It says information used for age checks will not be stored by Discord or the verification company.
Bullshit. Every time some bitch-ass company says this, 4-5 years later they're like "we were hacked, someone took everyone's photo IDs!"
"And we were hacked because we don't care about security because there's zero accountability, see you at the next hack!"
It won’t… it really won’t. It will be on Donald’s DOGE server, run by Space X.
Sounds like a creepy way for discord to take millions of photos of children and feed them to an AI.
my time with discord was short. but the amount of pedophiles or people who supported pedophiles was so high I never went back.
my point is, this is on-brand for them.
I mean… there ARE privacy respecting options, but guess what they chose to do so.
Like, to protect the children UNPROTECT the children by uploading the face to a thirdparty company, so not even directly to discord. I didnt read their TOS or Privacy Policy, but i bet they save the images for “improving” their model and selling it to other AI / ML companies.
Oh look, I found the uninstall
Well. Anyone got a Discord alternative recommendation if I use it for text messaging? Would rather not upload my ID or face. I looked at Revolt, but they're apparently histed in the UK, which is mandating age verification.
IRC, matrix?
How? My PC doesn't have a camera. Also couldn't you just hold up a video of an older person
Pretty much any adult has a smartphone capable of running discord and with a camera. You only have to verify once on any device.
Also couldn't you just hold up a video of an older person
Based on my experience with similar things in the past, it activates the camera for a few seconds and you have to pan to give it a 3d image of your face.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for explaining how the system works. I'm not even taking any sides here.
I don't use a smartphone
I gathered, but (people like) you're like 0.0001% of the population. Discord doesn't care about your demographic.
I find absurd that many political groups including the Pirate Party moved to Discord. People who that claim to be fighting for the rights of user privacy then invite you to join Discord. Looks like they have been assimilated by big tech.
In all fairness, I think the FOSS community lacks good messaging tools so people end up using:
Signal has been gaining momentum for personal messaging but its unrelenting focus on privacy comes with some significant usability tradeoffs: (1) it doesn’t have a web-app that I can use from other computers that I don’t control (eg a work laptop), (2) it doesn’t sync well between my phone (primary) and desktop apps (secondary), (3) it doesn’t have a "bots" API like Telegram does so its creative uses are very limited, (4) third-party clients are officially disallowed.
Matrix might be a good fit for communities and businesses (which have very distinct moderation needs as in a business you can just report users to HR hehe), but in my experience it (or its flagship client Element) has lots of performance issues that makes it unpleasant to use. It also reminds me of XMPP with its different extensions and not knowing which clients supported which extensions; for example, go to https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ and click around to discover that many clients don’t support threads yet. All that being said, I think Matrix is still the one that’s best positioned to win the communities.
For businesses, I think the "open core" model is pretty competitive: you have Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip. In fairness I think they made significant strides so I’d consider them pretty successful in their own regard, despite Teams dominating the market by abusing Microsoft’s monopoly and Slack’s popularity + coupling with Salesforce. Now, the issue is that those three "open core" software aren’t very useful for communities because again, their moderation models are very different. Moderation is a ~non-issue in a business setting where you have HR and other functions to enforce the rules and penalise accordingly.
Long story short, what’s your FOSS alternative to Discord for communities? Revolt maybe?
Revolt relies on community self hosting last I looked at it, which means it would never be a "mass" solution.
Should Discord ever collapse (something I don't see in the near future), the free alternatives that I see benefitting would be XMPP and Matrix — though there's new contenders that could make name for themselves by then too.
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