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!"
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.
Where the fuck did you go on discord. Wth
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.
See I still remember when I didn't have to scan my face to get a machine to do something. And that's the way it will always be. For me.
I remember those days, as well!
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.
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?
Thank you for suggestions!
If your state requires ID verification, then most apps will probably comply. You can try Matrix with Element or just Signal with a group.
More more "off-the-line" alternatives you can look at Mumble and own your own server.
I tried out matrix recently, it's pretty good.
Fuck is wrong with Mumble?
that's audio chat. Discord I mostly use for text.
? Mumble is text chat also.
Oh, I suppose. My experience with mumble is 12 years out of date, but I recall that you generally plan to use Mumble in advance rather than contact somebody through mumble.
Same thing that’s wrong with Teamspeak and the other old standby, IRC:
A dated look and lack of shinies like inline GIFs scares the youngsters, the lack of history/persistence drops them and everyone else.
Ah, the many logging bots of IRC. Going to a website or getting daily sized text files DCC’d to you so you could search up if your problem had already been solved, or so someone said they think it was solved on one of those days…
history/persistance is the problem; I don't think anyone seriously cares about inline GIFs.
Well fuck me if history/persistence isn’t really a problem in an age when we were being warned the government was spying on everything.
You would be surprised
I don't see anything wrong in preferring a higher level of expression through GIFs or whatever.
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.
Guess I better get my picture of Elon ready /s
Or who is the CEO of Discord?
Tim Discord
Use Mastodon. You can use a server outside of your country. And even if your country attempts to find the operator, 10% of their global turnover of zero is still zero.
Mastodon isn’t really a replacement for discord though.
True. Matrix is more for that. Or possibly SimpleX.
Unfortunately there's not really anything that comes close to Discord.
Revolt is the closest, as it's open source and self-hostable but still lacks many of the features and isn't federated.
Element is almost identical.
Not even close.
I only used it once a while ago. What doesn't it do that Discord does that you also need?
~~SimpleX doesn't even have a desktop client.~~ IT DO! Discord is mostly used for gaming.
I do believe it does have a desktop client.
It is not there yet IMHO hard to advise it as singal replacement for now
I think this time next year tho....
good luck trying to get family and friends on that lol
Discord is not really intended for "friends and families", it's for communities.
It's not really for communities either, it's for locking communities into a corporate platform.
...so it's not for communities, it's for communities...?
A seatbelt does not stop you from breaking a law. Age verification does. The assumption is that you are lying and trying to break the law and you need to prove why you aren't. This has nothing to do with discord. Be mad at shit garbage UK and Australian regulators.
"Protect the kids!" - always the first thing they use.
I believe the phrase is:
"WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?"
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