Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally
28 points by Joban
28 points by Joban
Considering how well this has been going I am personally looking forward to never verifying my age for the platform.
It's also a typical reason why the age verification ideas are always a bad idea. In the rarest case it'll be an anonymized official system from the state, and in all others some 3rd party vendor you wouldn't give you email in any other circumstance.
I don’t really like the platform anyway… currently, I sometimes sign in if I’m collaborating with people who already use it. But I don’t like to stay signed in on my laptop; it makes slack look light weight, and I’m using my laptop for things that are both more important and resource-hungry like VMs and JetBrains editors. I’ll probably give up the first time this requirement introduces any new friction for me.
If this breaks anything it’ll most likely erase my willingness to sign in at all.
I noped out of the handful of Discords I was in a month back to cut down on online distractions, this further solidifies that decision.
What alternatives are there that are friendly to people who are tech-illiterate or adjacent? Matrix seems to be the only one I can think of. Why hasn't anyone created a discord-like client on the AT protocol (that I am aware of)?
This is from a few months back: https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
The author rates "Openness" and "Decentralization" separately, and includes ratings for "Security", "Functionality", and "Safety". I don't think it's complete, but it did point me at a couple things I hadn't considered, so I recommend at least skimming.
Currently working on developing a federated Discord alternative, though it got delayed because my first child was recently born. Starting to find some time to work on it again though.
XMPP:
No particular protocol:
Our community switched to Revolt/Stoat. We've decided to fork their legacy codebase instead of following along the Stoat rebrand (because a lot of things are in flux and we're looking for stability.) We've got an awesome maintainer who's contributed improvements already.
Meanwhile, it looks like the Zig folks are making their own OSS Discord alternative in Zig? I approve of this ecosystem diversity: let's see how the new victors emerge!
The AT protocol currently defines no means for private communications, but there have been attempts to build a messaging platform on top of it, notably Roomy (https://roomy.space/, https://blog.muni.town/roomy-chat-alpha-2/).
What does Discord get out of doing this? Rolling out an age gate in regions where they're not legally required to do seems like a net negative for everyone, and in particular it's going to drive users away from Discord, so I can't figure out why they've chosen to do this.
They're preparing for IPO, and they have a not-so-quiet reputation of being a place where minors can easily be exploited by predators. Their gain here is putting up an image to prospective investors that they are working to clean up that mess.
Will that gain be net-positive? Hard to say for sure. My guess is that it will be, unfortunately. Discord has both platform-inertia and all the features that people are used to having: text chat, voice chat, video streaming, custom emotes, etc.
Nice, this is a good reminder to cancel my paid Nitro subscription.
Possible silver lining: all user data (unless verified) will receive additional privacy protections (via COPPA, GDRP/CCPA, etc)?