Discord is making a huge change that will enact age restrictions for all accounts until users verify their age with ID or face scans.
  • orenj@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    2 minutes ago

    this is making my ttrpg group actually consider letting me host stuff for them and I’m unironically thrilled… so like, matrix is the way, right? Or should I be looking at mumble or something?

  • cheesybuddha@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    2 hours ago

    I’m actually pretty happy that Discord is killing itself. Far too many people use it as an official platform for stuff like help forums.

    Maybe lets go back to basic message boards that are actually searchable, etc.

  • merdaverse@lemmy.zipEnglish
    12·
    2 hours ago

    This is great news! Discord shooting itself in the foot is a net positive for the whole world.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    5 hours ago

    Anyone remember xFire? It was better 15 years ago than Discord ever was or will be.

    …damn I miss that shit. They were litigated out of existence by a frivolous lawsuit from Yahoo. This is why we can’t have nice things.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    5 hours ago

    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.

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    116·
    7 hours ago

    For ID scans, Discord says that documents “are deleted quickly.”

    Just a few months ago they had a data leak which proved that they were indeed /not/ deleting documents and ID’s like they had been claiming.

    Granted in that case it was mostly countries that force keeping that data but, I’m sick of companies lying and saying “lol yea we defo delete the data after”

    • blazeknave@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      54 minutes ago

      My friend is an exec there. After reading this thread bugged him to buy my software that would protect this vulnerability. They confirmed data/file never leaves the user’s device. Sounds pretty safe.

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      6 hours ago

      I won’t even give hard drives when recycling a computer, I pull and smash myself. Last set of old drives I cut in half with bolt cutters.

  • Aielman15@lemmy.worldEnglish
    182·
    8 hours ago

    Let’s protect the children by scanning everyone’s face and ID and uploading them to a server that’ll get hacked five years from now.

  • TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    81·
    8 hours ago

    I would barely be okay with a bank or government website asking for this information, I sure as shit would not give it to a fucking chat app.

    • Agrivar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      107·
      8 hours ago

      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.

        • cheesybuddha@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 hours ago

          What’s wrong with good old fashioned data base backed message forums? There are so many implementations available, I’m sure many are FOSS, and I’m sure there’s managed solutions as well. It’s a mature, tested, rock solid reliable technology that has existed pretty much since the inception of the internet, and can be easily incorporated into other tools and workflows - because there is 40+ years of development work with the concept.

          Seriously, why?

        • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
          31·
          3 hours ago

          I mean, I share the complaint of Discord having tons of unindexable knowledge locked away in it, but forums are not good replacement for my friend group. So yeah we kinda want a Discord alternative specifically.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        331·
        8 hours ago

        Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.

    • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
      9·
      6 hours ago

      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.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        5 hours ago

        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.

        • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
          2·
          5 hours ago

          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 ?

          • Fushuan [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            2·
            2 hours ago

            Voice chat isn’t inherently costly to host, usually the server acts as a broker and then people connect P2P. Do you remember jitsi? It was used as an alternative to zoom during covid, it was a webpage like Google meet where you opened a room, and people joined with the link. Actually under the good the first one that joined the room acted as a host so all voice communications never reached jitsi’s servers.

            Jitsi still exists btw, although I understand that a more integrated solution like matrix is preferable. Matrix IS the federated discord-like solution, although last time I read about it it had some issues with scalability and the typical foss Dev drama.

          • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            1 hour ago

            Didn’t have much of an aim beyond trying to cook it up from scratch as a personal research project. That includes the protocol, since I’m handling priv/pub keypairs in a creative way to facilitate both encryption and user identity verification.

        • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
          91·
          5 hours ago

          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.

          • Willoughby@piefed.worldEnglish
            1·
            3 hours ago

            I see luck with “combos”

            XMPP + Mumble is a common one. The room is on XMPP, some users are in a mumble server with info in the topic.

            Matrix is buggy and doesn’t scale imo, it isn’t a sustainable alternative. Stoat looks like a great option and there are lots of open instances.

            • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
              3·
              5 hours ago

              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.

      • Oni_eyes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        I’ll swap to a shared calendar and any other voice chat software. Sure I can’t post on those but that’s why we also have a group chat for the different gaming groups I’m in.

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        Were you trying Teamspeak 6? The UI is different, but the functionality is on par I believe. Not open source, but at least you can self-host.

        • Fushuan [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Have they finally released screen sharing in ts6? I gotta say that the development of that project is pretty comical. Radio silence with the only communication being the community manager shitting on discord every other day while giving no updates on their own product.

          Weird vibes.

          • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1·
            2 hours ago

            I haven’t followed the development communication much, but yes, screen sharing works now. It wasn’t working on wayland like 8mo ago, but I tried again a month ago and it’s now working.

        • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          No. Recently I played a bit using a friends mumble server. And it’s a friend that is already privacy conscious. But these friends are not the norm. They are the exception.

          Interesting to see Teamspeak evolved but still you have to pay to host a server so that’s a huge difference.

          • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1·
            2 hours ago

            I haven’t tried mumble yet.

            You pay for the hosting resources yes, but you can host it anywhere. I’ve been playing around with it using a docker instance in my homelab.