Hear me out. Maybe, if you are a parent, its your duty to keep an eye on your child, and exert some control over the spaces and people they interact with?
Conservatives have been using the “think of the children line” to justify Draconian overeach for years. All while simultaneously doing everything in their power to take away programs that help children.
Let’s not act like the dems don’t do some of the same shit.
And no I’m not both sidesing this shit…just saying that the dems/left uses this reasoning a lot as well.
Minnesota recently used their tax on billionaires to expand education and provide free lunch to children so while the party isn’t perfect they are not at all comparable.
What makes them so similar is first pass the post it guarantees a two party system and the practice of gerrymandering creating safe seats. The worst Democrats are the ones with the safest seats. If you want positive change start there.
We’re talking about trying to pass legislation in the name of “think of the children” logic. KOSA is a fairly recent one that is from the dems.
Oh I know but anytime someone starts saying that they’re very alike I need to remind people that they really aren’t because these upcoming elections will be a fight for survival
Yes it’s an important fight for survival. Which is why the dems will nominate a bunch of corporatists who have been scorned by trump. Let the “good” money back into politics and “save the kids” my benevolent billionaires who are noble and just!!
This is why we need to push for progressives, it’s the only card we have left. Look at the last year if you want to see what not playing gets you.
Average age of Lemmy is too low to remember the democrats always managed to support the war on drugs. Save the children indeed. Think of the children is just the go-to bipartisan reasoning for bad legislation
Off the top of my head I can only think of Lieberman and honestly the ESRB was a reasonable compromise.
Tipper gore? KOSA
What’s tipper gore got to do with anything in the last thirty years? And kosa was bipartisan and died in the house.
30 years is a blink in time. You do realize laws don’t magically stop being potential issues after a few years right?
The Patriot Act which was bipartisan was passed almost 30 years ago now (25 years ago) now.
KOSA was introduced by a Dem.
You’re reaching to pull a both sides. Regardless republican platform positions harm children, Democratic ones feed them.
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You’re mostly correct, but Dems are not left in any political paradigm with the slightest awareness of the existence of non-American countries.
I’m not both sidesing, but both sides…
political parties aren’t real. Their only purpose is market segmentation.
It doesn’t matter which teams win in sports, billionaires own all the leagues.
Bugger off ml bot.
I, too, attack the source when I cannot refute the claim
Absofucking- lutely!
My 12 year old has zero unsupervised access to the internet. Zero. “But they’ll suffer sociallly!”
Will they? My son has tons of friends and they play sports and Nerf guns. And, he can read. A whole chapter book, on his own, without prompting.
Suffer socially, ask the “incels” who have recovered if the internet access they had as teens “helped them socially”.
My nephew plays lots of on online games. My sister checks in with me to make sure that he is both playing games that are appropriate for him, and with people who are appropriate to play with. We’ve setup a discord specifically for him and his friends, and the account he uses is actually my sister’s account, on her own device, so she has direct control over what communities he’s on in discord, who he talks to, and what content he is exposed to.
He is not allowed to play public lobby games with out her supervision, or a trusted “chaperone” (one of many IRL friend and family members) being in the lobby with him. This is as much about protecting him from harmful content, as it is about teaching him proper gaming etiquette. He was showing some toxic behaviors (greifing mainly) and I shut that down pretty quick.
My kids had full internet use with only porn and advertising blocking, except for “homework time”, as well as no restrictions on video games (except for fucking Roblox). They recently graduated high-school at the top of their class and continue doing great in university.
They grew up to be nice, well-rounded young men who make friends easily, aren’t assholes, aren’t glued to their cell phones (which they had since they were little), don’t mindlessly watch TV, can easily switch tasks and “buckle down” when they have to, and have a great work ethic. They grew up with the attitude that internet/cell phones are tools, not rewards or distractions. Once they hit high-school I found I no longer needed to monitor them (and it was starting to feel creepy and invasive). When they had to study they studied, on their own without prompting or timers.
I had no worries because I know how to read papers, and there was (and still is) ABSOLUTELY ZERO evidence that doing so would be harming, but in fact the reverse is true.
Kids grow up to be like their parents. Don’t want them to be assholes? Then don’t be an asshole. Want them to grow up with a reading habit? Then read for yourself. It’s that easy.
It’s interesting to see that their friends who had strict internet/gaming rules ended up turning into complete shitheads they no longer associate with.
Lot of pride here… Good for you?
Kids don’t always grow up to be their parents. I found such a broad statement to put such a sour taste in my mouth when I read it.
Feels pretty privledged, and like, good for you, but damn this statement … Is very broad, dare I say arrogant. Plenty of good kids come from shitty people and vice versa.
Anyway, enjoy your adult kids and thanks for sharing
I feel like it will be more common to heavily restrict the tech access of children as people who actually grew up using the internet become parents.
I also plan to restrict my (future hypothetical) children from internet access until 13 or so, depending on maturity. So your comment gives me some optimism in that regard.
As a parent: 100% agree
So are you for or against mass surveillance veiled as “child safety”?
Should be pretty evident from the comment.
I can’t help but see their comment as a joke. One can only hope
Americans- If you’re thinking “this isn’t so bad” please consider that all it takes is a teeny tiny, insignificant api added to the back end with absolutely no notice to users and suddenly the DHS has a database of dissenters, with cross-referenced IDs, photos of faces, chat history, link share history, raw uploaded photos, and approximate locations.
Say no to this. If you need a temporary alternative that’s quick to get going, create a signal group chat with your friends.
Forget DHS or other government agencies, these companies have been shown to be untrustworthy stewards of our data from regular hackers.
I get that discord is used to groom kids and there is a very real risk to allowing children to use it unsupervised, but that means kids devices are the ones that need to be locked down, not the rest of the world.
No argument there. Just feels particularly relevant right now if you know what I mean.
Pain fucking ass but deleted my Discord account. Sure wish had a decent alternative. I see a lot of suggestions just don’t which to try? Any that work great with Linux Debian?
Matrix
Do the people you talk with use Signal?
Only used it when used to game with my kids. So no one I know uses Signal.
Me and my people are moving to stoat. They’re having some growing pains right now, but I’m sure it’ll smooth out.
They’re already doing it to access the social security website.
If this is truly a concern, smash your phone, because all that is easily accessible.
I run graphene and have self control. You do you.
Good.
Discord is overused for help forums and wikis, which makes them extremely difficult to search and dependent upon third party software to be maintained. I hope this will force people away from that behaviour and back to good old fashioned messageboards that have been working just fine since at least the 80s
If you say your documentation is on discord we don’t run your software.
Absolute fucking clown shit
Wait 6 months, this will have changed nothing for Discord and they’ll carry on. Most likely in 2-3 years they’ll deploy the age verify for all users, not just users trying to access “adult” stuff.
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
Like this: spiritual advisory pastor to serve only 6 months after molesting a 12-year-old for years
Morris’s attorney said the molestation was her fault because she was “flirtatious.”
What the fuck.
“Children shouldn’t be so sexy if they didn’t want to be molested”
The real problem is, that the majority of users won’t change, and it’s the users that make Discord. There could be a much better alternative but if users are too lazy to change, it is worth nothing.
This is the case with Facebook messenger too. There are great alternatives, but it’s messenger that has the userbase
And compounding the issue is that there isn’t a better alternative to discord in terms of feature set and accessibility. Matrix is the closest, but its just… not there yet. There’s no option for people who care about privacy that isn’t a steep downgrade, and that just sucks.
As someone who barely used discord, what are these other features, is it not just a regular chat app?
For people that don’t like Discord, this change does probably nothing. I only start it when I need it. I do basic communication,I don’t buy anything and I don’t follow 18+ content.
For all purposes this change just decreases the likelihood of accidentally seeing pr0n.
It’s a sliding slope though. The initial reasoning is fair. But it will eventually spread to other features like (potentially) creating and owning servers or holding administrative and moderation roles
It’s the same with the chat control currently looking over EU. Nobody can say that they are against efforts to stop CSAM. The issue is that the efforts don’t limit themselves to fighting that. Likewise the age verification on Discord does not seem to be targeted or limited to certain content. They are leaving the door open to use it any way they want
As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.
I tried it recently, I used a temporary account for it. I think IRC is way more user-friendly: I wasn’t allowed access to anything , for no stated reason. So as far as I’m concerned, Discord is where information goes to die. Too bad some project hide all of theirs there.
Same here, been hating on Discord from day one since you are the product with free services.
The absolute shitload majority of users will not care about this enough to stop using the product
Kinda like reddit
kinda like gamers in general.
Cry, and cry, and cry, and stir up a big shit storm about whatever the latest greatest grievance is… Then continue to speak with their wallet by shoveling hundreds of dollars to the companies doing all the atrocious shit they hate and complain about.
I use it to stay connected to my local community including the high school robotics team I help mentor. I don’t have much of a choice. :(
As I understand it, you should be fine unless that server is doing 18+ stuff. Don’t verify, discord will assume you’re a teenager. I’m leaving because I don’t have any ties like that. Maybe you could convince the server to move elsewhere?
I am one of them. I only use it for comms for gaming. The rest doesn’t matter to me.
I think it’ll strongly depend on how intrusive it ends up being.
they would allow it to record conversations in their house while the computer is off. people do not give a shit
Many of the communities I am in are pissed and these aren’t even tech people, this is even worse than what reddit did.The thing that most people online hate is age verification, who thought this was a good idea, reminds me of when Tumblr decided to ban porn same level of stupidity.
It’s all about abuse.
Companies get too big for their britches and are accustomed to doing whatever they want with their sheep just going along.
I’m sure they’re very surprised to see any kind of significant backlash.
They for sure made the calculation, how many leave maybe 10-20% if we are lucky. How many stay and give them the right to sell their most sensitive data. How much money do they make with the data? Its more than they lose for sure.
I found this little substack article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
At what point are we going to take responsibility and take action collectively to punish these mainstream platforms ?
Keeping it real
Also this https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/ which is much more detailed and focuses on decentralised discord-like apps
After what happened in Nepal last year, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living. The powers that be saw a small country use it as a tool to affect change. To me, and tell me if I lm jumping to conclusions here, its obvious as to why this policy change is happening at all, to prevent the site from being used in that manner again.
What happened in Nepal and prevent what manner being used?
The youth used discord to coordinate an overthrow of the government, and used it to organise a vote for who to replace the leader with.
Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they’re going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it’s someone else’s problem.
hunting for alternatives
I’ve heard people mention Matrix, but I’ve not tried it yet.
It’s definitely nowhere near as polished as Discord, but it does a good enough job for my small gaming group to have moved over.
The equivalent of a Discord server is a Space, which is made up of Rooms (channels). Unfortunately Rooms are displayed in order of recent activity; admins can’t define a set order to group things by function.
The two weirdest things: there are no audio calls, you have to do a video call and turn off the webcam. And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it’s just strange).
And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it’s just strange).
Pretty sure discord has the same.
Discord has E2EE?
It has QR based sign in. Shit, Steam has QR based sign in so it shouldn’t be weird for people at this point.
So do “Smart TV” apps. Or messenger like Signal. That is really a common thing nowadays.
I’ve seen QR-based login before as an option. (Heck, I was an early adopter of SQRL…or tried to be. Sadly that protocol never went anywhere.) But it’s not typically mandatory, and I don’t think most casual users (the kinds of people who just reuse the same password everywhere rather than using a password manager) aren’t likely to be especially comfortable with it.
No audio calls
They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top
I think the video call rooms (always open channels) remember your preference but im not sure rn
They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top
I don’t see that. Video, Threads, Room Info, People is all I have at the top of my rooms.
Thats weird?
What version of element-desktop are you on? If its element-web it could be that your server is running a outdated version.Its only available in DMs not groupchats. It was added back in december https://github.com/element-hq/element-desktop/releases/tag/v1.12.5
Its only available in DMs not groupchats
Oh right, nice catch. Yeah I only use it as a Discord alternative, so no audio calls for me yet.
Anyway, audio calls in that way aren’t quite what I’m after anyway. They’ll work. They’ll do the job. Just like the existing video calls with webcams turned off do the job. But the Discord style chat room with an assumption of audio only on voice detection, with robust screensharing (including PC audio!) capabilities in an otherwise audio-only call is what I’m really after.
Yeah the video rooms feature is most of that but not quite. The “call” always stays open so you can join and wait until others join without disrupting them. It has good screensharing but no option to share your output audio. You have to turn off the webcam before joining. The voice detection thing would be cool as an optional thing because it can also cause problems. I just use a filter plugin for that on my computer.
Yeah the last thing you didn’t bring up was screen share. I’ve found Element’s screen sharing to be rather lacklustre. It’s share whole screen only, rather than having application or game-specific sharing (and Discord’s gamer-specific feature of detecting you’re in a game and immediately surfacing the option to share that is excellent here). And when I’ve used it, I’ve found audio from the game doesn’t make it through, and I’m not sure if it’s possible (I’ve never really tried looking through all the deep options) to send game audio while also having your mic, without using third-party software to mix the two together into one stream—which would necessarily break your choice detection filter.
Yeah, I have no idea why the matrix developers decided to have stuff called “spaces and rooms” instead of servers and channels.
Calling them servers in discord always annoyed me. Spaces and rooms isn’t much better. Room is fine, but space is incredibly nondescript.
Coming from IRC it always baffled me why people on Discord would talk about servers and channels too. Especially servers. It still irks me when someone says “Join my Discord server”.
Like the other replies you’ve gotten, I never really liked “server”. It implies something very different from what it is.
Rooms is pretty obvious and straightforward, I think. And to be honest I rather like Spaces too. It’s a lot less immediately clear, but there’s something ineffable about it that just feels right to me. I’m just glad to see the old Communities feature (which was their now-deprecated first attempt at a Discord-like functionality) is hard to even find out about now. When I first joined I was confused about the difference between Communities and Spaces and had to search to figure out which to use, but when checking now to remember what the old one was called, I found it hard to even find the name of it.
Slightly related. Does anyone know of any decent Matrix clients (apps) on Android and/or Linux? Because, and I don’t mean to be rude when I say this but…Element is very, very bad.
Stoat.chat seems to be a more likely alternative. I love matrix, but I don’t think it can replace Discord. Not yet.
This seems to be like Bluesky vs. Mastodon.
I see a lot of morons shilling one over the other, so I expect it to be the stupid-platform.
For me it’s as long as it’s not Discord.
So they’re going to turn everybody into teenagers. Last I checked, teenagers can’t buy things like nitro right? Doesn’t that completely fuck up their own business model?
They must have come up with some sort of plan to merit losing some nitro users for harvesting personal information.
It’ll be the new Victorian age all over again. Morals and acting righteous up top and secret human stuff just underneath the surface. Just look at what is happening in the bad old usa today. This is not about protecting minors.
So you are also following this Epstein timeline we are living in…
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
Revolt is now called Stoat Chat. Some sort of legal issue apparently.
Anyway, for those who don’t know, it’s basically an open source clone of Discord. Definitely worth a look, probably where I’ll my stuff now.
I looked into Stoat around the time of their name change announcement.
On the one hand it looks good and is definitely the closest Discord clone at the moment. I was disappointed about a couple of things though:
-
They have a self hosted server option but it doesn’t have the full feature suite and seems like they’ve decided that it won’t in the foreseeable future.
-
They’re aware of federation and have no plans to head down that path for the software.
Bit of a shame because if I could self host the full software that’d be pretty damn good as a replacement for all of my friends. If it could be federated in a way where servers could work in tandem that’d be a great distributed alternative to Discord for the entire community! I understand why they’re not pursuing those avenues but it’s still a shame.
While I would like to see those options explored, I don’t think they’re strictly necessary. For now, it’s a reasonable alternative, and the open source code means that a self-hosted and/or federated fork is always possible.
-
yeah it’s the closest to a real discord clone, at least discord before they introduced screen sharing
IRC :(
No voice/video calling, no screen sharing, no persistent chat history.
Sometimes you need to accept using more than one piece of software. And IRC can have persistent chat history.
That’s why IRC isn’t and never will be a replacement for Discord. Most people don’t care to accept comprimises and friction and people developing the alternatives can not impose compromises on their users and expect general market adoption.
I really wish there was some real alternative that actually worked like lemmy communities for example where you wouldn’t need to self host but be able to use a server someone else made available to be able to create a community there. And search engine indexing, that would be a must imo.
Then people are cooked, only way you can do all the shit discord does is by having massive funding to pay for all the backend. Or we can brutally murder all the advertisers and slowly move back into a sustainable tech society through fear of tech bro hunts.
Matrix does exactly that.
I’ve only used it for private chats, but you can also have a public discoverable chat. And you can sign up at one of many federated servers. The biggest and likely easiest being matrix.org.
I hear complaints about UX and usability but I will give it a try. Thanks!
The complaints are definitely fair. It’s noticeably less polished than Discord. But well worth trying out to see if that polish is an issue that will actually matter to you.
Is IRC still a thing? I havnt used it since 2006. I’d love to see it again
It is. Also widely bridged with Matrix.
Yep, still on it.
Guilded is dead. Their website redirects to a thank-you page of some sort. I remember trying it out ages ago and I thought it was pretty decent competition for Discord and had a lot of the same features, but ultimately it would have been susceptible to the same kind of fuckery that Discord is giving us right now. These private companies only want to extract value out of their users.
Guilded is dead
and it was roblox’s property anyway
Oooohhh.
Good…uhm riddance?
Revolt is Stoat now and it doesn’t even let me verify my email right now.
I signed up yesterday and just got my verification a little while ago. I hear that they’re being swamped right now. I wonder why? 🤔
I keep getting my verification mail, try to verify, and it tells me that something failed.
Yeah, they’re swamped! Glad I made mine around the IPO announcement…
Trying to point my friends towards matrix/element, they already started a teamspeak server instead though >. >
The biggest issue is it didn’t seem like matrix/element has streaming video in voice chat, we use that pretty heavily as we’ll play different games and just hang and talk several streaming at a time.
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That is not what the post says. They sell encrypted messaging to government organizations. It’s basic SaaS and allows them to fund themselves.
Is the third one of these a chat app or a verb?
Chat app similar to discord. I believe they rebranded but I remember them as being
Revolt.chat
Yeah sorry, I was mostly just making a joke there.
What do we do now that shitty government policies are forcing us off of Discord? Revolt.
Stoat seems like the only alternative, most of these are telegram clones,not discord clones, one of them is even abandoned
This is a free to use platform, just saying:
Meet Pavel Durov, the tech billionaire who founded Telegram
Pavel Durov was born in St. Petersburg in Soviet Russia.
The tech entrepreneur cofounded the encrypted messaging service Telegram with his brother Nikolai in 2013. The brothers were born into a family of intellectuals, according to a biography on the Digital-Life-Design Conference website. Durov spoke at the conference in January 2012.
Durov is now worth $17.1 billion, according to Forbes. Much of his fortune comes from Telegram, which he said hit 1 billion users in March 2025.
