Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face
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The restrictions don't seem very limiting. Why would I ever do this?
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Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every joint possible.
That's 100% what it is. It also sincerely makes me not want to use Discord, because even if this is what governments want, it's extremely bad for users.
That's fine if that's your personal response. This still feels like a misdirected and ultimately useless response though.
This is a government-created problem. Are we expecting widespread boycotts of Discord to change the government's mind? Of course not.
If it's extremely bad for users, then users need to change their government. Yeah, yeah, I know the excuses for not doing that, they don't listen, we are all powerless, it is the way it is, yadda yadda. It's a lie. We are powerful, they want us feeling powerless so we can't challenge them. Fuck that, challenge them. Government exists to represent us, it can exist in perpetuity only with our active and ongoing consent and participation. If people in totalitarian countries can overthrow their governments, so can we, we don't have to do it overnight, we don't have to do it over this one single isolated issue, but we can at least start working against them, eroding the structures that support them. Fuck governments like these, figure out ways to twist their arm, make things more difficult for them, and eventually, if we keep at it, we'll get what we want. We hold the power here, not them. We decide what kind of society we want to live in. We need to stop abdicating our responsibilities as citizens and actively fight against this shit.
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Back to teamspeak or ventrilo
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That's fine if that's your personal response. This still feels like a misdirected and ultimately useless response though.
This is a government-created problem. Are we expecting widespread boycotts of Discord to change the government's mind? Of course not.
If it's extremely bad for users, then users need to change their government. Yeah, yeah, I know the excuses for not doing that, they don't listen, we are all powerless, it is the way it is, yadda yadda. It's a lie. We are powerful, they want us feeling powerless so we can't challenge them. Fuck that, challenge them. Government exists to represent us, it can exist in perpetuity only with our active and ongoing consent and participation. If people in totalitarian countries can overthrow their governments, so can we, we don't have to do it overnight, we don't have to do it over this one single isolated issue, but we can at least start working against them, eroding the structures that support them. Fuck governments like these, figure out ways to twist their arm, make things more difficult for them, and eventually, if we keep at it, we'll get what we want. We hold the power here, not them. We decide what kind of society we want to live in. We need to stop abdicating our responsibilities as citizens and actively fight against this shit.
By all means, challenge your government, but I'm not going to upload my ID to a database to use Discord. I can self host a thing that will accomplish the same goals without doing something that stupid.
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Doesn't look like this will affect everyone. From the release:
- Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting.
- Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.
- Message Request Inbox: Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users.
- Friend Request Alerts: People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know.
- Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers.
I don't use any of those.
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Sure.
But what are you replacing it with ?
I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it's pretty far from the same level of comfort.
Don't take that the wrong way though, I'm all for supporting open alternatives, I'm just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.
I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.
I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.
The thing is do you even need to replace it?
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Doesn't look like this will affect everyone. From the release:
- Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting.
- Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.
- Message Request Inbox: Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users.
- Friend Request Alerts: People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know.
- Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers.
I don't use any of those.
If the DM filters treat people with mutual, large, public servers as people you may know and does not filter those chats, most users will probably be like you and be largely unimpacted. If it treats people with those types of mutual servers as people you may not know and does filter those DMs, Discord is shooting themselves in the foot. 99% of my Discord usage is finding people to squad with in online games, and no one like staying in voice channels in the official game servers.
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Half of Lemmy, for some reason: grr we hate kids!!! Ban them from social media!!!!
Lemmy users when platforms start doing as they asked:
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The thing is do you even need to replace it?
Well yes, I would say it's very much an integral part of my social life.
I spend a lot of time with my gamer friends and it revolves around our discord servers.
We even have a discord servers dedicated to our role play sessions.
IMHO Discord is a bit more than just a voice chat app. It's also rooms with persistant chats. It's the ability to share media etc.
Also their noise reduction tech is top notch.
I knew when I got in that it would be another "Gmail" for me. It's great but you have to give a bit of your soul to it and I knew it would enshitify eventually.
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By all means, challenge your government, but I'm not going to upload my ID to a database to use Discord. I can self host a thing that will accomplish the same goals without doing something that stupid.
That's fine, and I hate Discord's general situation too, and I can't wait for a properly federated self-hostable open source alternative to take off. But it just seems a bit knee-jerk or straw that broke the camel's back to throw Discord under the bus specifically for this. To be clear, you don't actually need to provide ID, you can either continue using a limited account (it's barely limited at all in any serious way unless you're using Discord for NSFW stuff) or you can attempt to validate your face with a camera instead, which supposedly happens completely on-device. Either one is a totally reasonable alternative.
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I'll scan my ass.
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That's fine, and I hate Discord's general situation too, and I can't wait for a properly federated self-hostable open source alternative to take off. But it just seems a bit knee-jerk or straw that broke the camel's back to throw Discord under the bus specifically for this. To be clear, you don't actually need to provide ID, you can either continue using a limited account (it's barely limited at all in any serious way unless you're using Discord for NSFW stuff) or you can attempt to validate your face with a camera instead, which supposedly happens completely on-device. Either one is a totally reasonable alternative.
If you believe that photo validation lives entirely on your device, you might be surprised by how many times the tech industry straight up lies about this kind of stuff, but I don't trust that for a minute.
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Well yes, I would say it's very much an integral part of my social life.
I spend a lot of time with my gamer friends and it revolves around our discord servers.
We even have a discord servers dedicated to our role play sessions.
IMHO Discord is a bit more than just a voice chat app. It's also rooms with persistant chats. It's the ability to share media etc.
Also their noise reduction tech is top notch.
I knew when I got in that it would be another "Gmail" for me. It's great but you have to give a bit of your soul to it and I knew it would enshitify eventually.
Fair enough, while I use discord it is not as big a part of my social life as it is for you. I only have a few servers I am in, and even then I am only active part of the time and not a "super user" by any means.
That is the unfortunate thing about nearly every app/website/software that the enshittification happens sooner than we would like. I'm hoping that this is a bigger non-issue than what it seems based on the announcement, and even then, only time will tell.
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I'll scan my ass.
They'll have a "retina" scan of a brown-eyed cyclops.
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Sure.
But what are you replacing it with ?
I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it's pretty far from the same level of comfort.
Don't take that the wrong way though, I'm all for supporting open alternatives, I'm just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.
I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.
I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.
I did start a projects aiming to be a more decentralized/federated discord more akin to how IRC was back in the day. Time to revisit it, it seems.
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Fair enough, while I use discord it is not as big a part of my social life as it is for you. I only have a few servers I am in, and even then I am only active part of the time and not a "super user" by any means.
That is the unfortunate thing about nearly every app/website/software that the enshittification happens sooner than we would like. I'm hoping that this is a bigger non-issue than what it seems based on the announcement, and even then, only time will tell.
For context my country (France) is trying to pass a law that forbids the use of social networks to users younger than 15yo. So I suppose this move from Discord is partly due to that.
Now that being said I would hope the verification process will have much more scrutiny in Europe than it would in the US.
I would definitely not be happy about it but if they are not allowed to keep any of the verification data afterwards it could be "acceptable". But if I have the feeling they keep any data I will actively look into building a Stoat instance and try the even harder task of convincing my friends to switch over.
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Maybe this bullshit will be the spark needed to move us all off Discord. It's fine for voice-chat in games, don't get me wrong, but I HATE how its replaced forums/wikis for so many games/mods/etc. Searching disparate Discord servers is like looking for a nonferrous straw-colored needle in a haystack.
People are already looking to migrate to checks notes apps exactly like discord.
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I did start a projects aiming to be a more decentralized/federated discord more akin to how IRC was back in the day. Time to revisit it, it seems.
A federation based discord would be amazing !
But still that's a big challenge as voice chat will be costly to host.
Also out of curiosity do you aim for something that would connect through the fediverse ?
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Half of Lemmy, for some reason: grr we hate kids!!! Ban them from social media!!!!
Lemmy users when platforms start doing as they asked:
Almost like social sites arent monolithic, and different people can be outraged by different things!
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Wow I guess I get to finally dump Discord as my last proprietary chat app.
There are lots of self hosted alternatives like Mattermost, Mumble, and Matrix (decentralized).
There's also the new Freenet River demo: https://freenet.org/quickstart/
Maybe I'll make my own discord clone lol.
