Discords about to lose a lot of users
Frankly it should be illegal.
Not just “never required.” Explicitly disallowed.
You’re right, but some governments are forcing it too.
It’s for everyone who wants to access adult content or get messages from people they might not know, according to their release.
And the “stone the gays” people are the ones who get to decide what is and isn’t adult content
Charlie kirk getting his neck exploded wasn’t considered adult content by discord when I tried it.
Who doesnt love getting spearphisted by all these random girls on discord that send friend requests without ever talking to you?!
Yeah, it’s the part of this that seems like a benefit. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t verify my age so I can’t get spammed by direct message.”
Bro leave all my discord girlfriends out of this
So, if I am not looking for adult content, and could not care less about getting PMs from people I don’t know, I don’t need to sub to this privacy nightmare?
Discord is still a privacy nightmare regardless, but at least they won’t require your ID by default.
That’s the way I read it
Which includes many of the wargaming, traditional art, and queer Discord servers my partner and I use. Never assume that when a bad actor says “adult content” they mean hardcore porn and snuff, they mean everything that doesn’t conform to their ideal christofascist ethnostate purity. And now they have a list of all the “dangerous” nonconformists while blocking everyone else from being exposed to “dangerous” ideas. This should chill people to the bone. Nobody should be okay with this anywhere, in any capacity, in any quantity, whatsoever.
Isn’t it only servers/channels marked as NSFW? If you don’t mark it as NSFW then it shouldn’t make any different to how it is now.
Also it just detects things it can read. Stick it in a file format discord doesn’t understand, or link to an external site.
I know Element sucks compared to Discord but with more users and potential funding interest from that user base growth, it can get a lot better and snowball to fast improvements. Blender was the butt of jokes until version 2.8. Like 15 years of being easily dismissed as major commercial production worthy. Element can get better. It’s the story of pretty much all the well regarded general consumer targeted open source software we use today
I feel like Matrix already hit the “elbow point” where it’s getting good fast. It’s very usable, I have ~10 contacts I regularly communicate with on Matrix.
Discord was always an overhyped crap.
Read: Discord is de-anonymizing all users.
Leeeave.
IPO is clearly closing in fast. Enshittification intensifies. The VC’s need to get their ROI out so they can move to the next grift. Apparently they’re also going to have “age inference model that runs in the background” (read: AI) that pops in and hits your with that age verification if it determines you’re actually not acting like a teen.
What I don’t understand is, have these people never heard of OAuth? I don’t know what it is, we have decades of this and people act like it doesn’t exist and don’t see the value in it. Even Lemmy, try to suggest why it might be valuable to separate identity versus community hosting, it’s like you have to walk people through it step by step.
There’s no way I’m giving platforms like this even more private information, but if governments put forth both publicly available OAuth servers along with the possibility of privately purchasable OAuth servers for this sort of thing, I would have no problem with it because then you have the possibility of vetting age authenticators like you would VPN providers, and the data would never leak into the social networks that abuse it. It’s like the regulators and the Internet has conveniently forgotten about OAuth and certificate authorities and has just said, “Yeah, let’s just have users leak their data all over for this” as if there were no better way. Maybe that’s the point, because I suspect organizations like Palantir will be quite happy at things like this.
They have and they don’t want it because it doesn’t give them access to everyone’s biometric data.
I could see this coming a long way off with Discord. It’s a honey trap. They swallow entire communities whole like some gargantuan leviathan of antiquity.
If governments
America has left the chat.
Honestly, we should start doing hardware-based age verification instead. Have the government run a simple yes/no service for individuals to be able to verify their age. The service simply asks if you’re over 18, and the government responds with a simple yes/no.
You verify your identity on the device once when setting it up, it asks the government if you’re over 18, and then your user account is verified as an adult when the “yes” response is returned. The only time it would need to be repeated is when someone turns 18, which would be something the user would need to manually prompt their device to retry. And notably, the government isn’t being pinged for every site you visit, they only got pinged for the initial device setup. So they don’t get access to any of your browsing data.
Now your phone can automatically send a “yes, I’m over 18” signal to any site or service that asks. And kids won’t be verified, meaning they won’t even be able to see the “are you over 18” prompts; they’ll simply be booted off the site (or in Discord’s case, restricted) as soon as it automatically asks their device for an age verification. No action is required on the user’s part, and the site/service didn’t need any invasive info about who you are. As far as an adult is concerned, they got direct access to the site without any kind of annoying “are you over 18” prompt. And as far as a child is concerned, they got automatically redirected right back to Google’s home page as soon as they clicked the porn link.
For shared devices (like computers) it could be handled on a per user basis. You verify your age on Windows/Linux/MacOS when creating the account, and then whenever you’re logged in, any site can simply ask if you’re over 18. Don’t want your kid to stumble across porn? Don’t verify their account. Now safeguarding kids on the internet is as simple as parents safeguarding their computer password and refusing to verify their child accounts.
It’s basically the best of all worlds:
- The government/private data brokers don’t get free access to your browsing data, like what would happen if every individual site asked the government for verification. This is our current reality, with data brokers hoovering up photos of IDs to feed to their data scientists.
- The adult user only needs to take action once to verify their age, and then after that the age gates are automatically opened. You don’t need to verify independently with each site, because your device handles that automatically during the initial handshake.
- Sites don’t get any additional personal info about you, except for the automatic pass/fail hardware response saying that you’re over 18. They don’t need to collect your info to pass to a third party verification system. They don’t need to ask the government, because that has already been done. And they don’t need to worry about things like GDPR compliance for collected info, because there is no additional collected info.
- Your browsing info isn’t shared with third parties, because the sites/services you use have no need to ask third parties for verification.
Of course it’ll never happen though, because it would restrict what kinds of info data brokers could collect and sell.
Are there any alternatives that have screensharing
OBS studio with whatever you’re using for video chat.
Anyone know if Stoat is a worthwhile alternative?
Its kinda buggy, but has 95% of discord functionality without the bullshit
But discord is buggy as fuck…
Cool. Once they get the verification emails going again I’ll check it out. Discord has been causing GPU crashes for me lately, hopefully stoat doesn’t.
I had problems with the desktop app fyi. But i run multiple accounts across many services so i recently started using Ferdium, which runs web apps in containerized sandboxes. Its very useful for managing multiple accounts on the same service. Ferdium also has the option to work completely locally with no account needed. It is very nice.
Sounds interesting, will check that out thanks!
I only have the app because a handful of people have asked to add me on it. I can’t recall the last time I actually opened it, let alone used it to talk to someone. Actually, I think the last time I used it was not for socializing, but to get support for a game mod. (For some reason, instead of having an FAQ page, the creator directed people to their Discord. I feel like that’s more annoying for the creator, answering the same questions individually over and over again instead of just having a webpage that users can read and find their own answers on. But, okay, if you wish.)
Totally not worth the privacy invasion. Brb gonna take two seconds and delete the app from my phone.
Edit: it is done
Matrix/Element is p good these days
