I don’t sign up for those accounts, and I change my mobile number every 90 days.

Then you decided to cave in and forego your privacy. Don&#x27;t assume others will falter in the same fashion.

&quot;I used to resist the boot, too. Then I was successfully conditioned by the environment that&#x27;s been engineered around me. Now I just lick it subconsciously.&quot;

&gt;but then you&#x27;ll have to face the consequences (de facto social isolation) and probably acquiesce.Nah I&#x27;m used to being lonely. Leaving these platforms shows how few truly deep friendships you have.You get used to it.&gt;I had the same reaction when platforms started asking for my cellphone number... after some years I just started giving it to them.Even when I gave Facebook my number, that wasn&#x27;t enough. I drew a line at some point. If everyone else wants to sacrifice privacy for the sake of pseudo-community, so be it.

Then you and I are not the same. If a platform asks for more than I&#x27;m willing to give it, it&#x27;s time to leave. I&#x27;ve done this enough times that it&#x27;s simply routine. If it means I suffer &quot;defacto social isolation&quot;, whatever that is, so beit. I&#x27;m old and I&#x27;ve cultivated a group of close nit friends that live nearby most of the year, we&#x27;ll manage just fine without discord.

I think this will be the kneejerk reaction of many, but then you&#x27;ll have to face the consequences (de facto social isolation) and probably acquiesce. 
I had the same reaction when platforms started asking for my cellphone number... after some years I just started giving it to them. Now I don&#x27;t even think about it.

Happily deleted it, just as I would for most % of the online rot I am a part of.

F** that, guess I&#x27;m leaving that platform too now...

Bleh. I still get through for now. I&#x27;ll be sorry when I need to go find an alternative, because I don&#x27;t know of another that works as reliably as archive[.ph|.is|.today] for me currently

On all my devices and all my connections (residential and mobile) here in the EU I end up in a captcha loop for this site nowadays. Is it just me?EDIT: seems like I&#x27;m not the only one [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;DataHoarder&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1q0ewh1&#x2F;do_you_also_get_infinite_captchas_on_archivetoday&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;DataHoarder&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1q0ewh1&#x2F;do_you...</a>

In case anyone else can’t read it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;PvpAx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;PvpAx</a>

&gt; panic at losing years of historyI used to be like that. It was unsustainable and ultimately mentally unhealthy.

Especially if it&#x27;s presented as a pop-up upon launching the app that suggests the user won&#x27;t be able to talk to their friends&#x2F;servers without showing ID. Carefully worded language would could spur some % of users to panic at losing years of history and immediately show ID. Folks with less privacy discernment hear &quot;jump&quot; and reply &quot;how high&quot;.

I&#x27;ll continue using Discord in teen mode, I guess. I&#x27;d rather not lose the current connections &amp; servers I have on there, and I&#x27;m not optimistic about people migrating away, especially non-tech people.

I have done that for stripchat which was also requiring it. Not happy with it but I&#x27;d rather use a selfie than a whole ID document which includes an image anyway.The thing is, what other option do I have?

I don&#x27;t see how disallowing viewing &quot;age-restricted&quot; content through Discord without giving them your ID would have any impact on the spread of disinformation, outside of like, disinfo in the form or pornographic or gory images.

How do I know that this message isn&#x27;t divisive propaganda posted by a bot?

In practical terms, it just ensures that the only bots flooding the zone with propaganda will be the ones owned by governments in whose jurisdiction Discord is.

I get the draconian side of things, but I am also tired of thousands of russian, indian, domestic-funded etc. bots flooding the zone with divisive propaganda.In theory, this seems like it would at least be a step in the direction of combating disinformation.I&#x27;m curious if there are any better ways to suppress these propaganda machines?

They don&#x27;t have to comply in advance.

I wouldn&#x27;t call it a response, but rather another thing that normalises ID verification online. Now all these governments can use Discord as a reference that (1) this is possible at scale and (2) companies are willing to do this.

Seems like an unforced error to implement this before being forced to.

I don&#x27;t imagine this was a 100% their decision, it&#x27;s more like a response to the epidemic of all the world&#x27;s governments suddenly coming up with adult verification schemes. Discord has already required it in some countries, and it&#x27;s definitely easier to get everybody to verify themselves than require it on a per-jurisdiction basis. The personal data they get is a cherry on top.Also, this is just the beginning, more social networks will require the same soon.

If it helps, it really seems like Netflix is only &quot;making money&quot; these days off of cutting programming and workers. It&#x27;s not a sustainable way to grow and it will hit a wall soon.

Sounds like when Netflix reneged on family accounts.I cancelled my account in protest, but their financials say they made money on the change (and thus all the execs are happy with it).

The issue is that it&#x27;s yet another platform that could leak your data? Why would you ever want to increase that chance?Also, I&#x27;m not sure you would need to give discord your ID unless you&#x27;re sending porn in your work chat or something.

I was planning to do that. My work chat is on Discord. I am an adult. Google and Netflix have my legal name and credit card number. I don&#x27;t see how Discord having my ID is any worse.

I had the same thing with Reddit and let it see my face. It didn&#x27;t bother me much - I don&#x27;t really do anything more exciting there than this sort of hn comment. If I wanted to post controversial &#x2F; illegal stuff I&#x27;d make a separate account.

The sad thing is that I think many people will en masse pony up their ID or snapshot without a second thought. I&#x27;m not sure if enough people will refuse to actually force Discord to back off this decision (unless their idea is to grab as much data as possible at once with the understanding that they are going to back off either way).

No thanks. Discord, it has been fun, but I decline.

At least Google is pushing on zero-knowledge solutionsMaybe they can force everyone&#x27;s hand like they did for https<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;innovation-and-ai&#x2F;technology&#x2F;safety-security&#x2F;opening-up-zero-knowledge-proof-technology-to-promote-privacy-in-age-assurance&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;innovation-and-ai&#x2F;technology&#x2F;safety-secu...</a>

Ratings aren&#x27;t legally binding though are they? I bought games older rated than I was, and it&#x27;s totally up to people&#x27;s parents what they&#x27;re allowed to play. Are you suggesting a 15 year old should be allowed to play the 16 rated game but not discuss it?

&gt; The first option uses AI to analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device.I&#x27;m wondering if this will work with a YouTube video...

Gaming certainly has age-concerns, many games are rated 13&#x2F;15&#x2F;16+ or 18+But yeah, leaving discord... they are not getting my ID&#x2F;Photo

If you don&#x27;t access adult stuff, you don&#x27;t need to verify age. I&#x27;m not giving them my ID, I&#x27;m not expecting anything to change about my Discord experience.What&#x27;s the issue?

Does it matter? The problem is that everyone uses discord for everything. It&#x27;s not an isolated platform, it&#x27;s THE platform if you want to have friends.

How many people are doing age restricted stuff on Discord (besides the specifically there for adult content and gooning crowd)All of my use is primarily professional and gaming and has no age concerns

Honestly they&#x27;re probably big enough to get away with it.If it was only friend groups it would kill them for sure, we&#x27;ve seen that many times, but given the absurd amount many large online communities on Discord, I&#x27;d wager they can force it down and be relatively unscathed.They played the long game - they provided a good service for 10 years, and got REALLY big before they started the enshittification process.

But under that argument, you would have to prove your age on a regular basis, the plan right now appears to be that each account would only need to do so once.

No law or regulation is ever 100% effective in real life. Income tax is not collected 100% effectively. Should we not do it? Criminals are not caught 100% of the time, should we not do it?Of course this won&#x27;t be 100% effective, maybe 80-90% effective. That&#x27;s all they need and expect from this system.

How often do you suppose they will be re-checking your ID? Once every... never?

Just ban that in TOS. As we know TOS is inviolable. As such it is not possible to sell, gift or otherwise transfer an account. At least this should be considered how it works for age verification. If account transfer is found out account can be terminated thus closing the loop hole.

So then it&#x27;s REASONABLY not the corporation&#x27;s fault if that user sees explicit content.

How does anyone know whether a family is engaging in that time-honored tradition of passing down accounts from grandfather, to father, to son, to child, and their posterity, in perpetuity?Seriously though, unless you have positively identified the person who created the account in the first place, you have 0% chance of knowing whether it is the same person using it today.Gamers sell their high-level accounts all the time. It would be a simple matter of economics that the Discord users with the oldest accounts sell them to 12-year-olds. Likewise, accounts are shared willy-nilly, whether or not that violates the rules. And accounts can be stolen or compromised, if you&#x27;re really hard up.

Yeah, my youtube&#x2F;google account is almost as old as youtube itself is, but will constantly ask me to verify my age when clicking on something as marked &#x27;not for kids&#x27;. Can we just get the leisure-suit-larry age-verification system ;)

Apple deleted many legacy mac-dot-com accounts without qualms, not long ago. It was the phone accounts, in so many ways, driving it .. IMHO

It&#x27;s been around for 11. However, you can reasonably assume that kids aren&#x27;t registering accounts below the age at which kids are generally literate; if we spitball an age of five this means old accounts cannot be younger than 16.

Has discord even been around for 18 years?

I&#x27;m curious to know what this &quot;model&quot; actually means. A real-time AI monitoring for conversations?

They are planning on doing something similar:Discord is also rolling out an age inference model that analyzes metadata like the types of games a user plays, their activity on Discord, and behavioral signals like signs of working hours or the amount of time they spend on Discord.“If we have a high confidence that they are an adult, they will not have to go through the other age verification flows,”

Any age verification process that does not consider the age of the account as a verification option is a data trap, plain and simple.

Jitsi is great but the element integration felt clunky. Maybe I&#x27;ll have to revisit it.

I seem to recall Jitsi working pretty well.

have you looked at mumble or teamspeak, seems they where the default for a bit before discord. Atleast for gaming.

So my friend group has been looking for alternatives for a while now that feel like discord, works on mobile and desktop, and has voice chat.I use Signal but the UI is very different from Discord.I&#x27;ve had very mixed experiences with Element + Matrix, Element keeps crashing on mobile, and while voice chat kinda exists in Element it&#x27;s not been great imho.I looked into hosting Rocket.chat, Zullip, and Mattermost but from what I recall voice + mobile were either missing or paywalled at a per-user price.Any recommendations?

“We will find ways to bring people back” yeah because that usually works.  I imagine this gets rolled back or siloed to only adult specific channels.

And E2EE platforms like Mega are now being censored on some platforms specifically because they&#x27;re E2EE, and so the name itself must be treated as CSAM.As people who want to talk about words like &quot;megabytes&quot; or &quot;megapixels&quot; or &quot;megaphones&quot; or &quot;Megaman&quot; or &quot;Megan&quot; on Facebook are finding out.

Pretty much every non-E2EE platform is scanning every uploaded image for CSAM at least, that&#x27;s a baseline ass-covering measure.

To be fair, the terms and conditions probably say that they can do whatever they want with that data :-).

Don’t forget all the government creeps snooping on the wires.

Speaking of hosting, Discord used to be one of the biggest (inadvertent) image hosts, so they might have set up the system to reduce legal exposure than to monitor conversations per se.[1]A lot of the internet broke the day they flipped that switch off.Weren&#x27;t external Tumblr hotlinks also a thing back in the day?[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;discordapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;16uy0an&#x2F;not_sure_if_this_is_real&#x2F;?share_id=O4BI30cPz6yHoqNYHDDm0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;discordapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;16uy0an&#x2F;not_sur...</a>

Really I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that anything I send out of my LAN is probably kept on a server forever and ingested by LLMs, and indexed to be used against me in perpetuity at this point, regardless of what any terms or conditions of the site I&#x27;m using actually says.

Everything that is not end-to-end encrypted understandably has to do it.

Well it&#x27;s not E2EE, so what did you expect? Nothing you do on Discord is private, everything is screened, categorized and readable by third parties.

&gt; and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive.I didn&#x27;t even realise discord scans all the images that i send and recieve.

Are you saying that you can &quot;mark&quot; the channel as &quot;NSFW&quot;, and Discord will stop scanning your content, possibly allowing you to share very illegal content through their servers?Sounds weird to me. Pretty sure that they legally have to make sure that they don&#x27;t host illegal content. Or does &quot;NSFW&quot; enable some kind of end-to-end encryption?

Here&#x27;s how Discord works. A third or so of its features, such as forum channels (EDIT: I think this specific example was wrong; stage and announcement channels, but not forum channels) or role self-assignment, are locked behind Community Mode. After enabling Community Mode, server owners are NOT ALLOWED to turn off content filtering anymore, meaning that by default, content in every channel may be filtered out by systems you cannot configure.The only way for the server owner to circumvent the filter is to mark a channel as &quot;NSFW&quot;, which doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean the channel actually contains any NSFW content.This change will not actually require ID for content confirmed to be NSFW. It will require ID for each and every &quot;NSFW mode&quot; (unfiltered) channel. The end result is that you have three choices:- Ditch Discord features implemented in recent years (or at least this is currently possible) - this prevents a server from being listed as public;- Require ID checks from all your users (per channel);- Have everything scanned from all your users (per channel).

&gt; I genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access to age-restricted servers and channels...Way more than you think. There are tons of Discord servers that only exist to share pornography.

&gt; Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channelsI genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access to age-restricted servers and channels...Feels like it should be just fine not to verify the age.

Element’s awful, but I’ve found FluffyChat, another matrix client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.

I have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS

MiroTalk can be made into a widget on Element, is open source, and is P2P after the initial connection.

Does matrix have decent 1:N client desktop broadcasting with low latency (and high fps) yet? I use discord for &quot;watch parties&quot;, video and tabletop gaming...

It&#x27;s because of the trademark: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stoat.chat&#x2F;updates&#x2F;long-live-stoat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stoat.chat&#x2F;updates&#x2F;long-live-stoat</a>Nevertheless, I don&#x27;t like the new name either, oh well...I like this comment though:Imagine you make a free software project and it runs into trademark issues because people have more money than you to register in more classes than your project.And then even though your project existed first, they still come after you anyway.And from that an even more expensive rebranding from this as well.from: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45626225">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45626225</a>, not sure how accurate it is, but it makes me want to revolt .

It&#x27;s open source, I&#x27;m tempted to fork it and do nothing other than change the branding.

&quot;[beaver emoji] Revolt is Stoat now&quot;Argh. If there&#x27;s no stoat emoji, petition the Unicode Consortium for one, don&#x27;t just use a beaver. It&#x27;s not even the right family; the badger emoji would be closer.

Revolt&#x27;s rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding MSFT done ever.

For me, the closest alternative to Discord is Stoat. Matrix with Element (or other clients) would be great, but it feels so slow on both desktop and mobile.

Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind a paywall to remain sustainable.

I wonder how Stoat will fare, and how it is currently maintained, in terms of &quot;making money&quot;; my fear is that it would steer into the direction of Discord itself.

Stoat has screen sharing &#x2F; video calling in the pipeline at least: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stoatchat&#x2F;stoatchat&#x2F;issues&#x2F;313" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stoatchat&#x2F;stoatchat&#x2F;issues&#x2F;313</a>

Matrix screen sharing is a feature of Element Call &#x2F; MatrixRTC (in development).For now, I think they do it through their Jitsi integration. I don&#x27;t know how easy it is, as I haven&#x27;t tried it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.element.io&#x2F;latest&#x2F;element-cloud-documentation&#x2F;integrations&#x2F;create-a-conference-call-in-a-room&#x2F;#screen-sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.element.io&#x2F;latest&#x2F;element-cloud-documentation&#x2F;i...</a>

I use MiroTalk for it. Within Element you can set up widgets (basically PWAs) and so you can call via Element’s built in Jitsi widget (or a more reliable dedicated Jitsi link) and then use MiroTalk to share screens. It is a LOT better, especially for streaming video.In terms of ease of use, it’s like three clicks. Technically more than Discord, but it’s p2p streaming so it’s far nicer quality.

One thing most of those lack is an easy way to share screen.Now if anyone wants to differentiate their Discord alternative, they want to have most of discord functionalities and add the possibility to be in multiple voice chats (maybe with rights and a channel hierarchy + different push-to-talk binds). It&#x27;s a missed feature when doing huge operations in games and using the Canary client is not always enough.

Last I checked Signal was not fully open source, which is iffy, believe their encryption protocol is still closed. That said its the best of a bad bunch for E2EE messaging. If you&#x27;re on android I&#x27;d recommend doing what I do, which is installing from the APK on the site, manually verifying the sig locally (you can use termux for this), and then lagging ever so slightly behind on updates to avoid potential supply chain or hostile takeover attacks. This is probably over cautious for most threat profiles, but better safe than sorry imo. Also their server side stuff is close sourced, technically this isnt an issue though as long as the E2EE holds up to scrutiny though.Edit: My information may be out of date, I cannot find any sources saying any part of the app is closed source these days, do your own research ofc but comfortable saying its the most accessible secure platform.

IRC does not support group voice &amp; video calls, which is one of the primary features of Discord (and previously Skype, from which everyone migrated to Discord in the first place)

For most Discord users IRC simply does not have the feature set that people need. Basics like simple drag and drop media sharing, threaded conversations, emoji reactions and voice comms, up to more complicated stuff like screen sharing and video calling.

The real sin is that if they went with electron, they probably could have gone with a web app, and while web apps have downsides, they make fellow user buy in trivial, instead of &quot;download this client&quot; it&#x27;s &quot;go to this web page&quot;I am especially bitter because electron advertises as being &quot;cross platform&quot; by which they mean that it also runs on linux and as a openbsd driver I get to go &quot;cross platform my ass&quot; and then weep because of how close I am, if it were a web app it would probably be trivial for me to to run. What I really want is a method to unelectronify electron apps.

IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after.I&#x27;ve never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it&#x27;s Electron. Total waste of time.

Same, depends on what you expect in terms of features and so on, but for chat, IRC works perfectly.

Which of these has been around for over three decades?That would be my answer.

Requires hosting of the private server (security&#x2F;privacy implications) or renting it from the third party.

Snikket (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;snikket.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;snikket.org</a> ) with Monal as the iOS client

I keep wondering why Zulip is so often left out of reviews and tooling comparisons. For me it ticks a lot of important boxes, yet it barely gets mentioned. Is there a downside I&#x27;m missing, or is it just under the radar?The concept that every message belongs to a topic and the async communication focus makes so much sense to me. I read conversations, not timelines.

Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don&#x27;t want to host their own shit, they want a one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have baggage.This is your chance to start Bluesky for discord. A competently built, VC backed competitor to exploit a misstep only caused by government overreach due to their colossal market share. 26 million daily active users is a nice guaranteed market to start whittling away at, with an effective marketing campaign to drive a wedge between &quot;little gamers, and big corporate enshittification.&quot;

This seems like a nice breakdown of some options:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taggart-tech.com&#x2F;discord-alternatives&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taggart-tech.com&#x2F;discord-alternatives&#x2F;</a>(Not affiliated)

Thank you! I&#x27;ve bookmarked your website!

For the latest in IRC tech, you can read my blog posts: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi&#x2F;irc_technology_news_from_the_second_half_of_2025&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi&#x2F;irc_technology_news_from_th...</a>I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.

Jitsi handles this very well.I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.

Discord&#x27;s voice rooms with screen sharing is a very cool feature i depend on daily. I haven&#x27;t seen opensource messenger that implemented this yet.

I think Matrix is the closest equivalent that&#x27;s reasonably popular, at least for text messaging. There are both web and mobile clients and they interoperate seamlessly. It&#x27;s also at the point where it somewhat reasonably works for the average user, rather than being the usual UX nightmare that teaches people that anything open source or anything pushed by their nerdy friend should be avoided.

Hard to say, I don&#x27;t really use discord so I think of it as voice chat as a service, and for pure voice chat it is hard to do better than mumble. However from the way people talk about discord, it is also a text chat screen sharing file server. and it is hard to find one product that does all that well.For video, both video chat and screen sharing I have had a lot of success with Galene, it 
offers text chat and file sharing, but they are sort of anemic and bare bones, which could be good or bad based on the needs of your users. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;galene.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;galene.org&#x2F;</a>What I usually do is start with a fossil server, this is trivial and gives you files, a wiki and a forum (none of them super good but like I said trivial to set up) then if I want voice, mumble is my normal route, but galene is growing on me more and more, the web interface makes buy in from the end users trivial and despite it being nice you almost never need the cool room stuff you can do with mumble.But I am a sys-admin, I like running servers, hell, I find I enjoy running the servers more than I like playing the games. Plus, statistically, I have zero-friends, it is fine to say a server is great when only one other person has used it. That is to say, my results may not be typical.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.com&#x2F;</a>

Matrix has been trivial enough for me to implement with some of my non-technical friends. YMMV

You&#x27;ve pretty much covered all the open source alternatives, other than rocket.chat which is more similar to slack. This has a good list - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@jingjunm&#x2F;the-best-alternatives-to-discord-ranked-a9deedf723b8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@jingjunm&#x2F;the-best-alternatives-to-discor...</a>If you don&#x27;t NEED the open-source, pumble and steam group chats work great too

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nostrapps.com&#x2F;flotilla" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nostrapps.com&#x2F;flotilla</a>

Check out Diode Collab. It’s private communities to join&#x2F;create, no IDs&#x2F;personal info needed, fully encrypted, and keeps your data under your control. Not a voice clone, but great if privacy and community joining&#x2F;creating is the main thing.

Diode Collab - not fully open source but network and client are all open source. It has dramatic privacy commitment (stores no data on servers, decentralized user-to-user routing, no PII&#x2F;phone&#x2F;emails). Diode team just added STUN&#x2F;TURN to the network last month and streaming will come soon. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collab.diode.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collab.diode.io</a>

Worth looking at Diode Collab too No PII, E2E encrypted, p2p. Not 1:1, but its Zones are Discord-like. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collab.diode.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collab.diode.io</a>

What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I&#x27;m currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group:- Matrix- Stoat, previously revolt (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stoat.chat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stoat.chat&#x2F;</a>)- IRC + Mumble- Signal

I have it on good authority that they really truly delete it this time, super duper pinky promise

Once it&#x27;s out there the only assumption that holds is no trust, and therefore all bets are off.

And do they really actually delete it this time?

Ah, so it was the &quot;staffer&quot; excuse.

Ah sorry our contractor did all that highly illegal stuff. Too bad we can&#x27;t pierce the corporate veil anymore... shucks.

&gt;Why they didn&#x27;t do that the first time?The company they hired to do the support tickets archived them, including attachments, rather than deleting them.

Also, _Discord_ deleting them is really only half the battle; random vendors deleting them remains an issue.

Since when the city one lives in is mentioned in the birth certificate?

Well since you have these IDs, for national security (AML, criminals and whatnot), we will need you to keep them if our endpoint says so, here&#x27;s the endpoint<pre><code> https:&#x2F;&#x2F;.gov&#x2F;print?text=true</code></pre>

&gt;&quot;Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners&quot;..Yeah, say goodbye to those the privacy and safety of those documents.

How can we even confirm that they are actually deleting them. Trust me bro vibe

&gt; The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information.This is also contradicted by what Discord actually says:&gt; Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.What are the non-most cases?

&quot;delete&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean delete anymore, like you say, there are always audit logs, and there is &quot;soft&quot; deleting.Expect any claims that things are being deleted to be a bold faced lie.

They wouldn&#x27;t _have to_, audit checks if you stick to law, your own  policies and such, but I think they will.

&gt; The ID is immediately deleted.I call it bollocks. Likely they have to keep it for audit and other purposes.

They&#x27;re a nonsense company, and trusting them with any information is foolish.
They&#x27;ll store everything and anything, because data is valuable, and won&#x27;t delete anything unless legally compelled to and held accountable by third party independent verification. This is the default.The purpose of things is what they do. They&#x27;re an adtech user data collection company, they&#x27;re not a user information securing company.

I believe the original finding was that they were not deleting IDs that were involved in disputes.

Why should we suspect the age verification and age-related appeals would involve different teams or processes?

This is corporate cover speak for “we keep all data”

Uh... EVERYONE with a Discord account has to go through age-related appeals now. That&#x27;s what the announcement is.

They explained it in their announcement at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;update-on-security-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;update-on-security-incide...</a>TL;DR: The IDs were used in age-related appeals. If someone&#x27;s account was banned for being too young they have to submit an ID as part of the appeal. Appeals take time to process and review.Discord has 200,000,000 users and age verification happens a lot due to the number of young users and different countries.

They also never say it goes through datacenters in room 641A or though Utah before it&#x27;s &quot;deleted&quot;, because it&#x27;s a US company and they can&#x27;t refuse that.

&gt; The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information.Everyone says this, including the TSA. But they never say they don&#x27;t keep a hash, or an eigenvector of your biometric. Which is equally as important.

Humm yeah, like a government digital ID of some sort. Except people go mental about that, so sending scanned copies of my personal ID documents to every bank&#x2F;solicitor&#x2F;estate agent&#x2F;mortgage broker&#x2F;random internet service it is then...

Until we have some kind of &quot;One Time ID Verification&quot; service that would work, the ID will never be deleted. Or a hash of the info or some kind of identifiable info.

Sigh, I guess it&#x27;s time to move platforms again or get your identity stolen. The more a company makes a fuss about trusting users, the more likely they store all of their shit in plaintext with vibe coded server security.

I bet the NSA does not even require their cooperation. They are probably already inside their systems.

&gt; We do not keep any information around like your nameBut they might be sending a copy to the NSA, similarly to how Alphabet, Yahoo, Apple, Meta etc. have been doing (PRISM program, part of the Snowden revelation [1]). The US has the legal mechanisms of requiring this to happen, secretly, such as NSLs [2].[1] : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PRISM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PRISM</a>[2] : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;National_security_letter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;National_security_letter</a>

Deleted from some location or purged from their entire system?&gt; We do not keep any information around... &quot;around&quot;

Here&#x27;s the October 2025 Discord data breach mentioned at the end of the article:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;c8jmzd972leo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;c8jmzd972leo</a>&gt; Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, says official ID photos of around 70,000 users have potentially been leaked after a cyber-attack.However, their senior director states in this Verge article:&gt; The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information.Why they didn&#x27;t do that the first time?

I’m always amazed that despite decades of evidence… there are people that not only don’t know that you can do anything if you say “it’s for the children” but they’ll actively support it.

Indeed, the article basically says as much in more pacifying terms:&gt; driven by an international legal push for age checks and stronger child safety measures

Children generally have these things called &quot;parents&quot; who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn&#x27;t a contradiction.

HN commenters are many. Not 1. And 1 person can believe 2 things are bad.

HN: Social media is terrible and ruining kids&#x27; mental health.Also HN: Any attempt to limit access to verified adults is an &quot;authoritarian crackdown&quot; and totally unacceptable.

Hard no. Reality is that this push is everywhere. Authoritarian governments are cracking down hard on dissent, they&#x27;re not going to leave huge platforms for communication untouched. We&#x27;ll need open source decentralized alternatives.

The difference with Reddit is it has way more persistent value. Everything on Discord is throwaway, but valuable posts on Reddit from years past are easily retrievable. The two aren&#x27;t so comparable.One of the unspoken reasons many people have for using Discord is they don&#x27;t want what they say to easily be associated with them in perpetuity. Requiring ID really chips away at that, in spite of what Discord has to say about privacy around ID.By no means am I saying that Discord will go extinct. I just haven&#x27;t observed anything about it that&#x27;s irreplaceable. Reddit, on the other hand, has a wealth of discussion dating back to the mid-to-late 00&#x27;s.

Discord has 150 million monthly active users.They’ll be fine. To them, this is just another internet boycott, with all that entails. Reddit survived a worse one and grew afterward.

Haven&#x27;t cared about Discord in a long time. In fact I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re continuing to shoot themselves in the foot.During the pandemic, I was on a Discord server for folks to socialize and blow off steam about the whole situation. Yes, there were some anti-vaxx wackos, but overall the place was civil and balanced, and I met some interesting people through it. We cracked jokes and it was a little bit of fun in a tough time.One day I came to discover that Discord had banned the server for allegedly violating... something. I wish I had written down everyone&#x27;s emails because I permanently lost contact with a bunch of friends in an instant.I never signed in to Discord again, in spite of times where some other social group wanted to use it. I vowed never to use Discord again. Fuck those guys and the Teslas they rode in on. I hope this ID verification thing is another big step towards their irrelevancy.

GeoIP this nonsense. Legal liability is solved as a &quot;good-faith effort&quot; and those living in jurisdictions where this doesn&#x27;t apply (or use a VPN) don&#x27;t need to be stripped of privacy.

There are probably enough regions where it is required or will be required soon, that it makes sense to just get it over with.The Internet is more or less becoming a locked down, controlled and fully observed thing for end users and citizens, so adapting to that world sooner and working within it is just sensible future-proofing.This also lets them more safely target older users with ads, purchase requests, etc. and new integrations for gambling and other high ROI systems.

&gt; but the implication is that the government now sees what you are using.No. The whole point of privacy preserving technology is that they don&#x27;t.The idea is that the government checks your identity (they know who you are) and give you an anonymous cryptographic proof that you are above, say, 18. They don&#x27;t know what you do with it.You give this cryptographic proof to Discord, and they know that if you have access to that proof, then you have access to someone who is above 18. They don&#x27;t know who you are.Sure, you could ask an adult to give you a token. But you can also ask an adult to buy you alcohol or to do the age verification scan for you.

Privacy preserving between you and the third party, but the implication is that the government now sees what you are using.

Discord is just the next biggest canary in the coal mine of increasing regulatory pressure in the EU, UK (which has had this Discord verification for months now due to laws there), and various US states.I do wish that the lawmakers had worked more hand-in-hand with technical exports on more privacy-preserving solutions ahead of enforcing these laws. But Discord is doing this because enforcement has already started.

I wonder if Discord is legally forced to do that, or if they would rather do it themselves (and collect the data $$$) rather than wait to be imposed a solution they don&#x27;t own.I feel like age verification will come, there is no way around it (unlike ChatControl and the likes, age verification seems reasonably feasible and has a lot of political traction right now).But I would rather have a privacy-preserving solution for that, e.g. from the government (which already knows my age).

Great news, there’s finally going to be sufficient motivation for people to both build out and use open source alternatives.

Alternative: run your own self-hosted messaging server for you, your family and friends. No company should ever get such sensitive data as private conversations.Use Discord with a throw-away account. Create a character in GTA 5 on your laptop and show its face (in &quot;selfie&quot; mode) to the web-camera on another computer with Discord open. All face scan checks so far gladly accept it. Instagram has been requiring occasional face checks for ages already.

&gt; How do you know one party isn’t 15 when the other is 25?You don&#x27;t. That&#x27;s why parents need to be involved in their children&#x27;s lives.CSAM is the easy excuse, anyway. That&#x27;s the one lawmakers use, and most people are against CSAM, myself included, so the excuse goes down easy. But the impetus they don&#x27;t talk about is monitoring and control.The answer isn&#x27;t to destroy privacy for everyone. The government and these corporations don&#x27;t need to know what you&#x27;re doing every second of the day.

They&#x27;ll now have kompromat associated with a name, address, and id number (be it social security, BSN, or whatever your country calls it)

How do you know one party isn’t 15 when the other is 25?You’re never going to convince a parent or a lawmaker or even me that this is dystopian. Seems like a perfectly reasonable safeguard.

&gt; Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. [1]That presumably includes selfies?That means that to exchange racy photos on Discord, each person must first record a facial age estimation video or upload identification documents.That seems dystopian.1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;discord-launches-teen-by-...</a>

&gt; prior fakesBut they assured me my biometrics are deleted after uploading!

There is a bit of an arms race between id verification systems and users bypassing them when AI gen. Which is really just ai generated images vs. AI generated image detection.In practice, nothing will stop it, the tooling will gradually get better at detecting prior fakes and banning those users while the newer fakes will go undetected for longer.Putting up the requirement satisfies their CYA requirements here. The race between AI fraud vs. detection is something they can just ignore and let happen on its own.

Genuine question, what is stopping users from using AI to generate a fake face or ID to bypass this restriction?

It protects the investors so they can IPO

Are they going to leak IDs of minors again like they did last time? Who does this protect exactly?

I think having kids asking if they can scan the face of their parents&#x2F;older sibling will probably give rise to some good conversations.

To be honest it kinda sounds like a benefit for my use-case. I don’t engage with adult content on there and use it for one server with friends.And this will reduce spam from random accounts. Will see if it remains usable without uploading my Id.

You have got to be kidding me. What is it with these lawmakers and websites demanding people do all of this stuff using services that nobody has ever heard of? I myself (as someone who is blind) have never been able to do the face scanning thing because the information they provide (for, you know, getting my face focused) is just massively insufficient. And a lot of the ones I&#x27;ve seen also require me to (as an alternative) do some weird ID scanning with my camera instead of, you know, just allowing me to upload my ID or something? (Then again, I really wouldn&#x27;t want to give my ID to some service nobody has ever heard of either, so there.) I also am concerned when tfa says &quot;a photo of an identity document&quot; what does this mean? If I have to scan my ID with my camera, that&#x27;s not exactly going to be simple for me to pull off. I get that we need to protect kids, but this is not the way. Not when it is discrimination by another name for individuals with disabilities (as just one example).

I foresee Discord receiving a lot of identification documents from the likes of Ben Dover

Can&#x27;t wait to send my id to the cheapest identification provider they could find.

Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;discord-launches-teen-by-...</a>

I&#x27;m generally opposed to services unnecessarily wanting IDs, content filtering for direct messages from my contacts, unwanted popups (it&#x27;s already annoying when my friends send me a link to a site I haven&#x27;t visited from discord before and it &quot;warns&quot; me and you cannot disable this entirely useless popups), and things generally becoming worse.A lot of these things are normalized already, but requiring IDs is not and I don&#x27;t want to see it become normalized.Ultimately, they are free to do what they like (or perhaps being unnecessarily pressured by various govts) and I am free to leave the service.

What am I missing? According to this, the only difference is you get a warning popup when someone new DMs you, right? And they can&#x27;t send you images flagged as porn?How does this impact you in any way?

It will impact me since I&#x27;ve decided to go with plan C ahead of time. Hard to keep track of everything every company does, but I&#x27;d rather not use a service that is unnecessarily aggregating facial scans + IDs of its users.

You don&#x27;t have to make excuses for corporate decisions that damage user privacy.

If all you use Discord for is chatting with 3 people, these changes will have zero impact on you and your daily usage. You wont ever see an ID prompt.

this is hilarious, person who barely uses service says he will leave the service, what a concept

I talk to three people on Discord. If I have to choose between A) giving Discord my ID, B) giving Discord a fraudulent ID, or C) just chatting with them on some other program, I&#x27;ll just go with C. If I cared about Discord more I guess I&#x27;d figure out B. May get started with C ahead of time anyway.

I&#x27;m afraid the thing that would be replacing Discord will be even worse

We use Jitsi for voice&#x2F;video calls + screen sharing (but I realise you may be talking about all-in-one alternatives)

XMPP and IRC are great and all but a massive part of what people use Discord for is group voice calls with screen-sharing. I&#x27;m not sure what the alternative is for that. TeamSpeak is the closest I can think of but it&#x27;s not a 1:1 replacement for a number of reasons.

I think it is more likely that the next best platform will end up gaining three principled civil libertarians and about seven zillion witches.

IRC is a much more impoverished chat experience than Discord&#x2F;Slack in a bunch of ways. Suggesting that people &quot;get back on IRC&quot; is not a serious proposal for making it possible for groups of people to chat online without being subject to identity verification or censorship.

It&#x27;s a relief to finally read that Discord is indirectly shutting down and getting rid of it&#x27;s users. It was inevitable but dragged out far too long with all the VC money to burn. Hopefully everyone can figure out how to use XMPP and&#x2F;or get back on IRC. It is a genuine shame how much culture and information will be lost inside their walled garden though.

This is just the latest in a long trend of increasing spying on users. Why bother having to guess who your user is, or fingerprint a browser if you can just force them to show you their national ID?This is transparently about spying on people, not &quot;protecting children&quot;. The real world doesn&#x27;t require you to show your ID to every business you frequent, or every advertiser you walk by. Someone can yell a swear word on the sidewalk, and not everyone within ear shot has to show ID.

I predict out-of-the-box deepfake live-camera software will get a bump in popularity, there&#x27;s already plenty solutions available that need minimal tinkering. It should be trivial to set up for the purpose of verification and I don&#x27;t see those identity verification providers being able to do anything about it. Of course, that&#x27;ll only mean stricter verification through ID only later on, much to the present-and-future surveillance state&#x27;s benefit.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hacksider&#x2F;Deep-Live-Cam" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hacksider&#x2F;Deep-Live-Cam</a>

At least this would make FAQs and other important bits of information available to non-users and search engines.

I&#x27;m being completely serious, but what is the current fav open source forum software these days? I&#x27;d love to host a forum for a small community I&#x27;m involved in. Not a stranger to hosting other things across a variety of stacks, so I&#x27;m not particular about technology used.

Running phpBB on some crappy shared hosting. Well, these days on some crappy VPS.

I gave up running my TS3 servers (after nearly a decade) because they added a trialware system that required getting approval&#x2F;serial code from the company every month to continue operating. They were squeezing everyone on TS3 trying to force them to TS4&#x2F;5&#x2F;etc. Have they stopped this or walked it back?And to be clear, Teamspeak from version 5 on is not teamspeak. It&#x27;s matrix with a skin. Not that that&#x27;s terrible, but it&#x27;s not great for running it on low power&#x2F;cost VPS like actual teamspeak was.

Those are voice chat, yeah? Discord has chat too, which is used more than voice in many of my communities.

That would be great if your community only exists in a voip channel

I had a look at Teamspeak but you need to email somebody for permission to have more than 32 users on your server.

TeamSpeak and Ventrillo still work great. It was a monumental mistake to switch to these 3rd party services that are bugged by every intelligence apparatus on earth.

&gt; Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! &gt;:(There&#x27;s an actively developed open source server that allows the clients to connect!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mk6i&#x2F;open-oscar-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mk6i&#x2F;open-oscar-server</a>I wish Smarter Child was still around so we could see how LLMs interact with it.

Seconding campfire. Straightforward, easy to host, easy to backup, no monetization strategy. Most self-hosted alternatives have complicated deployments to enable scaling to &gt;1,000s of users which I will never, ever need.

Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! &gt;:(Jokes aside, I&#x27;ve played around with Campfire and it&#x27;s very, very simple, but pretty nice to use and easy to set up: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;once.com&#x2F;campfire" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;once.com&#x2F;campfire</a>

Yeah Stoat is the closest, but no video calling still. But that&#x27;s in the pipeline at least

People talking about moving to Revolt. It&#x27;s the most similar

our groups are discussing [stoat](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stoat.chat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stoat.chat&#x2F;</a>).I don&#x27;t know it well yet........yet.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;discord-launches-teen-by-...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;safety&#x2F;how-discord-is-building-safer-experiences-for-teens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;safety&#x2F;how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...</a>

Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month