Age verification for all.

Discord announced on Monday that it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults.

Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.

Direct messages and servers that are not age-restricted will continue to function normally, but users won’t be able to send messages or view content in an age-restricted server until they complete the age check process, even if it’s a server they were part of before age verification rolled out. Savannah Badalich, Discord’s global head of product policy, said in an interview with The Verge that those servers will be “obfuscated” with a black screen until the user verifies they’re an adult. Users also won’t be able to join any new age-restricted servers without verifying their age.

  • wuffah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    251·
    3 minutes ago

    Discord is not needed. Quit. Kill it. Watch them BEG to get us back, then say no.

    • Kamikaze Rusher@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      15 hours ago

      I’m all for jumping ship on the grounds of this being an overreach. However there just aren’t any good alternatives to Discord which would entice the general public from following suit.

      Discord has the advantage of being a very frictionless user experience. You make one account and can join whatever servers you want thanks to its centralized design. It has file sharing, gif and video support, voice channels, screen sharing, API support with websocket events, and a hefty amount of bots to ease management.

      There are other solutions but they don’t cover the same amount of features. Some focus on voice, some focus on chat, and some try to do as much but the experience isn’t quite robust. It’ll be like Reddit users and the API fiasco that people thought would be its downfall: the activists will leave but the general community won’t care enough, or aren’t tech-savvy enough, to be bothered.

      • Batman@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        14 hours ago

        I’m currently deploying matrix on my home server. would definitely recommend everyone able to, look into deploying it. it seems doable if you go the kubernetes helm chart route.

        I got it working with docker but video always seemed a little hokey as I didn’t understand turn servers and the various protocols.

        Each server hosts about 100 people from the docs and it handles federation with all of the features you mentioned. Honestly it seems better than discord if you put some time in.

        some steps I took to make it easier on myself:

        • used pangolin on vps machine
        • ran their cart in my cluster
        • can expose matrix endpoints via a UI
        • DokkaeCat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          14 hours ago

          matrix clients are unintuitive, complicated and weird. It’s not a Discord experience and that’s all that matters to 99% of people. No body cares about encryption and security otherwise no one would use discord.