. Granted - I think Twitter's changes annoyed people much more than Discord's.
> Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's
More importantly, Discord's communities are silo'ed, private by default, and administered and moderated by human beings with almost no oversight from Discord proper.
There is no equivalent on Twitter. On Reddit, going dark makes you subject to administrative subreddit takeover. But if someone runs a Discord community that they want to migrate to another platform, they could easily lock the entire server to posting and post a link to the alternative community. Done.
It isn't siloed though, not truly - not in the way Teamspeak or Mumble used to be, at least. Discord's global friends list is what will keep people from abandoning it in droves, unfortunately, and until Teamspeak et al sort that out it isn't changing.
EDIT: Maybe I completely forgot how Teamspeak works. It seems like there is a global friends list, but I can't remember that it was a thing back in the day (10+ years ago).
The friends list is inconsequential. It's for sending private messages to people you already know and met from a Discord server. Long running group chats are an aberration, people just start up micro-discords instead.
And that is what Discord alternatives will have to solve - the ease of setting up a new Discord "server" by any old random user is hard to beat in terms of convenience. Matrix is the only real alternative on that front.
However, if you have an established community and have at least a little hosting knowledge among the staff, the moat is shallow to nonexistent, and it's just a matter of how much of a pain in the neck Discord decides to be.
The discord servers my friends and I use are just for shit posting and using voice among like 10 of us. If it becomes annoying we can move to the next thing. We're all millennials. We can run whatever server if needed it's not a big deal.
If you meet somebody mid match in a game like Valorant or Overwatch, it's simple to give them a username and they can add you and you then choose to group voice call vs inviting them to a private server, especially before you know them very well.
Teamspeak, as far as I know, doesn't have a way to solve this.
I'll admit that this use case didn't really occur to me, because the signal to noise ratio is so damn bad in matchmade games these days. If I want to play a game on voice call with strangers, I go to the community space first and then organize a team there.
That being said, after thinking about it, I actually have done what you're talking about before - just not on Discord. When I find someone, I simply add them on Steam, PSN, or whichever account the game uses.
There's also really nothing to a community beyond its mods, its users, and maybe some bots. Reddit creates a record of EVERYTHING and in many ways those years of discussion are the sub more than the current users or mods alone. Discord is nothing like that, if you could get everyone on the same page a Discord clone would work just as well, and relatively seamlessly.
tl;dr Discord has a moat, but it's not very wide or deep.
That's not true. Plenty of Discord communities have dozens of channels with long-running post histories, pictures, FAQ content, beginner guides; server roles and titles, permissions, custom emoji, stickers, etc.
Migrating all of that stuff to a new service (which may not even support it all) would be a huge pain.
I think you're right about Discord.
Reddit never faced the same pressure. The API thing pissed off mobile users, but all of the Reddit alternatives, such as Voat, were hyper polarized politically and were not good destinations for most people. They collected the "worst parts of Reddit" rather than providing a place for the majority of users.
The same thing happened to Twitter. Bluesky is very polarized and constantly gets poked fun at because of it, even by left-leaning folks. Threads was a much more neutral and inviting space that doesn't force you to wear a particular set of politics on your sleeves.
Discord has a few (small) alternatives that aren't alienating or off-putting.
Reddit's api migration did not put a dent in their MAUs but it sent 250k users to the alternative platforms like Lemmy and pumped a ton of donation money and contributors into the ecosystem. Now Lemmy has maintained 50k MAUs for over 2 years and has gotten 100 times better as a product. So reddits API change grew its competition from a hobby project to an actual competitor.
I expect discords change will do the same.
I don't think Discord is going anywhere, but people always vastly overestimate the power of market leaders. Reddit didn't see a big change in MAUs but it did see massive declines in the amount of time spent on reddit per user and posting activity.
I could see Discord going the same way - declining interest from users while they keep it around for the few 'essential' communities/friends on the platform, but very little tethering them to it if a disruptive competitor comes along.
We get these articles everytime there is some controversy. We had articles about how Gitlab was crushed under the load of new users after Github was acquired by Microsoft, and yet Gitlab is further from being the market leader today than it was back then.
It's clear age verification is coming from a changing legal environment around the world. Discord may be preemptively moving, but any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content.
"Any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content."
Maybe but I just don't see this as a certain thing. The US may implement nation-wide age verification laws someday but it is a long ways from happening. Other discord-like software may be self-hosted by individuals, making enforcing age-verification difficult. There's nothing wrong with this. People would rather have a private place to chat as opposed to a place where your data will be observed by a big company and potentially sold or given to a hostile goverment.
Most of this has to do with GitHub relying on a benefactor with a de facto monopoly in order to subsidize their massive business failures and loses. I'm sure if GitLab never IPO'd and was in bed with a trillion dollar corporation the situation might be more comparable.
All you're doing is making a profound argument why GitHub should be divested from Github, WhatsApp from Meta, or AWS from Amazon. It's clear many tech companies would not be in dominant positions without the massive advantage of their respective monopolies.
These companies need to be broken up radically and it needs to happen soon.
>the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown
Digg, MySpace and Vine?
Old world decay model, new world is twitter or facebook. Mass user exodus to a point a platform is a genuine wasteland, this means bots get deployed to prop up metrics. The money doesn't come from users, but the beleif of access to them via a platform. As long as there is a appearance of consumer data/attention you can access, then everything is fine re: revenue. Dunno how discord will fudge things though, since discord doesn't quite (historically) fit traditional social media models so maybe you'll be right in the end.
> Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown
There can be 2 things.
It can be fantastic for small players to get an influx of customers from a major player thats listing. Its good and healthy for the market.
That doesnt mean that Salesforce/Microsoft/Reddit/Discord is actually going anywhere. But these are still great numbers for the little guys.
>I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat
That would be great. I remember cryptocat was pretty good. But IIRC it died.
> Look at Reddit after the API switch up
Market cap is half compared to all time high, and having old organic data that LLMs want to be trained on is saving them right now.
It's frustrating how often 'journalism' assumes good faith and uses the language and arguments of corporations.
Rather than "fleeing age-verification" myself, and I largely assume others, are "fleeing surveillance state data harvesting".
Yeah, I'm 39 years old, I don't need to flee age verification. I just am not interested in having an account on a chat service that would do this. I don't want my driver's license and biometric information to be stored in servers who-knows-where in a country with weak privacy regulations.
This is an extremely rational position.
Journalism isn't twitter. A reporter just reports the facts, and nobody wants them to do more than that. If they started inserting their assumptions or making conclusions from the facts, that is no longer "news" that is an opinion piece.
Odd reactionary take considering the headline is talking about me, a player fleeing, and claiming my reason is something different from my own.
Which would seem to be a failure to "report the facts".
Write some random stuff some user on reddit thinks, people call it bad journalism. Don't write it, people call it bad journalism. Poor journals can't win.
Unsure why you are taking this stand on this issue, but calling the company in question "some user on <SOCIAL_MEDIA>" is absurd: https://kotaku.com/discord-palantir-peter-thiel-persona-age-...
Everyone involved knows why there is a backlash to this new policy so I advocate to stop obfuscating it.
It's well proven that Discord age verification does not harvest any data.
You're wrong.
Wow Teamspeak is still around and looks like they are succeeding again. Teamspeak and Ventrilo used to be such a mainstay of the video game community. I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. It does look like Teamspeak has taken a note out of discord and slacks notebook and have gotten more advanced chat room options now.
Many reasons:
1. To DeDoS a Teamspeak server, it's enough to DeDoS a single server. You may not even need to do that, it may be enough to be such a nuisance that their host kicks them out. To DeDoS a Discord server, it's necessary to DeDoS the entirety of Discord, which is much, much harder, and also much more likely to put you in legal hot water. Discord is the Cloudflare of gaming.
2. Discord servers aren't real servers, they're tenants in an application, effectively "rows in an SQL table", not standalone containers requiring their own tech stack. This means they can be offered for free. You also can't abuse them for E.G. crypto mining, like you can with a VPS where a Teamspeak server can be hosted. Free increases adoption, which makes people a lot more likely to pay for extra features. It's the standard "the rich subsidize the poor" model, common to so many web applications.
3. No technical expertise necessary to set a server up. Bus factor is basically equal to infinity.
4. One service, one account, one interface, many servers, many groups, many people. There's no weird workspace switching and per-workspace DMs like in Slack (not sure how TS does this). If you log in once on a new device, all your server memberships are there, and everything just works. You may be in dozens of servers, and they're all behind the same single login.
Those 4 features are table stakes now, like it or not. If you want to be a real, long-term Discord competitor and attract real users, you have to figure out how to get those 4.
Ooh, this is fun.
1. Yes and no. Discord "guilds" have their metadata and chat messages managed by a single shard somewhere in GCP. However, voice is managed using servers hosted by ID3, a much smaller provider. If you find the right websocket server you can repeatedly take down voice instances still.
2. Emojis are just lines in a database, and yet they still charge a fee for that. The reason why it's free is because that's the selling point. Also, that sharded "guild" is actually part of a sharded container that still has a cost to run, and manages the write-lock for the data in that "gimme".
The whole tangent here feels weird since I _choose_ what to run on "my" VPS. Noisy neighbors have been a solved problem for decades.
3. This is actually the killer feature, centralization sells because of network effects. You're only on Discord because your friends are on Discord.
4. Teamspeak has this with myTeamspeak now. You've been able to have multiple sessions for a long time, but now it's in a nicer interface.
It's DDoS. No e.
Isn’t solving cost effective voice hosting the only issue here? I’d compete if I could affordably scale rooms.
The main issue is that Discord is a fantastic tool that does everything right except the stuff people really don't care about. (Even if a vocal minority says they do).
If you want to run a community with SUPER easy access to everything from live video chats with a hundred members to forums, excellent access controls, integrations for absolutely anything especially if you also use bots from the marketplace, Discord is there and it's free, and it always works.
It's really rough to compete with that.
Were people really ddos'ing teamspeak servers? What does anyone gain from that?
You saw this in WoW and other MMOs. People would DDoS a rival during their raid night to cause havok, or if they were going for a world/guild record. People would also DDoS the server if a streamer was on that server. People are weird.
Wow, that's crazy, I had no idea people took WoW to those lengths.
Absolutely in competitive games, or even in MMOs against rival guilds.
> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to.
Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.
In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.
Yeah and even some of us IT people weren't enough into video games to care about hosting voice chat. Like I ran the middle school Minecraft server but not a Teamspeak for it.
As that IT person I’ve set up a few alternatives over the years (and they’re still up, certs and all). Matrix stuck with a decent group of people, but the group I hung out on Discord with refused to move. I definitively bailed after the ID news but the guys didn’t follow (to Matrix, or Jitsi, or TeamSpeak, or Mumble).
I’m kind of salty about making a fruitless effort I’ll admit, but I feel like unless there’s an effortless, perfect, free program that replicates the (voice) channel functionality and screen sharing features people are not going to leave Discord. Even if it does treat its users like shit.
I miss those guys but I refuse to take part in that abuse, and I’m angry about it.
Its just works to get your groups of friends together - up until the point the damned thing starts to asking them "papers please!" a they start leaving.
It looks like Teamspeak covers the "group of friends who voice chat each other" use case (Discord DM groups) but not the "IRC replacement" use case (Discord servers). As far as I can tell, the licensing for Teamspeak 6 (the version that tries to be competitive with Discord) is set up such that anybody who joins the server (as opposed to anybody actively using it) uses up a slot, so the licensing fees for larger servers would be cost prohibitive. Additionally, the text chat functionality is way worse than on Discord. There's no way to just have a chat channel, you can only view and use the text chat when you're in a voice call in a voice channel.
> There's no way to just have a chat channel, you can only view and use the text chat when you're in a voice call in a voice channel.
Yes there is
Server admin can set the voice privileges on a channel basis, limiting effectively channels to text only.
I think the main reason was Discord basically doumping free server hosting with VC money to eliminate competition.
Now that money has finally run out, it looks like things are reverting back to normal.
Has the money run out? I still have yet to spend a single dollar on discord.
Reportedly they are plan in IPO & the latest identity verification crap they are pushing seems to be related.
So yes, it looks like the money has run out and rather than pushing for direct monetization they try to turn to shadier stuff - get as much personal data as possible to either make the company look juicier for either an IPO or an acquisition.
Age verification doesn't seem like money raising at all. More pressure from regulaters.
Because a Discord server is very easy and free to set up, and has nice features like screensharing that weren't commonly handled well at the time. Before that, we used Skype or AIM or iChat if we even wanted audio at all; Teamspeak was more for "serious gamers."
Younger people don't know how to operate a computer anymore. Even back then a lot of teens had no problem hosting Minecraft or TeamSpeak servers but we regressed so much thanks to locked-down computing like smartphones that this knowledge is now lost and teens will pick Discord because you can just click yourself "a server" in a minute (doesn't help that "server" is false advertising and Discord knows it themselves because they don't call them "server" in their developer docs).
Discord offered more features. Voice chat was part of the initial sell for the platform, but these days most users don't even use the voice functionality and instead use it for long-running hypermedia chats with retained history.
I spun up a self hosted teamspeak server last weekend for my friends and I using their docker container.
Its going to take some getting used to. Seems weird that they have a hard cap on 10MB file upload sizes if its self hosted. Also the screen sharing wasn't working quite right
Otherwise, voice and text chat is there
10MB seems like a vestige of old code. What used to be reasonable no longer is. Cameras have too many pixels now for that low of a limit.
It would be a bit of work, but if their repo is solid you could just modify that hardcoded value and build the docker image locally.
Edit: Just realized they may not have a public repo. If that's the case, then sounds like a way to try to get people to pay for the service.
Doesn’t text chat still have a weird thing where you can’t see the texts unless you’re in a voice call in that channel?
No
Wonder why the 10MB limit isn't a setting?
Maybe a good opportunity to reduce screensharing (unless pure video content). A lot of people are sharing webpages through video. That's subpar (except for the shared pointer)
The answer to 'I want to share my screen' is not 'have you considered not wanting to do that?
Maybe I said something stupid but regularly I see people needing a lot of resources just to discuss a bit if text. It's kinda sad.
Discord has the momentum but overall I just find the experience awful. It would be nice to use anything else at this point. Joining a server with greater than a handful of people is just a nightmare and practically unusable.
Isn't this usually cause the admin went overboard? Like a server of 10 people has 30 channels, one of which is a lobby you have to clear first, and 10 bots telling you that you leveled up or whatever.
The hardest part about joining a new-but-small-but-not-that-small Discord server is convincing the server admin to turn off the stupid "click this button to spam the channel with a gigantic dancing emoji to welcome newcomers".
It kills any ongoing conversation, and imo, convinces newcomers that people don't so much chat in that Discord as they just press shiny buttons.
"That's why we have a separate #welcome channel"
I think it depends on how the servers are setup. Chat channels with 1000s people participating are typically worthless as the signal to noise ratio ruins it.
But when the majority of conversations are happening in forums/thread style channels then it works well. You can still have some more niche chat style sections where typically 2-10 people participate
Chat channels are also fine for lots of people when its not about conversations but more just about sharing things. Like a "Share what you build" or "memes" channel work well as tons of messages are fine as you only care to see a few anyway.
Also limited size voice channels can be good aswell 5 people max.
My thought is that it just doesn't make sense to have a product which serves both communities of 1,000+ people and a small group of <50 friends. You end up making far too many compromises.
I used to just engage with my friends. Now it feels like a really noisy reddit. Sure I could leave all of them, but that is kind of my point. There is an identity crises for the product.
Did the "forum channels" feature not help handle the huge server usecase? I've only barely been in one.
Forum channels are poor replacements for actual forums
Your experience is largely dictated by the person that set up the server. If you want, make your own and keep it small.
What I am saying is that discord as a product has an inferior experience for small communities because it tries to cater all. It's just not a fun product to use.
I'm not sure I understand but I hope you can find an alternative that fits your needs.
> Like so many things from history, this is all Britain’s fault. The farcical UK Online Safety Act is forcing all social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to require age verification checks before its citizens can access them
I guess no other US state or country has demanded age checks, great journalism from kotaku...
The things in politics have a habit of spreading outside of country's borders, as politicians in other countries just go "huh, that's nice kind of oppresion, and their population didn't totally revolt so maybe we should try"
Also technically US is fault of UK too
Lots of people support these age checks. The many tech companies delivering too much filth to young audiences with no easy controls shot themselves in the foot on this one.
Sometimes manufacturing consent is a little easier than other times.
No. It's a huge manipulation.
1. If all platforms introduce age verification by law, then no platform gets unfair advantage by not having them.
2. Age verification obviously allows them to gather even more data about users.
3. Age verification creates the illusion of there being "a safe internet" which is extremely important to parents who give their children iPads so that the kids shut up and fuck off, while the spread of brainrot can continue undisturbed.
The first US ones predate the UK one, tho.
Maybe kotakus editors need age checks...
That same Peter Thiel-tied verification that Discord is using, Persona, is also used by many other services right? Anyone know who else uses them so I can avoid them?
Looks like VRChat is using persona as well - multiple mentions here:
https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/Age_Verification
https://hello.vrchat.com/blog/age-verification
And quite a few discussions about the controversy on Reddit, including comparisons with the Discord Persona debacle:
https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r0jj7g/with_todays...
https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r511h4/id_verifica...
This can be seen possibly as even more invasive in this case, given the larger social aspects of VRChat as well as apparently this being done for more than a year by this point.
I did a quick search and it looks like A LOT of business use it (not 100% on the source,but it gives an idea ). Also looking at Persona's website, that includes OpenAI: `OpenAI uses Persona to screen millions of users each month with zero friction` [1] https://data.landbase.com/technology/persona/ [2] https://withpersona.com/customers/openai [3] https://withpersona.com/customers
A well known path....bluesky saw it with twitter. Reddit with digg. /. with digg are the ones that come to mind. Interesting to see if this works out better.
Fark, somehow still holding strong.
A name I hear about once a year and still somehow surprised. I was a totalfarker back in like ~2000. was a great place.
Florida is still a state.
Matrix is the only solution ready with all the features necessary. My community made the leap months ago and its been worth it.
All features? Where are the custom emojis?
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/issues/1...
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195...
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/254...
It's certainly on people's radar.
Those aren’t out yet, you’ve highlighted the one feature request which I hear repeatedly from our users too. That’s good news, it helps me to see we really are ready for prime time because there are so few concerns left. iPhone didn’t have copy and paste for years and still they were top adopted phone despite it because of all the other value.
It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?
It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?
Yes, the self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers. Teamspeak can be hosted for free but has client restrictions that can be overcome with a license.
On a related note, Mumble self hosted servers can also register with a centralized server if the server owner wishes to have it listed for public use. This is optional as the server owner can also just advertise the connection details on a website and/or in Discord. Mumble [1] has no concept of a license to operate however. There is a light-weight version of the Mumble server called uMurmur that can run on a Linux router or RasPi but the channel configuration is statically defined ahead of time on uMurmur. The full blown version is just called Murmur and by default uses sqlite but it can also use a database like MySQL or MariaDB for storing persistent data like user registrations, channels, bans, and server configuration. .
https://www.mumble.info/
Mumble would be my bigger recommendation for a truly open source Discord alternative, though I'm personally more invested in XMPP as an alternative.
Mumble is fantastic for voice chat. Its text features are very basic, though, so people fleeing Discord would probably want something additional to handle that. Maybe Matrix.
A single location is a good selling point. Being able to jump into a voice chat, and still post things in a shared text chat is a good feature. Mumble should work a bit on that.
> Mumble should work a bit on that.
Mumble is a labor of love, not a commercial product. I expect they would appreciate your help.
Since I don't know stream audio programming, C++ or gUI programming but am well versed on the shortcomings of mumble vs discord, perhaps I can bust out the llm.
> self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers
I doubt license authorization and an entry in a list are overwhelming their servers.
Yup. It would be the centralized servers getting overwhelmed with many more voice channels if they did not anticipate the growth demand. I was just explaining how the self hosted servers tie into their centralized systems in that they are decentralized but still phone home.
It's decentralized because you can run a server yourself, but they also offer hosting services.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221022162930if_/https://ventur...
""If you think Skype and Teamspeak had a baby and it hand all sorts of super powers that is parents didn't have," Citron said. "What was basically a skunkworks project appears to be the most promising product we've built."
For much of this year, the company has been working on Discord. The networking infrastructure is built in Erlang, a technology that Ericsson created in the 1980s for telecommunications. The system is spread across nine data centers around the world. The company has done tests to make sure that the latency is good.
Resmini also noted that esports competitors - or professional gamers who play games for money prizes - were worried about security. With Skype, it's easy to get somebody else's personal internet protocol (IP) address because the communication happens peer-to-peer. Citron said that Discord works through server infrastructure, so it's impossible for anyone to obtain another player's IP address."
Perhaps the peers cannot obtain each others' IP addresses but the person running the Discord server has all the peers' IP addresses in addition to their payment details
There are few if any meaningful limits on how this data can be used, how long it can be retained or where it can be transferred.^1
Apparently this centralised architecture does not matter to Discord users until something like "age verification" comes along
1. The legal compliance exception obviously allows for "age verification"
Example of Discord privacy policy pre-"age verification":
https://web.archive.org/web/20200504172025/https://discordap...
What's actually happening? From the commentary here on HN I thought everyone was going to have to upload an ID or something. I use a Discord server to chat with some old high school friends, and wasn't wanting to upload my ID to them. But this update[0] from Discord says they're not requiring everyone to, and that "the vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age." So I'm assuming I won't have to, after all. Do we know who will, when, or why?
[0] https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...
They have a ML model based on shrug emoji that decides if you’re in the automatically approved bucket, the face verification bucket or the ID verification bucket. If face verification fails or you’re in the high risk bucket you’ll need to send them ID to access adult content, i.e. any channels manually set to nsfw, anything their classifier deems nsfw and anything in servers deemed nsfw. Discord would like to imply that most users are in the automatically verified bucket and only like porn is flagged nsfw, but it’s entirely in their control to tighten these screws when they reckon that the controversy is over (and they’ve already been trialling more mandatory ID verification on UK users, before starting the global rollout)
My guess would be that for most people they already have a pretty good idea if you are an adult. Like my account was created years and years ago not long after it was released so unless I was under 8 when I did so the odds are pretty good I am at least 18. But to further my guess of why they are not bugging you is because they are not YET bugging you. By that I mean then want to make it seem like they only want to "save the children". That, in a lot of cases they basically already know you must be over 18. But in my opinion that is only to lessen the blow and not annoy everyone at once. Many escape ID requirements and continue to use the app and if all goes well not enough people push back or quit and a high enough number of people continue to use the app that it makes other people either use the user hostile app or not easily connect and communicate to a large community. But also in my opinion once people calm down and move on they will continue to push more demand for user ID. It will be a slow push but knowing who you are is too valuable. There will be excuses as to why they need it and eventually there will be a reason why you a user of over a decade will also need to prove you are who you are.
One positive note I am actually old man wrinkly balls. I have been there for the rise and fall of many sites. Maybe it will happen for discord as well only time will tell. Cheers
Age verification is required for age limited servers and channels. The vast majority are not age limited and will remain available without verification. As has happened in the past, more of the remaining channels will turn off age limiting as it becomes more invasive, in favor of moderation and tweaked community standards (no more porn in #shitpost). I'd expect the remaining bits will leave, with most of the members not wanting it to be linked to their real id.
Australia recently locked under 16s out of social media and it seems like the social media companies used heuristics to determine if accounts were owned by under 16s... so I assume Discord will do something similar.
I'm in Australia and have not been prompted to verify my identity for any service (I'm assuming that one of the heuristics is average age of "friends" but I have no idea).
This new ID policy is to get into servers tagged NSFW, like OF creator communities. The new policy says by default, you can't get into those servers without uploading IDs.
So, for the vast majority of servers, like your high school friends, local Pokemon Go servers, work alumni, etc, they'll still work fine without an ID upload.
Unless the AI based on shrug emoji decides these channels contain NSFW content
Discord has an age estimating tool that seems to work well.
So it's likely that almost nothing will change and this is a huge nothing burger.
Besides, if underage mode just means I can't see nsfw marked channels that's... Entirely fine.
I don't think any of us are going to be able to get enough of a sample size to know if their age estimation tool is working well or not. You can know the age of your real life friends, but beyond that it's just going to be self report.
Seems like a missed opportunity to move away from proprietary solutions entirely. Teamspeak is self-hostable, but it is proprietary, supports limited numbers of users on the free tier, and presumably send telemetry to the proprietors even when "self-hosted."
Going by how little it is spoken on here I assume it is a localized phenomena, but the word of Fluxer.app is spreading among my spaces and it is open source and selfhostable and federation in the future.
The official instance and full time dev is funded by a cheaper discord nitro like premium sub.
It very recently became public and since that makes people think it is vibe coded I recommend reading the making off blog post https://blog.fluxer.app/
It isn't yet 1:1 with discord, no phone app yet, but it is by far the most discord like discord alternative (closer than Stoat), but open source and selfhostable.
One downside to Fluxer is its also 100% fully restricted in Mississippi. https://fluxer.app/help/regional-restrictions
To make people move away from something proprietary, there needs to be a better free alternative. "Better" means "I don't need to know what a VPS is"
Is there really no open source version of these that people can selfhost?
There are multiple free providers for AI moderation models (openai and xai), you can get a vps with 1tb of storage for pretty cheap, just setup an image optimizer/downscaler with Go or Rust so its fast and you can handle probably 10,000 people pretty easily.
I guess the main reason that discord is good is because of the centralization as it allows all your servers in one place and super easy link sharing and signup.
Decentralized social and chat should be present in this new era, clawbot showed that people are willing to spinup and selfhost useful things even if they are not overly technical. I think we could see a new wave of similar things happening for things like social media and chat.
I think you overestimate the capability and willingness of the average Discord user to go through that. Majority are not technical, they have no idea what self hosting is, what a VPS is, etc.
Also self hosting creates an issue of balkanization. Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. The closest we can probably get is the Mastodon model.
You underestimate how much people hate age verification. Literally everyone I know on Bluesky that uses Discord has been talking about wanting an alternative. I'm slowly getting people on Fluxer, which is the closest thing to a Discord clone out there.
I agree that most Discord users do not want to self host. However,
> Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort.
This is already the model. Everyone has "their own" discord server, and you have to connect to it manually via an invite. That would actually be the exact same usage.
You can connect directly to other discord users with no mutual servers. You can make chats and calls with users with no mutual servers. You can make group chats and group calls with users with no mutual servers. You can screenshare in these calls, stream to the group, etc, all just by being Discord users. No need for a server.
All of that is perfectly reasonable to support with a federated model.
Those are all great points. I totally agree.
Clicking a link (discord's approach) is very different from downloading a different piece of software and setting up a new account for each gaming group
Totally. I meant if people were all using the same replacement software, that joining groups' different "servers" would be the same experience.
Absolutely agree that if everything splintered, it would be a mess.
Normally I'm a lurker here but I gotta put in a good word for this project: https://sharkord.com/
It's still super early in development but it's already been amazing to have a self-hosted 3rd space for my friends and myself. The "living room not a convention center" focus is exactly what I find missing in most of the other options.
There is Mumble for a free software option similar to TS. Works well in my experience. I've hosted a server for friends for around a decade now I think.
yeah i remember using mumble over 10 years ago for game chats, but you cannot compare the UX and design of something like mumble to discord for the average person.
Jitsi does usable conferencing and Matrix is mainly text but has some support for calling or integration with Jitsi.
IMHO the bits all exists, it just needs to be all integrated in to a distribution that people can easily setup.
These days Matrix does even have native support for conferences
some of OSS if you search for it:
* https://github.com/jkleincodes/echo
* https://github.com/ericellb/React-Discord-Clone (not maintained anymore)
* https://github.com/SashenJayathilaka/Discord-Clone
My worry is that discord will require the ID of everybody at some point or another.
Now that they are going public I think every real user will have to identify themselves. The way they do it I think will be a staggered rollout of requests. So they use the guise of this algorithm to state that no everybody will need to verify but when it’s your turn to provide your ID they just wait for the next instance and lock the account to teen level until you do it. Given they say they will do ongoing monitoring to place an age group, this I don’t think is far fetched and increases the value of the profiles for the shareholders.
This would make a mass exodus nearly impossible too as too many people already sit in the side of it’s not a problem if it does not effect me. The result is it will effect just not enough people to cause such a large exodus.
I don’t think this spect is talked about enough. Companies that enshitify don’t do it all at once. It’s bite by bite.
Matrix is looking better by the minute. Anything from other people's experience? I haven't used it at all.
I'm already using Matrix for a number of open source communities. It's fine as far as it goes.
However, from a community space point of view, it seems to be more similar to IRC than Discord. Much like an IRC server, there's a public list of channels and you join them individually. There is voice and video chat, but as far as I can tell it's only person to person without any voice and video conferencing like Discord has, and I've never actually tried them to see how well they work.
Some organizations, such as Mozilla, run their own Matrix server in order to corral the community into one place, but more often than not I see communities creating a single channel on the primary matrix.org server, and "expand" by adding more channels, IRC style.
As an IRC replacement, I think it's perfect. But if you are expecting something more similar to Discord in terms of functionality, you'll likely be looking elsewhere. Stoat is what I see most frequently touted, but I can't speak to it personally.
Absolutely stupid: what makes them think teamspeak will not implement the same age verification in future. Running from one platform to the other will never be justified
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turns out convenience loses when you start asking for face scans.
Well teamspeak is voice chat only, so I don't see how it's a rival for gaming communities that do ongoing text chats and voice only for group play...
Not anymore. There is text chat and screen sharing for years now
Oh? They've grown up. I haven't used it in a million years...
I haven't gamed for years, but decades ago TS was the solution for team play.
Such fond memories of playing in a team of people scattered all over the world.
Teamspeak is using matrix under the hood
> It’s a less complicated piece of software, but that also means it doesn’t constantly fucking pester you about whatever the bloody hell Nitro is.
It's not "but", it's "and". Complexity in an app is not a good thing.
They are not fleeing age verification, but surveillance capitalism of the evil kind.
> surveillance capitalism of the evil kind.
Is...is there another kind?
Surveillance capitalism just to sell you more stuff is the less evil kind.
i still don't understand how discord works with the infamous "claim your account" bs. Every time i use discord, it won't let me use my username, wtf?
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The histrionics around Discord's completely optional age verification mechanism are really entertaining to read.