Discord to Require ID or Face Scan Next Month for Full Access

Yep, hate when I want to follow some project and they link you to X, Reddit and Discord lol

I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn't. We've discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn't stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.

I'd be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that's a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I'm still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.

I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.

https://stoat.chat/download

Stoat looks promising as an open source alternative

There are layers to this.

Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.

As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.

As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago... Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help...

Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap. And... you should really try to avoid being dependent on said EOL software. Not always possible but... yeah.

And that isn't going to change. So they'll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable... like Matrix.

This is bad.

One problem will be that there are way too goddamn many software projects that use Discord as a shitty replacement for a blog and documentation, and they’re gonna be a pain to move to proper content platforms.

They absolutely have their users by the balls and I guarantee most people will continue to use the app after this, unfortunately.

Mass migration like that occurs (from my memory at least) when the newer alternative has much better functionality, performance, and ease of use compared to the status quo service and has a low barrier to entry (sign up is quick and straightforward). Do any of the decentralized Discord alternatives fit these criteria (honest question, not rhetorical)?

Revolt (suppose stoat) had problems with noise cancellation and people complained to me the UI wasn't intuitive.

On one hand yeah sure, people ditched Skype and MSN as soon as something better came along but that was a long time ago. Discord has sadly been the go-to for people for over a decade. Many users literally grew up with it. They are conditioned. A lot has to happen for them to leave their comfort zone. It‘s like asking someone to stop drinking coke or get McDonald‘s after they‘ve had it for their entire life.

I‘ll say this probably won‘t be the straw that breaks the camel‘s back but there is a silver lining. Discord will lose revenue over this and might change course quickly. This already rolled out in Canada and from what I‘ve heard many users cancelled Nitro at least. That‘s a start. Discord may also try to milk remaining users even harder as a result very soon and that will definitely put them into a down spiral.

Thing is, people move platforms extremely easily.

LOL WTF are you talking about? The only reason these platforms are able to abuse the absolute shit out of their users is because they refuse to leave. If there's anything we've learned in the last 3-4 years it's that users absolutely do not leave platforms no matter what (at least not in any significant numbers). Not Reddit, not Xitter, not Facebook or IG or Threads, not Windows, and not Discord.

I just went through an EXASPERATING experience installing and signing up for Stoat. It DOES NOT WORK. Don't recommend it.

irc

now there's some letters I haven't seen in quite some time.

/poke

I love IRC, just need some user friendly client recommendations if we want wider adoption by less tech savvy folks. Though I get the impression there are a good few IRC users who prefer how that filters out the "normies"

The main problem with IRC is that it isn't asynchron, like I can write something now and a friends only comes only tomorrow to check up on me messages.

I mean yes there are/were bouncers when I last used irc but if I remember correctly that's just not the same...

From my experience, the average joe will just do whatever is asked of them to continue using a service.

I just deleted my account. So there's one less.

Discord is going to be the age-verification-service for gaming, if they can get laws to follow fast enough.
They have the gaming community, they have chats/friends/DMs/VoIP.
If they release a dev toolkit that implements in-game chat, in-game VoIP, friends list and age verification... All while not being tied to steam? Imagine if they offered a system for in-game purchases and gifting purchases to friends (oh yeh https://gam3s.gg/news/discord-adds-in-app-purchases-for-in-game-items/ )
They are positioning themselves to offer a huge range of features, easy navigation of legal minefields, and no distribution-platform tie-in - while also offering out-of-game functionality of all of that (likely leading to player retention for games that leverage it properly).

They are positioning themselves to be a market-leader/industry-standard for game social networks. Everyone that has ever used discord is the product they are selling, and they are now releasing the features and tools for companies to leverage that.

Let me know what you come up with. I have a server of about 600 that I’m about to just shut down if this process is invasive or privacy disrespectful.

You think they'll let you access the account settings to delete the account without scanning your face first?

Care to make a remix of "7 Words You Can Never Say on TV" for blahaj? YOU might abhor all censorship, but your admins don't, and I'm inclined to agree with them.

Not to go all conspiracy-nut, but it feels like the net (at least the social spaces) is decaying, and it feels intentional / coordinated.

At this point, I don't think it's conspiracy-nut to say this. We have a group of tech oligarchs in the US who are openly collaborating with a fascist administration. It is a conspiracy and this kinda shit is the result.

Can you elaborate? My people and I are seriously considering migrating to matrix and I'd love to hear your concerns.

Drop anything that's not opensource and federated, except if you want to live the enshitification process over and over.

Matrix might be the closest to Discord. XMPP should also be considered.

I hope people using fake IDs to bypass it becomes common knowledge. Felony or not it's effective and the ID verifying part isn't.

Zulip is great for text based communities, but doesn't have built in voice or video.

I think a big thing that made it catch on was the ease of joining. Just send someone a link and boom, they're in the intended server. No immediate registration process, no buttons or commands to use, just a single click and entering a username. For all that I dislike Discord about, they did that part really well

There's always https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ if you need a lifelike photo

Werent people also using cheap richard nixon masks and getting by too?

Teamspeak needs to get off their ass and release the Teamspeak 5 server already

For now… maybe 6 months or a year and everyone might need it. That’s the way everything seems to be going.

Back to post order catalogues.

Yeah, same.
It's about the only megacorp thing I actively use (beside Steam, tho purely for downloading games), but I won't help normalise & support such bs (ofc I never bought Nitro bcs I'm not supporting bs monetisation).

Sadly prob none of the small communities I chat with every day will migrate to Revolt/Stout, so I'll just lose this part of my life/daily memes.

Matrix does have a bot API, but there is not even close to as robust an ecosystem of bots to choose from. Whatever you want is probably possible, but depending on your needs you may have to write it yourself.

I have many friends have that ported their bots from other platforms to Matrix, but these are technically capable people that created bots to begin with so YMMV.

Is Matrix a self-hosted alternative to Discord? I've been looking for one but the closest I can find is RocketChat, which is meant more for corporate environments. I'm going to be launching a radio station for Lemmy soon and I need a suitable solution for chat platform that I can integrate with my website (and eventually app).

Youtube age restricts pro-Palestine stuff and the government age restricts the Epstein files, so I can imagine this would target political or LGBTQ spaces, which are some of the worst spaces to require ID for. There's a local political server I'm in, which due to this I'm strongly urging to migrate to Matrix with Discord bridges, and am offering to help with.

I'd miss the history in my family server, but we'd get over it. If I can convince everyone else to move

Stoat, Formerly known as Revolt.

There's Mumble for voice, text and images. The server is self hosted and there is no chat history so it's private. It uses Opus so the audio quality is very good without using a lot of bandwidth. For gaming, it supports positional audio and a HUD that shows who is talking.

For the projects using Discord for support, they should move to a forum.

Grok needs to faces to turn into porn.

It's extremely easy, the Matrix ansible deploy project is very simple to use (with at least basic tech literacy), is very well documented and as far as I've seen in the past few years of using it do deploy and update my Matrix instance - it's also very robust. I haven't seen it fail a single time, which tends to be a problem with larger Docker/Ansible projects.

I'm paying 7$ a month for a cheap server on Hetzner, you also need a domain name, and the whole setup took like an hour.

"It appears you are Fred Flintstone."

GDPR should give you the right, but I'm not sure if they have a button you can click or if you need to email them about it

You can.

But only CIA can export them.

On serious note, here is a tool to do that.

Matrix is not a Discord alternative, it's a Slack alternative

Matrix, the central service, might work, but I'm not sure if it could handle the load well. Matrix, the federated service, hosted by many people, have performance issues with the "free" version. I could not test the paid/more optimized version, so I can't talk about that.

Anyway, the protocol and clients have their issues. All these stems from usage; I did not do a deep dive in the internal of it. But on the top of my head:

• joining a room will sometimes not send you keys to see older messages, despite being configured to do so. When it works, it's ok. When it doesn't, there's little to no recourse.
• sometimes (rarely) rooms have to be upgraded to use new versions/features. So far it happened once (to my knowledge). The issue is that "upgrade" means locking the existing room, creating a new one, inviting everyone in the new room, and putting a link to the old room as read only. Sure, the process is mostly automated… except the best way to start it is using dev commands on a client, and every user will have to accept the invite. Just hope you don't have too much rooms.
• Logging into a new device/client sometimes will works perfectly fine. Other times it will obstinately refuse to retrieve your room's keys from another existing, online, logged-in device. Despite the "confirmation" dialog, it won't work. You can manually export/import your keys from one device to another, but for large scale adoption? Not good. You can say goodbye to all previous messages if that happens.
• Interface is relatively barebone, and some features gets pushed quickly (like, throwing confettis), while other (like, proper room management, fine notification controls, etc.) are held back forever.
• Features are limited. It works very well as a chat, and they recently worked on a built-in video/audio call service, but that's it. A few "plugins" are supposed to work but are clunky as hell (they're basically iframes). Some features that people consider important (like stickers) are definitively an afterthought, and searching for a sticker is a pain (dicslaimer: I'm not using the central service/app, so that part might be specific to my instance)

With that said, nothing's actually a show stopper for small usage, and the heavily optimized server might handle itself well enough, as long as you're mainly concerned with having text rooms. But open instances handling hundreds of users might be a stretch… for now. Maybe this will cause more development into the Matrix/Element ecosystem.

I really want to love Matrix but man, it just feels janky. And this is from someone who likes IRC and XMPP. I can't put my finger on why Matrix just doesn't feel great, that's the most frustrating part. Might be solvable with a decent client. I don't like Element. Quaternion seems nice and simple but keeps crashing on me, and I don't think it handles voice