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I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts.

Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with their identity.

Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are:

- Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade.

- Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)

- Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about data protection, identity, etc.

- It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and maintainable codebase that ~1500 people have successfully contributed code to. I don't think you'll find modern alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going out of business.

- We are a values-focused organization (https://zulip.com/values/) where providing a public service is important to us all.

- Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is free for community use and soon to be E2EE).

I'm happy to answer any questions.

I recently moved a small community group from Slack to Zulip. Half because of the UX for infrequent visitors (topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"). And half because of your organisational values, which are more aligned with ours than are those of Salesforce.

The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has that in spades - which makes me not want to exit.

Thank you for the work you do. Hanging out in CZO watching the Zulip team work in public is inspiring!

> topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"

my experience is exact opposite

> Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)

Could you expand on this?

Slack has basically one main hierarchy level (messages are grouped into channels) while Zulip has two, streams and topics. So you can create a stream for each project (say) and create a different topic for any given point that needs discussion about that project.

Kind of like if each slack thread discussion had a title and was discoverable from the left sidebar and didn’t get in the way of the other threads.

This is great to hear and ironically we (Pidgin) just decided that Zulip was going to be the next protocol we were going to add support for just barely 24 hours ago before all this Discord nonsense!

https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/1...

What’s the state of accessibility on Zulip?

(Thanks for making Zulip, I love it)

Does your app pass the grandma and quarterback test? Can I get my grandma and the group's jock/quaterback to use it without handholding?

I'd say so, especially if you start on desktop and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video. We are satisfied with what we see with our internal usability studies with nontechnical users.

Among customers, one reference that I can quickly cite is this one:

https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/

> Agents at GUT contact use Zulip every day to communicate with their team leads. “Most of our agents are in their 60s or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That’s why we love Zulip,” says Erik Dittert, who’s been leading GUT contact’s IT team for the past 20 years.

I would recommend doing a little training/handholding call/video when moving over a community -- but this is true for any new app.

My mom needed training to do basic things in Squarespace, and I had a friend who worked at Slack whose manager started every chat message with "Hi <name>" and ended it with a signature, like you would an email. :)

    > and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video

That's an automatic fail.

> start on desktop

Echoing this. Navigation is better and clearer on desktop. The mobile apps works really well once you know what you're doing. Part of onboarding into Zulip is being able to get an "overview" of the community and the discussions that are currently happening, and this is easier on desktop.

In my experience, the median user for communication apps is mobile _only_. Before that, it better be a website that works well on phones, and decently on desktop.

As a developer I don't like it, but reality doesn't have to appease me.

Data point of one: in my small community group that has moved to Zulip we do have a grandma contributing. No jocks though so I can't speak to that.

I would also like to note that Slack did not pass the grandma test in our case. I highly doubt that Discord would given how hyperactive the UI is.

As a software engineer who's had to interact with Discord only a handful of times, I had no idea when other people could hear me or where I had to click to find people I was looking for.

How does Zulip compare to Campfire and Stoat (and other FOSS) efforts? How is onboarding for non-tech people?

What is the video calling and screen share experience like?

Why zulip instead of the good ol' IRC?

It has modern features. It stores message history. It has a fairly unique feature of letting you create ad-hoc "topics" (that go under a "Channel") that make it easier to manage the flood of conversation.

1: IRC loses all messages to you while you are not connected

Not for years. If that is still the case for you, ask your server hosts to update to a version that supports ircv3

Thank you! Zulip is a great project.

Sold

Looking for your features but no voice chat, no screen sharing, no deal.

Looks like it has integration with Jitsi Meet https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi

It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.

Rules for thee, free love for me.

People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off, there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them.

What is interesting is that, as demonstrated by mass media and social media’s influences over our politics in the last century we can be motivated, but we have let power become too concentrated in the wrong hands.

China’s qualifications for influencers thing is interesting by fundamentally doesn't address the power of social media publishers.

Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.

And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1) control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the contrapositive is also true.

> Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.

1. No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-impossible to accurately and objectively judge the present-value of many types of assets. Even the case most-familiar to working-class folks, property taxes, nobody really likes/trusts the outcome.

2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual transactions between people with "skin in the game" are harder to fake. The extent to which wages are preferred as a subset of income is separate from the wealth-vs-income split.

> control inflation

I think you are confusing cost inflation with an increase in the money supply. The way the US government funds deficit spending is not by increasing money supply (though it could) but by issuing debt in the form of US Treasury bonds. That is a transfer of money from bond investors to the government. No new money is made. This is distinct from the way that banks issue loans which is by creating new money in the form of credit (but that credit money gets "burned" as loan principal is paid back). So federal taxes do not actually control inflation in the way you are describing. Since federal deficit spending is not financed by increasing the money supply, it can only cause price inflation if it increases aggregate demand over the current productive capacity of the economy. An example would be paying more for healthcare subsidies when there's a shortage of doctors. Or subsidizing demand for housing with more mortgage subsidies when there's a housing shortage. Taxes could also increase inflation if they have the effect of reducing supply of some goods or services (like tariffs do).

Edit: I want to mention that the Federal Reserve can and does increase money supply by buying US Treasury Bonds from banks (converting the asset into cash reserves). There are various reasons why they do this but overall it's done with their dual mandate in mind: control inflation and minimize unemployment.

People treat US treasuries as money in some contexts therefore it can be considered part of the money supply and a cause for inflation.

Degrees of liquidity matter as M1 vs M2 vs M3 etc don’t all impact inflation in the same way, but there is an impact.

> Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands?

Except for the fact that, without first solving the problem you responded to, yours is impossible to solve

With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it's already not that easy to walk it back :-/

It would be so nice of that tax was actually "burned"(similar to proof of stake), instead of being used to fund even greater inflation. This comes in the form of a huge administration, which gets payed for providing, many times, negative value. Alternatively, it is used to pay social benefits for the sole purpose of keeping the current political party in power.

> Alternatively, it is used to pay social benefits for the sole purpose of keeping the current political party in power

This sounds like a 2-party government problem, not a tax problem. Plenty of countries do just fine spending that money to provide healthcare, unemployment, etc to their citizenry. Only really seems to be the US that views this as a negative

Oh we spend that money, just on weapons or handouts to the welfare class known as the ultrawealthy.

Us does spend the money on healthcare, it is just very inefficient. US government spends much more per capita than any other country. 50% than the #2 country, Germany.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

I am amazed. What an incredible statement!

The USA is very corrupt, true. But getting rid of the "huge administration" and burning tax receipts is not going to solve that. How could it?

One of the roles of the state in a modern society should be to ensure no one is left behind to starve, wither and freeze amongst the incredible resources we (as a society) have accumulated.

That takes administration. That takes resources. That is what your taxes should be used for.

I agree that far too much is used to give aid to the powerful, but the solution to that should not be to condemn the weak.

Burning taxes and de-funding the administration is exactly that: condemning the weak.

Sure, it’s easy to tax “wealth”. Except most wealth today is of the type where Alice owns 10 million Y and Bob decided to pay $1000 for one Y. Alice cannot possibly sell her Y for near that price, but now she will be taxed on “wealth” of $10 billion.

If someone takes a loan out against an unrealized gain, that should immediately trigger a tax event.

The real solution though is for the legislative branch to not be beholden to those same people and be able to quickly and effectively close tax loopholes as they are discovered.

That would instantly wipe out most leverage from the stock market, and from a casual bystander perspective, it would be a great thing.

> If someone takes a loan out against an unrealized gain, that should immediately trigger a tax event.

How does that work when a house is used as collateral on a loan? Or artwork?

The loans are just a symptom, the problem is in the Estate Tax, and those loans are being used as a tool to wait out the clock and then dodge dynastic taxes entirely.

Remove the final loophole, and they'll stop playing weird games to get there all on their own. Plus it'll be way less-disruptive to everyone involves in regular loans for regular reasons.

There is not a loophole. When you die your loans get paid off first. The money to pay off these loans would be taxed. It could delay paying taxes until you die, but you can't escape it.

Agreed. This would get rid of borrow against gains to spend tax free. But also just get rid of the income tax, it is the worst way to tax, and do a land value tax.

There's a very simple solution to that problem. Tax Alice in Y rather than in $.

How would this work with real-estate? Probably the Y that should be taxed the most when we're talking about wealth.

So it would fix false valuation shenanigans too? I see that as a win/win.

Maybe we need a debt jubilee then.

Who says you need to tax the whole wealth if it in form of Ys?

We all know that 10 million Ys maybe not sold for $10 billion dollars but it gives you enough leverage to buy a social network and name it Y

you can tax stock without taxing inventory.

Also the term "asset" exists and is used in accounting

> you can tax stock without taxing inventory.

How? What is the difference between "stock" and "inventory"?

Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.

This is overly simplistic. Most economic activity is not related to the government at all. Taxation can slow economic growth and inflation, but the government running at a deficit or surplus is neither a cause or a solution for inflation but rather a byproduct of multiple aspects of government policy.

Wealthy people own assets, not money. Stealing their assets doesn't reduce the money supply. Elon Musk is "rich" mainly in paper wealth.

Taxes raise inflation as they increase the production costs. If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave, and take their capital away to invest it elsewhere. This as a result will lead to inflation due to lack of available capital for production.

> If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave

Are we not tired yet of the various versions of the Reaganomics boogieman? When are we going to grow out of trickle down economics mentality?

The issue isn't representation, it's division. The party that won is being well represented with respect to the values of their constituents, whereas the opposition views it as a daily nightmare. These two visions of the world cannot be reconciled.

Representation needs to be less about black/white political ideology and more about the specific needs of various people. Farmers need representation, white color workers need representation, small business owners need representation, but their needs are all different, and don’t really boil down to left/right politics. The government isn’t treated as a forum to collaborate on solving problems, but as a playground for the powerful to create boogeymen that get people riled up.

> white color workers need representation [...]

Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup. jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"

I agree while also disagreeing. It feels to me like the Democrats seemingly always get their way while in power while Republican presidents with a congressional majority get little to nothing done.

To me they have the classic problem as with non-profits: “If we solve the problem we cease to have a cause to exist.”

Taking a look at what’s been accomplished this past year, it’s a lot of token Executive Orders on renaming things, a token deportation effort, no material change on mass legal immigration, nothing happening on the voter ID front.

It’s just theater until they lose out in the midterms and they to rally their base again in 2028 to “Save America” or “Keep It Great” or whatever hokum.

Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.

The Republicans this term have gotten plenty done, it's just nothing that helps average people. Their wins can't be widely celebrated and so they aren't, as much.

https://www.project2025.observer/

I would say one side is being told that they should believe it a daily nightmare, e.g. people on the right really disliking obamacare but loving the aca.

The problem in America is that more than half the country does not live in a shared factual reality. Like:

* Jan 6 was a fedsurrection, and also simultaneously all innocent people that needed pardoning (Pardoning the feds?)

* World Liberty Financial receiving billions selling out American interests worldwide? Never heard of this but Burisma was worse!

* The Raffensperger call was no big deal there were attorneys on that call. Trump's personal (now disbarred) attorneys, of course, not there to represent America's interests but how's that the big deal?

* Also who's Raffensperger? But did you see those boxes under the table! What do you mean the clip is longer than 6 seconds that's all I saw on the infinity scrolling apps.

There is one reality that's undeniable: that political donations by individuals are strictly monitored and can land you in jail if violated, but PAC money is untraceable and unlimited. That fact alone has led to stacking the deck in favor of lobbyists and monied interests at the expense of the electorate and national institutions.

I assume you mean Citizens United v FEC. Should they not have been allowed to release their documentary? Its not an easy question and there's a reason none of the dissents directly address Roberts' opinion.

I’m not a lawyer and won’t address the merits or lack thereof of the ruling on the particulars of the case. The effect of the ruling was a sweeping change in money in politics. It effectively legalized an oligarchic take over of governance. It’s a fact that money and advertising largely determine outcomes in battleground races. Tipping those races, along with the structural power imbalance in federal politics, means that control of the government is relatively easy and cheap.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/15-years-after-c...

This comment is not well-formatted and a bit "zomg", but an important mention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...

This is the infamous call where Trump, according to the recorded tapes, tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results by demanding that Raffensperger "find 11,780 votes".

My solution for this is to rate-limit political contributions --- they may only be made in an amount equal to what a minimum-wage worker might reasonably be expected to donate from a week's wages (say 10% of hourly min. wage * 40), as a physically written out check or money order physically signed by hand (at least an "X" mark) and mailed in a first-class envelope with at least a similarly signed cover letter explaining the reason for the donation.

If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm fine with that.

Most of the money in politics isn't direct contribution to candidates, it's PACs.

PACs are just groups that do advocacy of some sort. Some do things like advise congress people on legislation they'd like passed, some run ads to campaign for positions or candidates, some advocate for movements.

What they're not supposed to be doing is directly coordinating with a candidate, or running ads just for a candidate. But that's a line that has been continually fuzzed.

An example of a good PAC might be something like the HRC (human rights commission) that campaigns for LGBTQ rights.

This is the central problem with Citizens United. The supreme court tends to be unusually deferential with 1A cases and ruled that infinite money can go into formally unaffiliated PACs. Undoing this would require activist judges or a constitutional amendment.

Activist judges?

The supreme court is majority activist judges. Why cant new judges undo the old activist judges wrongly decided law? Why are the other new judges suddenly activists?

PACs and dark money have been a disaster for this country

These days instead of paying out politicians you just buy social media bots or even the whole platform to push propaganda to the general public so they start agreeing with you.

What's to prevent them from just ignoring those restrictions?

Bundling would get around that to some extent

1 check would require 2 x marks and 1 envelope and 1 stamp (or other indicia) --- just paying minimum-wage folks for stuffing envelopes and making "X"s would probably result in this being equivalent to a job creation program, and it would probably save the USPS.

Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the federal government and devolving power to the states, communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the negative effects of humans with too much authority.

This assumes that govt and individual families are the only players in the game. Now as in other historical periods large corporations hold arguably more power than either of those groups and reining in govt leaves little obstacle to them consolidating even more power and wielding it globally.

Reducing the size of the government just makes it where billionaires and corporations control everything instead, which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign in their power/wealth as well.

+1... Reducing government is part of power reduction, not the sum total. To reduce the size of government you need to reduce the size of things it manages. So, for instance, anti-trust would need a huge buf in enforcement to eliminate concentrations of power in business. I'd think strongly progressive inheritance tax would cover the rest.

Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power

Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.

You can't find that because any concentration of power means the corruption forces have only very limited surface to pressure, and all the more that surface is actually easy to swap with one molded for even more corruption convenience.

People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved into alien agendas on which they have no agency.

In countries like the US and UK with FPTP voting systems, proportional representation would help a lot. As it would make it a lot more viable for candidates outside of the main two parties to stand (and actually have a chance of winning).

(although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads at the expense of the more established Conservative and Labour parties)

FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done. Too much compromise in decision making is bad.

Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes it very easy for those people to be removed. This is typically the model that works best in business and other cooperative pursuits anyway.

Throwing more people in the room with different opinions will ensure significant decisions can almost never made. Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by centrists who can't really change anything and anything they do change will be disliked by everyone.

Great idea, except that I don't think it's easy to make sure we don't grant too much power. Basically this idea is the core of representative democracy. Problem is, the people who have been granted a lot of power are very good at finding loopholes to avoid or remove the safeguards we put in place...

Which is exactly why we need a strong federation, and broad participation in democratic process across the bank. Many people can't even be bothered to vote, much less participate in their local, municipal governments. That must change.

It’s easy to solve concentration of power, just distribute it more. Nowadays we can have quite large distributed systems.

It’s nigh impossible to invent a system that truly formalizes collective will with the goal of optimizing for everyone’s best long-term interests, minimizing unhappiness.

100% agree, and I think that's sort of what was intended with a lot of democratic government setups. What we fail to realize though (or maybe just remember) is that these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want more power always looking for attack surfaces. (We seem to be under attack by almost all, if not all, current billionaires!)

For example in the US, the executive order is a massive problem. Citizens united as well. And for all democracies the natural appeal of strongman politics is a huge problem.

Every attempt at government overreach really needs to be questioned. I don't say rejected, just questioned. How will it be used by future powers? Is the tradeoff worth it? Can it be temporary? Do we even have a way to claw it back if it turns out to be detrimental? Is it too subtle and nuanced that the majority will miss seeing it? etc.

Except it's very easy to "sell" government overreach. Whenever a plane flies into a tower, or flu season is extra scary, people will clamor for strict government authority. With every such event, the government gains capabilities and tendencies that always end up with a few people having outsized power over the masses.

Yes, but I don't think it's so straightforward. I think there are bad actors marketing this overreach. Like the surveillance industry for the Patriot Act (tech, defence, telcom, maybe compliance vendors?). I don't think their goal is to create a distopia, but we should always be looking at incentives for large government programs.

It is straightforward, and very predictable. Bad actors, aren't an anomaly.

> these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want more power

I think this is an inherent human problem that prevents us from overcoming it... history has proven that the more equal everyone is, and the less individual ownership they have, the lazier and more bored they get.

Look at the previous attempts at socialism... people stop caring when there's no goal to work towards, they can't all be doing the same thing and just be happy, because humans are naturally competitive. We desire things other people don't have, like possessions, money, or power.

Is there a way to accept but also limit greed that is reliable and durable?

Like a pragmatic meritocracy. We accept that there will be cheaters, and we won't catch or stop them all, but we have some hard limits. Do we care if you stop working so hard once you hit $1b? Maybe we'd even prefer that you did stop working (against societies interest!)?

This wouldn't even remotely resemble the communism bugaboo. It's basically saying, yes greed can be good, but at some point it gets ridiculous.

In capitalism, the rich get powerful; in socialism, the powerful get rich.

[dead]

Post Citizens United, that’s going to require a Constitutional amendment.

And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would need to ratify it.

Let's not act like they weren't corrupt and bought before Citizens United

This is unhelpful fatalism and actively dissuades reform. Not all politicians are "corrupt and bought". And further, there is an enormous difference before and after this Supreme Court decision.

It costs money to run for office. Before Citizens United, it was hard, limited, traceable donations, from individuals. No corporations, no soft money, no legal dark money. Now money has flooded in, with far less accountability.

[dead]

You either win big enough under the current system, with its system problems, or you never win to improve it.

Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping.

And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept.

The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate.

If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.

You can't have truly representative government if the people voting don't understand or care that they're not being represented particularly well.

It is apparently not much of a risk to your seat if you don't represent the interests of your people because the people have become tribal and it is only their tribe they vote for with very little effective criticism of the leaders in their tribe. (it's not that complaints are nonexistent, they just don't result in anything)

I think this is entirely the wrong way to think about this. While better elected representatives and officials would always be a nice thing, what we need is to ensure that we design systems around them that mitigate their corruption and double standards. We were even (collectively, across humanity) doing better and better at that until not that long ago.

We need regulations on the politicians because, clearly, their "public good use" far exceeds their contribution back.

I didn't really mean "regulations" but more a political (and civic) system in which a given individual's corruption etc. gets caught quickly and/or there are too many disincentives for them to to do much based on it.

Term limits for congress.

And age limits for congress.

>there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them

The hard part is this has been true going all the way back to the stone age ever since we elevated the first person arbitrarily to chief. There has been no model of government developed since that is immune to this. I really don't know how to get around this and it depresses me that we will always be held back by the slimiest who abuse systems.

Sortation.

Sortition?

That's a lot of work to do. It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged.

Corruption is happening out in the open and there's still so many people shrugging in response. One good push back from everyone all at once would fix a lot of things quickly. But that implies the people are united and not instead driven into manufactured conflict by said interested parties. It's basically enough that we're in a post truth era as of now. I don't know how we come back from that

Anyways, repealing Citizens United would be a good first step.

> It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged.

That, and the fact winning a senate seat costs on average $26.53 million [1]

You can't self-fund, that's 152 years of your $174,000 salary.

Where do you suppose the money comes from, and what do you suppose motivates the donors?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...

[warning/apology - this comment regards USpol specifically]

Our media landscape has people focusing on basically everything except what we need to be. I am not sure that liberal democracy will survive the information age. So much effort goes into the process of argument, we aren't as a whole really thinking about how to solve our very real problems.

China's technocratic rule, after some, shall we say, growing pains (hunger pains? Is it fair to say that when millions of people starved to death?), seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power.

One of my great fears is that democracy was the right model in the past decades and centuries, but that it won't keep up with the laser focused technocratic rule that a competent bureaucracy can potentially muster.

Authoritarian governments are always more efficient than democracies. Their flaw is that citizens have no say in what goal will be efficiently pursued. When a technocratic authoritarian is in power, things improve overall (but there are still many "inefficient" people left behind or crushed). But when a cruel or incompetent authoritarian takes control, things hit lows that sound democracies wouldn't allow. Lows that take generations to recover from.

While I like your message here, I don't think authoritarianism is actually more efficient (efficient at what?) usually. Because often it goes hand in hand with economic and social extraction, which is inherently inefficient.

But I take and am a bit heartened by your main point - while the best case authoritarian regime can plan and execute more quickly and with greater efficiency than representative government, the worst case authoritarian govt is much much worse than the worst case possible with a functional democracy.

> China's technocratic rule…seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power.

This requires that those in/with the power actually have altruistic, or at least not solely selfish, concerns. How rampant is government/bureaucratic corruption in China?

I elided the population starving part in order to not distract from the possibility of truly selfless governance strategy. It may very well be the case that millions starving is considered "acceptable losses" ("the needs of the billions outweigh the needs of the millions") in executing on that strategy. Which, make no mistake, would be truly tragic and should be undesirable. But that not everyone sees it that way is really what we're fighting against.

"I have a machine that feeds everyone, no one shall go hungry."

"But mah profits!"

"You only need profits so you yourself can eat, but that's now a solved problem"

"But mah profits. How will we know who's winning?"

Corruption definitely happens in China but even as a US person I can think of at least one major case where there were very real consequences for that. How many US govt officials have been executed for corruption? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zaiyong

Millions starving during the Great Leap forward was very much NOT part of the plan, it was the result of some very misguided agricultural practices.

My point is that in the same period, China has gone from "oops we accidentally caused the 2nd largest mass starvation event in history" to "we have the largest high speed rail network and manufacturing base in the world and nobody is even close."

While the US went from "what's a postwar superpower to do? How bout some megaprojects?" To "I'm drowning in entitlements and houses now cost the same as the average lifetime GDP per capita".

Colossally awful take. Corruption is an intractable problem in human history. Power is a magnet for the worst people, and every system we invent can be exploited in innumerable ways. The only variable is how long the people of any individual society can remain free and prosperous before their decline. Temporary recoveries have only happened by lopping off massive chunks of empire, implementing extreme monetary reforms, and/or a switch to full autocracy. Every other outcome is terminal decline.

It’s not irony. It’s by design. Politics is for controlling people. Rules don’t apply to rulers. No one cares about children or anything. Even manipulating the public opinion is outdated. Technology helps them to control. Freedom is an illusion today. We are not free anymore.

Politics is simply how a society governs itself. Whether or not a society values the rules being enforce to rulers is itself politics. Dismissing politics like this is how we end up with exactly the problem of rules not applying to rulers.

Get involved with politics. Be part of politics. That is how freedom is earned & maintained.

Technology might be one half, but the other half is demographics.

40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas.

Nowadays, our societies are old on average (especially the politically powerful).

Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.

> 40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas.

The government generated most of those too. As technology became more capable they utilized it more but that doesn't mean they were standing around with their hands in their pockets prior to that.

> Nowadays, our societies are old on average

Do they have an unfair access to technology? If not then does this actually have any impact?

> Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.

In your experience perhaps. I doubt the reliability of this logic.

The gates have already been closed at the pasture's edge.

Moo.

What do you mean day by day.

We have known this to be the case, for quite some time, yet majority of the public still thought that a convicted felon was good enough to be president.

I think that's the exact irony that the parent is eluding to.

It's all about the kids, unless, idk, you're rich enough?

Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth[1] lies squarely in the center of the foundational belief that those who've acquired such means have done so because they reflect "the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished."

It takes only a brief glimpse of the real world and its most wealthy to recognize that an abundance of virtue is not what's reflected in reality. In fact, the benevolence Carnegie describes, serves as a smoke screen for cruelty, degenerate acts, and the slaughterhouse of the soul. We've sold out every moral for a bait and switch and it's well past time to reneg on the social contract.

1. https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/

Andrew Carnegie wrote and lived in an era without an income tax. In that era rich men were expected to be broadly philanthropic, to steward their wealth for the good of the common, to act with generosity and responsibility. Because the state did not provide a safety net, the wealthy faced immense social pressure to act as stewards of the public good.

In today's era those expectations do not exist. The public-facing, gilded age palaces, which by their public nature tend to enforce good behavior by forcing them to physically interact with the society they profited from, have been replaced by private, gated bunkers behind tall hedges blurred out on Google Maps. The wealthy wear jeans and hoodies to "blend in" or appear common, when they are very much not. A rail tycoon in a 10X beaver tophat might offer a beggar something on the street. A tech mogul in a hoody might not even get solicited.

Income tax - and broadly speaking many other changes to the social contract between upper and lower classes, like the bureaucratization of welfare - has not just allowed but incentivized the wealthy to shirk the responsibilities of old, and outsource their morality to a (corrupt, as many have pointed out) government. And it's not good. There is no honor in giving anymore.

If we repeal the income tax, virtue will return to the wealthy.

Is that something you believe?

Improbable. It's hard to un-ring a bell once rung. Was adding critical context to the Carnegie citation.

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Are you really asking this? For real?

You're shooting the messenger.

I think you've got that quote backwards. In full it reads:

> Unequally or unjustly, perhaps, as these laws sometimes operate, and imperfect as they appear to the Idealist, they are, nevertheless, like the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.

Or (to shorten it a bit): "These laws (of capitalism) [...] are nevertheless [..] the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished". So this is only an unlimited belief in the virtues of capitalism, not in the virtues of rich people.

From the introduction:

> Carnegie believed in giving wealth away during one’s lifetime, and this essay includes one of his most famous quotes, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” Carnegie’s message continues to resonate with and inspire leaders and philanthropists around the world.

I really wonder what Carnegie would think about his successors dismantling USAID?

I believe the connection he was making was that the laws, results, and people profiting from the system all represent the best of humanity. That said, whether read forwards or backwards, the point still stands. I appreciate your attention to detail.

It's all about the kids when you need a certain segment of the population to vote a certain way.

It's never about kids. If they cared about kids, they would have school lunch and wouldn't starve.

It's about control and monitoring of civilians. And creating a dragnet to ensnare any new politicians and business leaders.

Freedom of speech is insufficient. We need freedom of privacy and from monitoring and tracking.

Only 22% of the public voted for Trump.

That is the uncharitable interpretation. I think it is at least as likely that voters consistently get to chose between a turd sandwich and a giant douche, so it will always be possible to accuse them of preferring a terrible candidate.

Also, nitpick: it was neither a majority of the public, or a majority of the eligible voting population, or even a majority of the people who voted.

I think a really good first step, at least in the US, towards making our candidate selection better would be to mandate open primaries.

I think your interpretation is uncharitable. One of the options is a fraud and a pedophile and the other wasn’t. They absolutely were not equally bad.

This is the most uncharitable take and common of the people who try to play the middle or wave away their decision to vote for Trump.

The decision was quite literally between a known criminal and already even at the time known to be likely pedophile (and now it's basically a fact) and someone who is none of that.

Peter Mandelson was pushing very hard for digital ID cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006

It is kind of obvious that once someone reaches such a power they should be monitored all the time.

Criminality among the rich and the politically connected is off the charts. It’s way beyond any group of immigrants for example that these same people are trying to demonize.

Chat control? Every single politician should have that on their phone.

I think politicians should be the least privileged people in a society except those in prison. Any protections or exceptions for them alone are unconstitutional.

They will have that exception on their phones.

> that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.

In most cases a lot more than simply "hanging out".

I think it's wild you would make that connection for this topic

These are literally _the same people_.

Musk was hanging out with child sex trafficker and is allowing kids to create porn with grok on X.

He is allowing a lot worse version. Allowing adults to create child porn with grok on X.

And, further, that all the child rape was coordinated, for the most part, in the clear over fucking Gmail.

But we have to decrypt everything to protect the kids.

Just like how you learn that all black men are criminals when you see a few of them committing crimes!

You're really pulling your punches there.

I'm fine with the free love and debauchery, but just really keep it to adults and be safe.

'I'm fine with extreme indulgence, but just really keep it restrained and be safe.'

By definition, debauchery with durable constraints can't be normalized, as its appeal is the overstepping of norms.

There's also an argument to be made that normalizing debauchery invites scope creep.

I'm just going to go ahead and say that "free love" is a terribly inappropriate way to refer to sex trafficking, regardless of the age of the victims, unless you're being facetious (e.g., The Onion's "Penis Goofin'" allegations against Epstein).

I’m going to suggest re-reading the top level comment and the GP’s response. I don’t see anyone suggesting non-facetiously that free love and sex trafficking are synonymous nor that sex trafficking of adults is acceptable. I think the top level poster is being facetious; such a view is how these creeps might think. I think the respondent is, intentionally or mistakenly, ignoring that context and using the term at face value.

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I hope this time it really sinks in that law and rules are only for the little man. Time to think about the system from scratch.

What makes you think next time will be different?

Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up in the same place.

The problem is not them. The problem is us.

> Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up in the same place.

The optimistic take is that this phenomenon is a characteristic of the _emergence_ of an information age (through the agricultural and industrial ages), and will no longer be true of the internet-connected human.

it has never been about children.

do as we say, not as we do

It's useful to point out hypocrisy, but are you suggesting we shouldn't try to protect kids because of Jeffrey Epstein?

> It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.

They are hypocrites. In the UK there are hundreds of thousands of girls who have been raped between the 1990s and now (17 000 cases of sexual exploitation in the UK in the year 2024 alone). At least one UK politician refer to the girls who've been raped as "white trash" and recently people are shocked because many are implying that these girls, who are typically mass-raped, have been considered to be consenting.

It's known for a fact they tried to bury the story once it's been revealed. Turns out the same method is used by these grooming gangs in countless cities nearly all across the UK.

It's not just that the richest and most powerful do frequent child sex trafficker: it's that many politicians and judges all over the west are totally fine closing their eyes on the mass raping of girls (some boys are victims of rapes too but it's mostly girls).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal

> Rules for thee, free love for me.

Rules for thee, free love for me and for my voters base.

I am not a native English speaker, I may be missing a cultural nuance, but I wouldn't call any of what they did love. That word enters nowhere in a sickening child abuse island.

it's just sarcasm.

and they keep protecting the pedos from prosecution. lol.

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I don't recall the Bible saying much about who to vote for, given that democracy wasn't much of a thing in the ancient middle east.

So you're saying people talking about some particular god are highly moral and not involved in crimes, including crimes on children?

It's a question of scale. Neither crime is less serious but far more children are groomed and abused over Discord than flown in via some super rich sicko's private jet for a 'costume party'.

Making everyone "teens by default" fixes none of that, though. Roblox spaces aren't exactly 18+

This is no worse than Discord just banning NSFW content wholesale throughout the platform (which they would be entirely within their rights to do). It's a big fat nothingburger.

I'm sure the owners of Tumblr thought the same.

The owners of Tumblr thought being banned from the app store was certain death, but losing the nsfw content was only possible death.

It would be in their rights to do it.

Its users who value their privacy will be in their rights to leave and we will.

They have a right to ask for my passport and SSN. And I have a right to say "hell no" and delete my account in response.

It's not a nothingburger; it's a massive collection of personally identifying information.

Especially by the company already involved in a leak of a massive trove of pictures, personal details (including IDs), etc: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

What could possibly go wrong this time...

Except it is scarily easy to find servers which openly have minors selling NSFW content. Or BDSM servers targeted at "14-28 year olds".

he was convicted of soliciting prostitution (not of minors), right?

why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew the details of what he did wrong?

This article was on the front page recently: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9534

So at least some lay people easily realized he wasn't worth getting involved with.

good call! hadn't read that.

> not of minors, right?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1180481...

"The victims described herein were as young as 14 years old at the time they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein... Epstein intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his victims were in fact under the age of 18, including because, in some instances, minor victims expressly told him their age."

> why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew the details of what he did wrong?

Some of them were emailing long, long after his conviction.

He was arrested for sex trafficking minors and convicted procuring a child for prostitution.

He pled to Procuring Person under 18 for Prostitution.

He ran a sex-trafficking ring that involved hundreds of girls and women. Possibly over a thousand. He wasn't keeping it all to himself.

I deleted my Facebook account in 2011. After finding out how much critical neighborhood information I have been missing, I finally registered a new Facebook account fifteen years later to follow my neighborhood groups.

A month later, the account was suspended for supposedly breaking guidelines. I never posted a single message, never reacted to any posts.

They then required me to upload a video scan of my face to prove I was a person.

We aren’t quite at the end of the internet, but man I can really see the end of this journey coming sometime soon.

I helped an elderly woman create her first FB account. She'd just lost her husband and wanted to notify his friends about his upcoming memorial service. She knew their names but didn't have contact information.

We created the account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of consumer authenticity. But after she added five of her relatives within half an hour, her account was locked for suspicious activity.

There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.

Many consumer banking apps have begun integrating similar identity verification third-party providers. They are very inaccurate.

Sometimes it works with the front camera on one smartphone but doesn’t with another (iPhone 17’s distortion), sometimes it recognizes your face on one day, but desperately fails to recognize you on another. I had to repeatedly record videos for it only to fail over and over again. Anything their system flags as suspicious, anything, will trigger the same video identification flow again, which effectively blocks your money in the account.

I’m closing my accounts with a couple of banks with these video id flows. Simply because it’s way too easy to lose access to my money in the account with them. If their QA is not good enough for this vital requirement, I don’t want to know how they treat other requirements. They simply outsourced the id verification to some third parties that are way too unreliable.

When I researched a bank learning they want to use some third party never-herd-of identification service on me was the moment I knew I do not want to share any of my personal details and consumer habits with that so called bank. They do not care enough to pretend they keep all my data in-house.

Not to defend, but to understand. Last year our old "High School class of 19NN" group received about a dozen join requests per week from bogus accounts for a couple of years. At first they were trivial to discriminate because they were folks located on the opposite side of the Earth. But over time they became filled with pictures and names of (randomly generated?) Americans.

I could still tell because their profiles were sterile and had few normal comments or likes etc. Also a high school class has a very narrow age range. We recently landed a fatal blow by disallowing joins by "pages" and adding a few questions. A trickle continued but stopped recently.

The hamfisted false positive response you described is probably a result of the above.

It sure beats the Reddit system where you think you are interacting with people, only to find out a couple of days later that your fresh account is shadow-banned and nobody is seeing your comments and that none of your likes went through.

At least Facebook tells you that you are banned.

Tip: You can always tell if you are banned on Reddit by accessing the shadowban appeal page which is only visible if you are shadowbanned yourself:

https://reddit.com/appeal

No, FB has their own shadowban system

Reddit and HN.

Since when does HN have shadowbans?

since almost forever, that's what the "show dead" toggle in your profile settings is for - it shows the dead posts from shadow banned people

I always assumed that those were posts that got flagged too often.

"Spamming", or rather, responding too quickly in an intense discussion, is cause for automatic shadowban here on HN. It happened to me on a previous account some years ago. The posts themselves were completely harmless, I merely responded to too many users in a too short timeframe. My attempts at having the ban undone also turned out to be a waste of time. Completely absurd.

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I wasn't aware HN had it, but considering the number of [flagged] by people who work for big tech I'm sure some people actually posting truthful things have ended up on the shadowban list

My sister died a few years ago. A couple of months later, someone created an account with her name and profile pic and started inviting family members. Quite frankly, I would have been ready to brawl with this person if I were in a room with them.

I feel very badly for your friend. Unfortunately, those completely benign actions look identical to a common identity theft pattern.

Last year I finally caved and tried to sign up for instagram. It's tragic but it's almost like a second internet. So many small business and bands only have instagram. So many lil communities post their events only on instagram. I always have to ask friends with instagram to tell me when a brewery is open, when a show starts, etc.

So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I am, still locked out of all this information lmao

Mark Zuckerberg, folks. It matters when his default philosophy is "They trust me dumb fucks". Copying Snapchat 9 times is more of a priority than account security. He wasn't "making a good point". He's a malicious asshole who deserved jail years ago

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Ironically, this may be one of the many straws that breaks the proverbial internet camel’s back. We all wax and wane about the old internet, the pre-homogenized, non-corporate, Wild West internet.

Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to create our own spaces again Our own little groups that exist independent of the corpo-sphere.

The only reason ‘the way things used to be’ went away was because the new thing was convenient. Well, now it isn’t anymore. So let’s just go back to the old thing.

I yearn for the days of yore when a few of us would co-lo some boxes at a small local ISP we were friendly with, where we'd get to take advantage of their always-on and (at the time) blazing-fast T1 connectivity. It was low-cost for everyone, and we'd host our own services for whatever was useful to us and our friend groups.

On the other hand: It was kind of awful when even my dialup access would get screwed up because someone's IRC server got DDoS'd -- again -- and clogged up the pipes.

---

These days, the local ISPs are mostly gone. But the pipes are bigger -- it's easy for many of us to get gigabit+ connections at home. Unfortunately, the botnets are also bigger.

How do we get back to what we had?

Compete with facebook in an area you can actually win. Don't try to be all of a mobile messenger, news feed, telephony platform, marketplace, forum, async messaging... just do one of those things well for a group of users (potentially around a focus.)

Piggy back off of an existing community that has already built trust -- for instance, build a forum for a local activity that often attracts 10+ years of participation and involves equipment. Your board will become the best place for users (who already trust one another) to swap used gear, discuss local venue closures, etc. Adopt moderation metrics that sustain your community (don't let bullies and spammers spoil everyone's experience.)

In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.

>In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.

And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it comes down to the fact that scaling such communication isn't free.

We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?

> scaling such communication isn't free.

So don't scale. There is a sweet spot where a few $2 classifieds (e.g, for motor vehicles) will sustain your operating costs, and the high-trust environment keeps moderation efforts/costs low, while the total target audience is too small for most bad actors to bother with.

What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained?

Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation.

But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table.

So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was.

What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?

>What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained?

Very possible. I'm on Tildes and its invite only structure prevents the infamous Eternal September effect. It also means that it's nearing a decade and is very much not going to compete with other forums as a platform.

I'm perfectly fine with that. But that doesn't seem to be what people en masse want. They want to connect with all their friends and family, and discover new ones through specialized communities. On a scale of a billion people, that's hard to manage. And if no one principled fills that void, the unprincipled will.

>What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?

Plenty of methods for that, centralized or decentralized. It's less a matter of "do we have the technology/ingenuity" and more "can it defeat the massive network effects?"

Sorry, but to host a small community on a v-server costs you today 3,50€ - 15€/month, when you can't pay that, you have other problems than the dying internet. It's not 1990 anymore...

Small community, yes. If you want to replace a site on the scale of Discord or Facebook? It does get really expensive.

Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30 years of people used to free and open mass communication. How many will give that up for proper freedoms and protection from state actors?

Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or timeline.

The fediverse already exists.

I have my small little groups. I've walked away from big sites constantly and this won't be an exception. Definitely going to cancel my Nitro today until/unless they revert this.

But leaving is never free. There's a lot of gaming communities (especially niche subcommunities like emulation, speedrunning, modding, etc) that are mostly on Discord and not anywhere else. Many probably won't move. A lot of tribal knowledge will be lost as it's locked in these communities.

Heck, even some FOSS communities communicate mostly on Discord. I have more faith they will move. But not all.

The interests of the people who own/control technology, and have the most influence over standards, will make sure you are forced to participate.

And they have always organized society to make sure this is the case. It's not a wacky conspiracy theory. These are just the interests of the people who create and have most influence over tech, and these interests are shared in common amongst most elements of that class. So, this class, the capitalist class, will just plan (conspire) to make it necessary for you to participate.

Viewing tech in this way makes one see that the historic development of tech is not happenstance occurrence, just tech skipping along, unconsciously, into authoritarianism, but as tech being influenced by the interests of the people who have the most influence on its development: those who own it, who are often the same people who determine standards.

The internet was never a free form idea upon which everybody could sway, its a technology owned, controlled and influenced by those who produce it.

They WILL absolutely try to place social/state/labor functions behind this wall of authoritarianism. As they already have, and are currently doing with the growing ban on VPN usage, anti phone rooting measures, anti-"side loading", etc.

It should not be absurd to suggest that the people in power have used, are using, and will use power in their favor.

I have a similar story. I quit in like 2016 or so and 9ish years later I wanted to shop for a used car for my oldest kid. I know already, of course, that Facebook now holds a monopoly on peer to peer sales of goods like that so I tried to make a new Facebook account. I was denied at the creation and told I had to try again with a video of my face (which I begrudgingly did) at which point I was denied AGAIN and told there was no appeals process.

> a monopoly on peer to peer sales of goods like that

I don't know ... around these parts (Santa Fe/ABQ) while Marketplace is very popular, Craigslist continues to be widely used for this, especially since an ever growing number of younger people are not on Facebook (either at all, or not regularly).

I would be just fine with a return to Craigslist but it's still mostly useless in my neck of the woods despite once being the main (digital) tool for p2p sales.

My friend has a restaurant and showed me the ad he wanted to promote on Instagram about a pizza coupon was suspended for breaking the guidelines, they mentioned gambling or something. I was quite impressed. When you see that one of the "magnificent 7" is dysfunctional to that level, it's hard not to think we're living the last decades of American economic hegemony, by now propelled mostly by inertial monopolies than anything else.

The big ad networks want a cut from business users and will actively suppress posts from business accounts that haven't paid up.

But instead of paying Instagram for reach, consider taking the same budget and spending it delivering samples and coupons to other local businesses mid/late morning. Bonus points if you make the coupons unique for each delivery so you can track which local businesses are your biggest fans. Office managers are generally receptive to this kind of cold call and you can leave a catering menu. Catering gigs can keep your kitchen busy during the off hours.

FB/Discord/etc were never the internet. They were walled gardens you could enter via the internet. This could be a revitalization of the internet - pushing people back to decentralized ways of communications.

Perhaps you may have not read about how Iran is moving to a whitelisted internet. Or perhaps you believe this will not happen in your country.

However, “think of the children” will always result in more restriction in western countries, not less. We are watching countries prove that it works to isolate from each other. Europe is not isolating from America in exactly the same way, but is isolating business processes from American services.

We are not on the cusp of the end of the internet, but the cliff sure seems in view to me.

> Perhaps you may have not read about how Iran is moving to a whitelisted internet. Or perhaps you believe this will not happen in your country.

I hope for it to happen in my country, with local companies and developers competing to create the new social networks. The current arrangement fine foreign entities too much power.

> perhaps you believe this will not happen in your country.

That would hurt billionaires in America, so I'm not too worried about that gaining traction in my country. Even if it ultimately becomes the next superpower regime.

More relevantly, I wonder of such restrictions would impede the First Amendment even if they did want to try.

Had a similar experience after rejoining a few years ago. My account wasn't suspended for breaking guidelines AFAIK, but rather flagged as a suspicious account that required an upload of my face and driver's license. I think the account still exists in this limbo state because I'd rather not upload all of that to Facebook, and yet still not able to login to request for the account to be deleted.

That won't guarentee that you get your account back. Many times it's used to permaban you later.

Twitter (before Musk) and Facebook did the same thing to me... and that was a long time ago.

Discord tried to do it to me a few months ago but I refused, contacted support instead. Eventually they made it work but it took forever. Lucky for me I hate Discord so tried to avoid it anyway.

I had the same experience when I deleted my FB then years later reregistered one using the same email. I think thats kind of a good thing in some ways, specifically in the FB case because I wouldnt want someone to go online saying they are me when they are not.

Yeah, same here. I tried logging in years back and they wanted my driver's license. My last comment must have been in 2013 or so.

I don't see it as the journey's end. But it's gonna be a much quieter road if most people don't walk away from this stuff. Maybe that's for the best.

It should go without saying but,

*CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason)

This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.

It boggles my mind that they need a photo ID to prove that my 9-year-old account with a saved credit card belongs to an adult. The linked Steam account is 18 years old.

Just cancelled mine after reading this comment, I only really cared about the bigger file uploads and the HD screen-sharing anyways and I can live without those.

Now that I think of it, I bet I could host a decent instance of some open-source alternative in a public cloud for around the same cost as what I paid for Nitro ($100 a year)...

Discord has been immensely hostile to the public in general since forever, and people love to flock to it and throw money at the company behind it.

I don't expect the masses to change their incomprehensible habits just because of this.

It's not incomprehensible. Discord makes it so much easier to organize communities than most other platforms.

Telegram, Slack, Facebook, Team Speak, Reddit, GroupMe, nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup that Discord does.

How many of them let me turn up/down or mute individual participants in a group voice call?

> nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup that Discord does

Apart from the open voice channels, what Discord features is Slack actually lacking? (and huddles can sub-in for voice channels much of the time)

This doesn't feel like a real question... Slack free tier is basically crappy Discord, limited message history, no voice channels, huddles are also behind the paying tiers. It is basically worse on all aspects unless you start paying

The biggest one for me is that Discord will keep all history for free servers, whereas Slack only gives you access to 3 months iirc (and as of a year or two ago, has started permanently deleting older content).

For large communities, the very granular role-based permission system of Discord can be put to some good use, I don't think Slack has a trivially equivalent feature.

Most importantly, Slack limits the amount of message history you get to keep if you’re not paying. And the payment plans are per-user fees which quickly becomes non-viable for non-commercial use.

A nonprofit I help out just moved from Slack to Discord for a very simple reason: Slack pricing was too expensive, and as the amount of people increased, the price continues to climb. Discord is free

Not a subscriber, but I understand your call for retribution.

I suppose the silver lining is that they are putting the responsibility for age verification adults. Which imo is better than requiring everyone; kids get a free pass to the kids stuff...

Yeah I agree. I actually see most of the stuff in the teens mode as a feature

I'll reply for both you and GPP,

I don't know if this will personally affect any servers I use since they're not obviously adult, but I assume the slope will be slippery and if they're doing a faceID system now it will only get worse. Article says "analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device"

...are they really going to implement a facial recognition algo in the browser, or is this a "download our app or fuck off" situation? I'm guessing the latter.

I pay for nitro as of now (not for much longer). If absolutely nothing else, I'm not going to give them monthly payments (which generally required a CC. Aka "I'm an adult") and still not be trusted to be an adult.

And that's the thing, these policies are always loose and will be abused.

- M rated game? Okay, it's adult only now. Sure.

- Emulators? Well they can play adult stuff. Now they just happen to add friction on something that is convenient for billionaire studios.

- LGBT content? Well you're talking about sexuality. Of course you need to be an adult. Here let's take face scans and totally not be a sitting duck for any malicious parties looking to identify traditionally disenfranchised people

The escalation is fairly obvious at this point. We've seen it happen in real time.

Thank you for reminding me, I've been meaning to cancel for months but it's only 2.50EUR and having to sign into my apple account was such an effort I never got around to it.

Cancelled

Here's the October 2025 Discord data breach mentioned at the end of the article:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

> 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:

> 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't do that the first time?

> 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:

> 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?

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

Not to mention collecting them at all means those servers are a primo location for state actors to stage themselves to make copies of data before being deleted.

To say nothing of insider threats of which likely exist across every major social media platform in service to foreign govs.

Weird that I have to get a list of all the cookie vendors that know I visit a website to show me an ad about something I already bought but the guys with my ID don't need to be listed.

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

It was only one example they gave, and they accept multiple different types of ID; a driver's license or national ID card being other likely ones, and DLs do say where you live.

None of those documents reliably state my city of residence. At best they document where I once lived, but not even that is guaranteed.

What kind of tyranny do you live in? None of the documents I have on me say where I live.

It's pretty standard in a lot of Europe, one is required to update ones license with each change of address (although many people don't).

Along with such weird (to us) things as applying for an exit visa from your current town when you want to move to a new town...

Which parts of Europe have a town of where the person lives on their driving license? And what do you mean by “us”?

My Spanish identity card has my full address. Not sure if the DNI does as well, or only the foreign resident version.

> And what do you mean by “us”?

US folks are pretty used to being able to up and drive across the country with a suitcase, without filing any paperwork (at least till the taxman comes knocking next April)

I ask you about drivers license, you tell me about the national ID.

UK driver's licence has my full home address on it. Come to think of it I think my Polish one used to as well.

Australia and UK goes the full distance. Your full address: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_licences_in_Austral...

> 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't keep a hash, or an eigenvector of your biometric. Which is equally as important.

They also never say it goes through datacenters in room 641A or though Utah before it's "deleted", because it's a US company and they can't refuse that.

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

They explained it in their announcement at https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...

TL;DR: The IDs were used in age-related appeals. If someone'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.

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

Age verification is done by an iframe to k-id.com.

Appeals are done in the actual Discord ticketing system.

Appeals are like escalations. They bypass automations and move to manual review.

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

And do they really actually delete it this time?

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

>Why they didn't do that the first time?

The company they hired to do the support tickets archived them, including attachments, rather than deleting them.

Ah sorry our contractor did all that highly illegal stuff. Too bad we can't pierce the corporate veil anymore... shucks.

Ah, so it was the "staffer" excuse.

rogue engineer

How convenient.

> The ID is immediately deleted.

I call it bollocks. Likely they have to keep it for audit and other purposes.

"delete" doesn't mean delete anymore, like you say, there are always audit logs, and there is "soft" deleting.

Expect any claims that things are being deleted to be a bold faced lie.

They wouldn't _have to_, audit checks if you stick to law, your own policies and such, but I think they will.

So how do they prove they actually checked someone's age?

They don’t need to prove that. The government or whatever would have to prove that they aren’t checking ages, by going to the site and seeing a lack of age verification.

How does shop clerk proves they checked someone's age before selling them alcohol?

They're a nonsense company, and trusting them with any information is foolish. They'll store everything and anything, because data is valuable, and won'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're an adtech user data collection company, they're not a user information securing company.

Compliance

Liars…

[dead]

When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else.

Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control.

> The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional secrecy” rules.

https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-...

What about my "PERSONAL SECRECY" ?

I have a friend who is a social worker. Hearing stories from them, I think people severely overestimate the level of involvement that many parents have with their kids. The people who are checking in on middle school kids at the hospital with burn marks on their arms or elementary school kids who showed up under the influence of cannabis aren’t also going to have time to enforce online safety.

If this is what it means for a parent to “do their job” then what do you propose happens to parents who are unwilling or unable to police their kids’ Discord account?

For this reason, I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of low-trust social media. They can’t tell if a user is a child or even a human. People will move to things like group chats because they don’t rely on sending your ID to a verification service in the Philippines.

Parents are just burnt out, I think. Online spaces have become so consolidated and enshittified that it’s seriously a choice between basically keeping them offline - which is a very socially isolating thing to be these days - and letting a small number of faux-accountable monopolies ranging from Discord to Google and Meta call the shots. It’s kind of a no-win situation.

I’d love to have my kids in relatively small, intimate online spaces where I can’t necessarily assume they will be perfect (nor do I want them to be - they deserve to have some room to learn to navigate problems for themselves) but I can at least assume they won’t be overwhelmed by the impossibility of successfully navigating life in a globalized fishbowl. But if there’s one thing late stage capitalism abhor, it’s a self-contained community of real humans from which the powers that be can’t extract “value”.

> Parents are just burnt out, I think.

I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just ignore what your kids are doing.

It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the government.

No one has the ability to monitor the frequency and volume of their children’s social contact on a platform like Discord or Roblox. It would be a full-time job for me.

Can we normalize “it takes a village” again? After all, we do let bars and liquor stores get a slap on the wrist for selling to minors. If you let a child into an adult movie theater you’d be in jail. Why do we pretend we don’t live in a world with laws and standard conduct the second we connect to a modem?

The amount of time and energy that I have to put in to keep my 3 individual kids safe online while still allowing some access is mind-blowingly high. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is. It’s so hard, in fact, 99.9% of parents give up on it. I’m not one to do that but I’ve strongly considered it many times.

Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they can’t enforce everything in one place, domain filtering isn’t practical, some sites (like YouTube) are needed for schoolwork and they include adult content intermingled with no sane way to bifurcate those. It’s also impossible to disable the forced short-form video push onto toddlers and teens.

Saying parents should be doing their jobs will lose you votes, that's why. Anything that implies personal responsibility is political suicide.

As soon as politicians are also included in these acts, then you could see a shift in their opinions.

Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.

> When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job"

you can say this, but it is not enforced, so this part of discussion is not really productive.

What's ruined by this? Honestly asking

It's giving my identification to a no face company, that I don't know will handle the data correctly. And if they don't I have absolutely no recourse.

Also, why should I need to identify myself at all ? I used to use IRC for the better part of my life, I still do infact. So to have to Identify myself by sending my ID to a random company is insulting to me.

Any idea that is based on "If everyone just..." is wishful thinking. Describe the mechanism by which you convince everyone to just do something.

Sure, but the ID solution is an "if everyone just gives up their privacy / anonymity / sensitive data" and the mechanism is by denial of service

In fact its worse. Every site must also implement this security check. Or everyone must agree to just use sites and services that follow this policy. Otherwise anyone can just use another, often 'less safe' website.

I can see the moderation and age-verification motivations here, but I am wary of how this changes expectations around identity on social platforms.

Mandatory age checks with biometric or ID data can create long-term privacy and reuse risks that the ecosystem has not fully reckoned with yet.

You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna upload ID to use a “shitposting about video games with friends” service.

To protect my privacy, I have a photoshopped drivers license with a photo of my dog that I've successfully used for verification (e.g. AirBnB) in the past.

Though, with AI being used I suspect it wouldn't pass any longer.

It used to be that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. ;)

The perfect reply. Hats off to you, good sir.

Youtube flagged one of my accounts as a teenager because I watched a few pop videos (lol) and I was not able to trick it with fake IDs, though I didn't try all that hard.

Huh. Can you do that? I wonder what is legal status of this. I used to make all sorts of fake IDs (pretty good ones!) when I was a teen (you know, for purposes such as going to clubs, buying alcohol), but of course this is literally a crime, and not even a "minor" one. Apparently, back then it didn't bother me much, but with age I became more cowardly, I must admit. So now I use my passport data more often than not, even though I am not really a fan of the idea of giving a scan of your documents to some random guy on AirBnB (although, with some obvious caption photoshopped on top, to make the scan less re-usable). I mean, it's just a matter of fact that everyone requires them, and it also has that weird status of "semi-secret thing" that you are somehow aren't supposed to give to anyone, and I still have close to zero understanding of how that works.

So, I suppose you shouldn't give your fake id (digital or physical) to a government officials. It also seems "obvious" that it's similarly unwise to give it to a bank. But you can do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel? To a delivery service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)? Dicsord? Where is the line between a bank (a private commercial corporation) and Discord (a private commercial corporation)?

>>But you can do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel? To a delivery service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)?

The "legal" line is usually around fraud - trying to obtain some financial gain by providing false information. There is nothing to gain by giving a fake ID to discord - but it probably violates some rules around unathorized access to computer systems.

I found a picture of someone my age, gender, and background and used that in the past for some things.

But not even worth that effort for this. Not a subscriber, but probably won't ever use it again, either.

wdym, how did your dog driver license even pass before AI ?!

He's a handsome boy.

Guessing they probably just ran some rudimentary OCR on the image to compare the name and DOB. I modified the actual license# as well as the picture.

Well then what was the point? If you gave them an ID that matches your name and DOB, they still got an identity vector that can conclusively match to your physical, government-acknowledged identity.

Not having a correct photo or license number didn't really mean anything to them if their OCR didn't have any half-decent verification that would look at the fields where that information was expected to be, anyway.

The tech used some variant of OCR, presumably

well, any dog can pass the driving exam in US

[dead]

Just use Ai to make a non existent human face, might as well

You do realize this is wire fraud right?

Wire fraud is more than just lying to someone over the Internet. It requires a financial gain.

Yeah, I've been warning everyone about the consequences but nobody wanted to hear it. So do people still want a general social media ban for teens?

Absolutely. Social media and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race. Ban it for everyone.

I've flown across the US to meet what will likely be lifelong friends[0], and just went out to dinner and an escape room with some others, all of which I connected with through Bluesky. The worst of social media is terrible, but I would hate to lose the best of it by banning it outright. The really negative parts come are

- Underage people who do not have the emotional maturity to deal with digital public spaces

- Emotional manipulation through "algorithmic" timelines (chronological or bust)

- Waves of unwanted interactions

Social media seems like it can be a positive tool to me. I would love to be able to continue to use it as I am. I do think there is a conflict of interest issue between the mental health of the people that use social media, and for-profit corporations that provide social media services. Regulating social media in a sane way has become difficult due to how much financial sway social media companies have on legislation, but it's an important fight to fight.

[0] I have a thread on my bsky account with a bunch of group photos, if you're interested it shouldn't be hard to find. I'm not linking it because I'm not interested in people engaging in it from here.

Blue sky is a social network, not social media.

A subtle but important distinction

I am super curious about this distinction! Could you say more?

On a network, people interact with each other.

In ~media~, you have a few specialized ~creators~, and doom scrollers.

Compare Lunarstorm anno 2000 and instagram 2026.

> "specialized ~creators~"

I can understand what this means in the context of visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on TT in that a number of very large creators there record from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ specialized production.)

In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not social media?

> On a network, people interact with each other.

On any platform that would be considered social media by any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than a subreddit, but they serve the same function.

I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't understand the distinction.

The "media" in "social media" doesn't refer to image/video/audio, it refers to "the medium being used". Twitter/Blue Sky/etc are all social media. Read it like "a medium being used for social interaction".

OPs is closer to the truth; the shift from network -> media shows a useful distinction between what the focal point of activity is.

Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while it is not in "social media". You may as well call it "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use it most of the time.

Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while 'social networking' is primarily based on social connection and interaction.

It was renamed from social network to social media by business executives, who hijacked the social networks built by us

By that logic, Discord would be a network. There's no default feed for Discord, you need to actively seek out friends and community.

Meanwhile, HN would be closer to media. It technically has a few personalities, and one default feed to doom scroll.

Sorry but you sound exactly like that comic. "Our blessed homeland, their barbarous waters"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...

More seriously, I have seen similar exchanges many times on this social media where one party tries to exempt what is clearly a social media from his anti-social media agenda because he finds it personally more palatable. Usually he tries to exempt Reddit or HN but in this case it is Bluesky, which has the same features as Twitter ten years ago and is notorious for being always politically charged. It makes me think whatever criticisms he may have against social media are actually less about social media but about people he does not like being on social media. Like a driver complaining about all the other cars causing a congestion while he sits in his own car.

But fear not, because our blessed regulators (totally different from their tyrannical censors) will save us from the Big Bad. Never mind when Nepal blocked WhatsApp in its social media ban or when UK came after Wikipedia!

Disagree, that's reductive and beside the point.

It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.

If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.

The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.

I don't disagree in general. I wouldn't call 4chan a social media, for example.

What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out there. It's not. It was founded by jack dorsey and copied the UI and features of old Twitter. Its main selling point is "twitter but no Elon musk" and is, from my perspective, almost exclusively inhabited by politically antagonized people seeking a refuge which then resulted in US politics sucking the air out of everything else on that platform.

Can people forge constructive relationships on bluesky? I am sure they do, but they can also do it on X, Reddit, Facebook or whatever "bad" social media out there.

Blueskys only difference is that it hasnt been enshitified yet.

Hilariously, the website hosting the post you are currently commenting on is Social Media by almost any definition. Autocracy and autocratic thinking are never the solution. You don’t know what’s best for everyone.

Not really. By a broad definition, yes. But here there is no algorithmic filtering of what you see based on data about you that is tracked and data about you purchased from data brokers. Nor is there a team of psychologists constantly working on ways to hit your dopamine triggers and keep you engaged.

But that isn't the main issue with Discord, either, despite their attempts to add features like the ICYMI tab. The problem of Discord is more in the social than the media.

Social media has none of that. Sometimes it is conflated with that as Facebook was social media for the first five minutes of its life, until they realized you can't make money with social media and quickly pivoted.

This place should burn too.

And every video game is a RPG because you play a role.

Sure, social media is bad for kids. Why can't their parents regulate them though? Isn't keeping kids away from dangerous things a basic requirement of being a parent?

I propose passing laws that make parents who let their kids on social media pay fines and risk having social media sites blocked by their ISP rather than just making all adults have to get an "internet license".

It’s bad for everyone, except for the advertisers, and arguably it’s bad for them as a 2nd order effect.

I think we just need to ban social media in general. It's done more harm to our societies than good.

define 'social media' .. were BBSs social media? usenet? email? aol instant messenger? physical community bulletin boards? classified ads? newspapers?

Good bye, Hacker News. I knew ye uhh... Well, I knew ye.

The loss of all anonymity and privacy on the internet is much worse than this generation's version of the "won't someone think of the children" scare. It's wild how many people are eating this up.

I’m not suggesting “upload an id”. I’m suggesting ban all these brain slugs outright.

Make META a criminal organization. Put Zuckerberg behind bars.

Yes we should give the government more power and put up “The Great American Firewall” so Americans can’t use any foreign Facebook like companies.

I didn't respond to the suggestion of absolute prohibition because it's too ridiculous a concept to take seriously.

It's the only reasonable thing to do; the status quo is what's ridiculous.

While we're architecting the lives of millions of strangers what other reasonable things would you personally like to disallow?

What if there is simply nothing that can be done? I don't mean to sound defeatist, but what if there are some things that truly are like pandora's box. We can't put the lid back on. All we can do is educated people on how to use the tools correctly

>All we can do is educated people on how to use the tools correctly

This lives in opposition to the people who own the websites/apps goals. So it won't happen.

I'd love to arrest billionaires, but can we at least suggest some specific and resonable goals forst? Baby steps.

Eat the rich is a good mantra and banner, but not an action plan. Here in America we have at most 3 years of this left and at median 1 year (with a huge nebulous cloud based on the reaction to trying to seize power). There's a lot we can do to build up to the ultimate mantra.

Louis Rossmann had a vid about this and it's much more than jut anonimity, it's about protecting yourself from being exploited by algorithms. Can go as far as influencing your political voting, or who knows what else.

Does tiktok have good intentions keeping your hooked all day on end?

The one (teenage verification for specific services such as social media) does not require the other (require uploading ids to every site on the internet). For one, the scope is limited and secondly, there must be different schemes possible.

> "won't someone think of the children" scare

Pretending that's what the anti-social media stance is, is hilariously dishonest.

Anyone pretending there is any anonymity and privacy to protect on the internet, right now, has their head in the sand, especially if they use social media.

I agree that social media is a plague. Unfortunately, the legal definition of "social media" is likely to be so broad that it will include things like Hacker News or even old-school forums. The real plague is the infinite scroll, engagement-farming social media like Twitter, post-newsfeed Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. I'm skeptical that laws addressing social media will target the right problem given how rich/powerful a company like Meta is vs. some guy running an Anime forum.

> some guy running an Anime forum.

I expected all of them to have become Discord channels at this point.

ID verification for sites that where people speak the truth.

Cesspit of AI-driven "validated" accounts for pushing propaganda.

It's the worst of both worlds.

Everybody hates teenagers, so yes.

It's not really about protecting them; people that claim this is the case are generally doing so to launder that hatred.

They're not hated, they're just treated as non-entities that aren't assumed to have or need any agency.

People under 18 are the largest disenfranchised block of citizens.

I mean, yes. Because we don't give kids all their rights yet. That's fair in many regards (not all. Having schools able to silence dissent legally feels all sorts of wrong). It also add protections, like not letting a 12 yo work in a coal mine or be sent to war.

More importantly, it's a powerful political spin used to justify often heinous actions. People want to protect kids.

Brilliant observation! I would like to make the statement more precise: not hate/hatred but jealousy.

This is the kind of thing I would have posted while in High School.

Discord hasn't been video game only for a long time

You don't have to, you just can't access NSFW channels and servers.

Then use that server without age verification?

I have discord for gaming communities, but also for political communities. Pod Save America has a discord with thousands of users talking political things. While I don't mask my identity there, I sure don't want Discord preemptively linking my state ID to my person. Screw that.

If you're worried about government retaliation they can already figure out who you are from what discord has, especially with a justice department that doesn't really even care about looking like they're following the law

Government, sure.

But it's the non-government entities you really need to be worried about. There are plenty of brokers buying up this data, making up assertions/predictions about the data, then selling it along downstream to secondary vendors who just blindly accept the data as true.

These are how people online get doxxed. It's not the government or FBI, it's these brokers who mine/buy data from sites/credit bureaus/local governments, link them across various social media, then build out profiles of individuals that they then sell to anyone with a big enough check book.

I've looked into these vendors before and their profiles on people are often wrong on several dimensions. So you don't want to do anything that's going to increase their ability to map you across the internet, because that's just going to improve their ability to identify you, while still selling lies about your personality.

We shouldn't reward their data collection and AI surveillance bullshit with apathy, though.

For sure, I'm just saying if you're in a political discord depending on what exactly is being discussed you should really be aware you already are certainly not anonymous to the gov if they don't want you to be

I think Discord is trapped in an ugly place:

1 - Piles of parents too stupid or lazy to, well, parent the children they made;

2 - A very reasonable societal expectation that it shouldn't be easy for young kids to access, or even be exposed, to the worst dregs of the internet;

3 - Very different use cases (gaming, kids stuff, free/affordable slack for communities) all on the same platform;

4 - A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method. It's a government-wide game of underwear gnomes.

> A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method.

This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's actual malice, not just incompetence. Leaving aside that this shouldn't be done at all, there is no desire to do this in a privacy-preserving way, because destroying anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be avoided. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for generations.

https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...

That’s not a reasonable societal expectation. That should be an expectation of the parents to follow through on.

How reasonable is this expectation? All you do by intituting these draconian 'wont someone please think of the children' ID laws is make it marginally more difficult to access mainstream services where there's not much crazy bad stuff anyway. The rest of the internet is the wild west, and good luck controlling that.

The whole thing is security theater designed to conceal the fact that child security is not the objective, it's the justification.

[flagged]

All social media websites should require id tbh. This is the new public town square - everyone should have a voice, but nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.

Except that is clearly not how it works. Spend 5 minutes on facebook, and you will quickly realize that people have absolutely no problem spewing the most disgusting racist, xenophobic shit you have ever seen in your life, while their full names and pictures of them hugging their granchildren are there for everyone to see.

>> nobody should escape the consequences

There are no consequences whatsoever for this.

Feel free to go make a social media website that requires ID. What you are claiming is that websites that don't require ID should be destroyed. No.

I don't need a public ID to sit in my local park nor shop for most things on Main Street.

>nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.

We can already do that without needing ID stored on servers. Blame lazy enforcement with an incentive to retain even bad customers.

I’ll vibe code that sh*t in a sitting

You can say “shit” on the internet.

Only if you let them scan your face first, comrade.

Seriously, and probably do a better job of it. Electron. Yuck.

The problem isn't the platform, it's getting a critical mass of users. Until everyone is using it, nobody is.

I hope Discord understands the risks they pose to their audience when they open source their IDs again.

Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their names.

A part of the Discord users is from countries from which Discord isn't even officially accessible (eg China) or where involvement in LGBT discussions could result to death row (Afghanis are still on Discord)

For me, a company that open sourced 70,000 IDs and ask for moooooore just weeks later is just a joke about the sharing economy

The problem isn't even for new users. Some users have over a decade of private hobbies and will now need to associate their governement ID to their profile. Discord pinky swears they ask but don't keep this time, which isn't enough.

Companies shouldn't be allowed to change such fundamental ToS after an account is created.

+1.

It's a push out.

That's fine. We'll take our attention elsewhere.

> The first option uses AI to analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device. If the age group estimate (teen or adult) from the selfie is incorrect, users can appeal it or verify with a photo of an identity document instead.

Are they shipping a video classifier model that can run on all the devices that can run Discord, including web? I've never heard of this being done at scale fully client-side. Which begs the question of whether the frames are truly processed only client-side...

They'll have to "partner" with some company that's in the business of building a database of IDs and biometrics to do AI things with. Other companies in this space (Jumio) have a bad habit of ignoring privacy laws and will keep your information for years.

I wouldn't mind showing my ID to a person (in person), but there's no way I'm letting some company get a scan of my ID or passport to store in some giant database that's a rich target for hackers. Might as well give them access to all my bank accounts (Plaid) too.

(It sure would be nice if there were a national privacy law in the US.)

Also, it's illegal for companies to use facial recognition in my jurisdiction, so if I allowed them to "verify" me, they'd be breaking the law.

Ignoring the implications of this for the moment, let me broach a related (and arguably more important) question: what do you do when you have multiple communities you interact with only on one platform, and suddenly that platform becomes intolerable for a subset of your community?

It is the same as what everyone did after the reddit fiasco i.e. protest, boycott, grudgingly use it while complaining and then finally accept the change.

May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the masses.

Reddit dropped a lot in quality after that. I suspect a lot of people stopped posting, even if they did continue using it in some capacity.

I uninstalled it from my phone entirely. Definitely helped curb my usage.

For me, I just stopped using Reddit. Turns out that I’m happier without it.

Hah I did the same thing. I only ever interact with it now when it appears in search results.

That's not what happened with the X nonsense, a lot of people went to mastadon/bluesky.

It seems like the answer is pretty obvious. That subset of the community stops using it and uses something else, and the others either follow them or don't.

You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability to communicate with each other.

The ideal outcome is for everyone to stop using the intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That's even what often happens over time, but not always immediately. Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.

We start a new app. Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated. Serving that subsection that cares about privacy and security.

Discord is a good design, and should be replicated rapidly with mutations from competitors galore.

> Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated

Sounds like you want https://matrix.org/

> Discord is a good design

Then the main, reference client https://element.io/ or https://fluffy.chat would work great for you.

... With the only caveat being that general experience of using Matrix is awful.

I second the other commenter's suggestion of using https://stoat.chat/ or as it used to be called: Revolt, which matches the "Opensource Discord" requirement perfectly.

Matrix is slow, buggy trash with bad clients.

(Incidentally, this is also the incantation that will cause its primary maintainer to show up in the comment thread and tell me that I’m not using their seemingly annual complete new client rewrite that fixes all of the problems and makes it perfect now.)

Bad clients issue stemming from the bad design.

Soatok covered it very well here: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...

I'm quite sure most of these issues were fixed by now, but the fundamental issues remain, at least in this federation.

Pretty much why centralized billionaires will always win. It takes a lot of resources (in terms of hardware and engineering) to make things at scale and smooth. The rich abuse this, the not rich can't afford to be principled.

[dead]

Revolt/stoat has existed for quite a while: https://itsfoss.com/revolt/

https://stoat.chat/

Mumble already exists. IRC exists. Matrix exists. Discord is a surveillance tool by design. Jason Citron pulled the same hijinx with Aurora Feint, but I assume he has been betraying users to CIA-and-Friends from the start so he gets a pass for breaking the same laws.

Nobody scales free, high-bandwidth services without some dark money support from feds or worse.

Remember when Tumbler banned porn? People migrated to other platforms like Reddit, and it died.

Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to a fledgling app.

WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government boosted Signal.

Sooooo, what is a good discord replacement?

Oh I think it definitely did damage, just not enough to kill such a massive platform overnight. Twitter has lost a significant amount of users while other social networks grew or held steady, and the cultural impact seems to have waned a lot.

I've never been a regular user of Twitter, pre or post elon era, but a lot of people I follow in other ways used to be very active on there and discussions would often spill over into other venues. That still happens a bit, but much less than before.

Its hard to say. Reddit is still a shit show, but I still peer into niche communities you won't find anywhere else on the internet.

Discord is even more niche than that. There's tons of IRC esque group chats of that's what you need. But a community: not so easy to replace.

Try to tell them it's a bad idea. And be ready to leave that community if nothing changes. That's pretty much the way of life for an internet vagrant. Maybe you hope the community migrates too. Maybe you try to remake the community. But those aren't in your control.

I left Facebook, left Reddit (never really had a Twitter). This won't be different.

If this happened 15+ years ago, a huge chunk of the userbase likely would've migrated to alternatives, potentially resulting in Discord being replaced and falling into irrelevance.

Today, though, no chance that happens. The current generation literally grew up with it, same for most of the other established social media apps. The concept of alternatives largely does not exist for them. And besides, they were probably already sending pictures of themselves and other personal data to each other through the app, so it's not like Discord doesn't already have all of that.

There's also people who have been through enough of these moves and community splits that they're incredibly tired of it all.

I'm always exhausted by a migration. But I don't move off because there's an easy alternative. There never is. I do it to maintain principles, even at the cost of my social circles.

I mean, I grew up with AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC... yet I switched every time a new tech came out with more of my friends on it. Why do we think discord will be any more sticky than Digg or Slashdot, or any of the above?

People will migrate, some will stay, and it will just be yet another noise machine they have to check in the list of snapchat, instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter, twitch, discord, group texts, marco polo, tinder, hinge, roblox, minecraft servers, email, whatsapp and telegram, and slack/teams for work.

Absolutely exhausting to be honest.

Kids today are alarmingly bad at technology. This is not a "kids these days" situation, this is absolutely true. They understand "tap on icon, open app, there's a feed and DMs".

I mean it, the tech illiteracy of gen Z/alpha is out of this world, I did not expect a generation that grew up with technology to be so inept, but here we are. But they grew up with a 4x4 grid of app icons, not with a PC.

I don’t think people understand the true level of tech illiteracy of Gen Z. A couple years back I did an internship with the IT guy at my high school, and the vast majority of the problems students had with the Chromebooks we used were, in no specific order:

  - Not understanding that a dead battery means it won’t turn on
  - Trying to use them without an internet connection
  - “The screen won’t work” when trying to non-touchscreen models like a tablet
  - “I can’t see my stuff” when using the guest mode rather than their login, or when they used a PC and they couldn’t see the docs icon on their desktop

There’s a mountain of issues along those lines we ran into, and it was honestly frightening to watch.

Yeah, I work with kids and it's admittedly a bit disheartening having conversations like

> why don't you make a separate account for your sibling

> I don't know how to make an email

> but you needed an email for your account

> yeah, I just use my school email

By that time my age as a young teen I knew how to make new accounts and research what I didn't know. And I'm not sure of its my place to help them create an email without knowledge from their parents.

Correct. From my personal experience (have kids and nieces/nephew this age), and all think an app is the thing that they scroll in, and any attempt to explain the very basics on internet connectivity, servers, databases, etc, ends up in them basically experiencing blue screen moment and backing away to the safety of the endless scroll.

The most complex concept they can understand is mail/post attachment or capcut, but then this is it. 10 minutes later they will download phone flashlight app that requires Google services for app delivery.

Shocking.

I ended up with refusing to help with anything related to technology in any other way than pointing to help/manual/search engines and asking questions.

One of the starkest social desirability biases in tech is between federated and centralized platforms. Most people, in public, say they support distributed, federated systems, but when push comes to shove, they all use centralized platforms anyway.

atproto is a really good attempt at solving this issue

Shake your head and move on.

It's not like we haven't seen closed source applications become hostile to their users before. And it's not like we didn't warn people about it.

People tried warning that moving all your discussion forums into a proprietary, closed, unsearchable platform was a bad idea. And it was. But nobody cared.

I'm seeing Groups.io show up more for hobbies/interests I have. It seems email can be a way to slow down heated discussions. Perhaps at the expense of push-back on using more email?

Anyone have any experiences to share with moving their discussion groups from Discord to Groups.io?

So you want to go back to mailing list and run your own email server?

No, we’d like to go back to the culture that created protocols to solve our needs, such that people could create interoperable servers and clients to implement those protocols.

Email is an open protocol, perfectly suited for delivering messages between people. Discord is a closed application, unsearchable, any server or account may be nuked at discord's discretion, thus it's entirely unsuited to replace e.g. a forum.

You do understand the difference?

Oh yay, the company that told me to "just use your wife's phone" when I couldn't verify my own phone number, instead of even trying to fix the problem, now wants a copy of my face?

Pardon me if I don't have a lot of trust in their ability to keep it safe.

What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group:

- Matrix

- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)

- IRC + Mumble

- Signal

For the latest in IRC tech, you can read my blog posts: https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.

I think Matrix is the closest equivalent that's reasonably popular, at least for text messaging. There are both web and mobile clients and they interoperate seamlessly. It'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.

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's a missed feature when doing huge operations in games and using the Canary client is not always enough.

Matrix screen sharing is a feature of Element Call / MatrixRTC (in development).

For now, I think they do it through their Jitsi integration. I don't know how easy it is, as I haven't tried it.

https://docs.element.io/latest/element-cloud-documentation/i...

Stoat has screen sharing / video calling in the pipeline at least: https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313

According to the last comment in the issue it is already available for self hosted clients.

Jitsi does that well

This seems like a nice breakdown of some options:

https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/

(Not affiliated)

Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don'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 "little gamers, and big corporate enshittification."

> government overreach

How would you avoid the same problem that discord ran into that made them require ID verification? I doubt they're doing this for fun. Incorporate in the Bahamas?

the largest block of discord users are from the US which hasn't got id verification laws regarding age for social media. The 2nd largest is brazil, which does, and the 3rd is India, which doesn't.

So they are forcing users from countries that haven't passed these laws to abide by them. They don't have to do this, they could just require brazilians use face-id.

Discord's voice rooms with screen sharing is a very cool feature i depend on daily. I haven't seen opensource messenger that implemented this yet.

Jitsi handles this very well.

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

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

Which of these has been around for over three decades?

That would be my answer.

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

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

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 have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS

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

Snikket (https://snikket.org ) with Monal as the iOS client

Requires hosting of the private server (security/privacy implications) or renting it from the third party.

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're on android I'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.

Revolt's rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding MSFT done ever.

It's because of the trademark: https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat

Nevertheless, I don'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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225, not sure how accurate it is, but it makes me want to revolt .

"[beaver emoji] Revolt is Stoat now"

Argh. If there's no stoat emoji, petition the Unicode Consortium for one, don't just use a beaver. It's not even the right family; the badger emoji would be closer.

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

Zulip?

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'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.

Sadly Zulip does not have a big marketing budget, and many reviews/tooling comparisons are paid for in some way, directly or otherwise, or are SEO spam that starts with reading other similar SEO spam.

It is highly ranked on some platforms that do validated reviews, like Capterra.

(I lead the Zulip project).

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.

IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after.

I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron. Total waste of time.

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

It's a viable system for the many open source software projects that collaborate over chat. Expo, Typescript, and Effect are relatively large examples. I'll participate there if available and I get locked out. Otherwise, I'll just use the stuff without contributing, no problem.

Kids these days...

Should be blame the majority of the users, or should we accept times change?

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.

I think she is a polarizing figure to some, but journalist Taylor Lorenz has been complaining about this sort of thing for a long time. She has been increasingly warning about a future in which we need to scan IDs for all of our online services, in the name of protecting kids. (With the obvious implications about that data leaking, governments using it to track dissidents, etc.)

[flagged]

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'll just go with C. If I cared about Discord more I guess I'd figure out B. May get started with C ahead of time anyway.

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.

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't send you images flagged as porn?

How does this impact you in any way?

I'm generally opposed to services unnecessarily wanting IDs, content filtering for direct messages from my contacts, unwanted popups (it's already annoying when my friends send me a link to a site I haven't visited from discord before and it "warns" 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'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.

They're saying there's a very good chance that, in your use case, you still won't be asked to provide ID.

This is correct. I'm a UK Discord user, so I've been subject to these requirements for ~6 months now. It's basically nothing - I'm in near 50 "servers", of them all I only really can think of one channel in one of them that is flagged "nsfw" and thus blocked to me as I never ID'd myself.

If you don't use Discord as a source of "nsfw" content you can comfortably ignore these requirements. I do realize there are some communities that may fare a lot worse than my gaming / software dev interests, and may be falsely claimed "nsfw" just for their existence. Which yeah, that absolutely sucks.

Why does the idea of collecting millions of images of minors not sit right? Roblox, Character.ai, Discord…

There's a special phenomenon that happens as startups grow large. They begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product, their users and how it's used. It's a drift away from users. And a drift towards internal politics. A lot like Rasmussen's drift towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-dri...

As startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product. These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company.

Which is why we end up with decisions like OnlyFans hitting $1B / yr in revenue (with extreme profitability) off of porn and then deciding to ban porn, https://www.ft.com/content/5468f11b-cb98-4f72-8fb2-63b9623b7...

Or, Digg deciding to kill its "bury" button and doing a radical "redesign" that made Reddit worth billions.

Unity's decision to update its pricing. Sonos' app "redesign" etc etc.

Corporate vampires will cheerfully slaughter your golden goose. Or, in the best case, severely cripple it.

I think this decision is more defensive than "losing touch with their customers." The winds are shifting in other countries that are cracking down on social media use for children. Discord does not want to get caught in the shit storm of legal issues if they fail to comply. This is a proactive measure.

> this decision is more defensive

That is prioritizing internal politics over the realities of their product. The Discord userbase is young. And it serves a variety of use cases / the same account can be used to access open source communities, coordinate video game time with friends, interact professionally, and have a supercharged group chat for close IRL friends.

In other words, Discord is the app where maladjusted early 20-something leaked classified data to impress his teenage friends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/discord-leaks/

Any decision that isn't along the Apple's hard privacy stance lines, "we'll protect user privacy" is prioritizing the discomfort of that decision over the user base / use case.

This is the real issue, and it's why just cancelling your discord subs and moving to stoat or etc isn't a solid long-term strategy. If KOSA passes in the us basically every platform will have to do something like this.

Multi-billion dollar corporations have never had any problems lobbying for their interests before.

Perhaps collecting everyone's messages, social links, scanning their faces, and then adding ID data in for "ground truth" is the real interest here?

That's a big if. And yes, if push comes to shove I guess I'll become a forum pirate. I won't tie my real ID up in anymore private servers than absolutely necessary (which as of now is governmental entities and banks, a highly regulated sector).

I don't think it's that big of an if anymore - there's worldwide pressure and interest groups to get some kind of age check on all these companies, at least. Keep some alternate contacts for friends at least

There's always been pressure. People have been fighting for decades on this. The only thing that's changed is how they've tried to disenfranchise dissent.

There still is push back, so I won't say this is a losing battle. I'll keep fighting regardless.

>Keep some alternate contacts for friends at least

They know where to reach me. Whether they care enough to go outside their gardens to talk is another matter.

I think this is about "losing touch with their customers" and the need to IPO and make money from the customers.

The thing is, most of discords users are in countries which haven't yet passed laws that ban children from using apps like discord. If they were privacy focused they could do this only where the law requires it, like Australia.

Yeah, this really seems like it's our politicians screwing us. The older I get the more harmful politicians seem to be.

If you're in a democracy, that's the call to pay attention and vote in helpful representatives.

I think this is actually a different growth problem, which is that they became so large that several countries are designing new regulations that specifically target them. I think discord is trying to spin this into a regulation-as-moat opportunity instead of dying by a thousand papercuts.

I don’t think this is a phenomenon. At the best places I’ve worked, I’ve seen success correlated with actual user value. You do find climbers at certain places but I tend to think it’s a large reason they fail.

Also, I don’t think your OnlyFans analogy holds up. My understanding is that their threat to ban porn was a stunt. A pretty effective one.

Do you have reading on it being a stunt? That seems like a huge gamble. You’re basically inviting competitors and pissing off your supply (content creators.)

If they view you as unstable, unreliable, or adversely motivated, they will look for alternatives to at minimum diversify. It’s their livelihood.

I don’t know for sure but it’s been implied that it was an intentional action to garner public outrage at the banks who wanted to stop processing their transactions.

In pretty much all cases, the companies in question had peaked were experiencing declining growth and attempting to do a hail-Mary... and failed miserably.

Compare Digg and slash. One completely died, the other has stuck with its formula and hasn't disappeared, but has just faded into irrelevance.

that's true, guilds moved to discord because it was easier to use than teamspeak

To add context to the discussion, it is important to recall that Discord was reported to have recently filed paperwork with the SEC for an IPO [1]. Thus it seems likely that the real reason for the age verification (i.e., user identification) policy is to boost its perceived earnings potential among Wall Street investors. According to this theory, Discord is the new Facebook.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/discords-ipo-could-happen-...

The sad thing is that I think many people will en masse pony up their ID or snapshot without a second thought. I'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).

I don't imagine this was a 100% their decision, it's more like a response to the epidemic of all the world's governments suddenly coming up with adult verification schemes. Discord has already required it in some countries, and it'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.

They don't have to comply in advance.

Especially if it's presented as a pop-up upon launching the app that suggests the user won't be able to talk to their friends/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 "jump" and reply "how high".

> panic at losing years of history

I used to be like that. It was unsustainable and ultimately mentally unhealthy.

Yeah. You male new friends and find new experiences. Or maybe you don't. That's the cost of freedom, I suppose.

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).

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

I have done that for stripchat which was also requiring it. Not happy with it but I'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'll continue using Discord in teen mode, I guess. I'd rather not lose the current connections & servers I have on there, and I'm not optimistic about people migrating away, especially non-tech people.

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't see how Discord having my ID is any worse.

The issue is that it's yet another platform that could leak your data? Why would you ever want to increase that chance?

Also, I'm not sure you would need to give discord your ID unless you're sending porn in your work chat or something.

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'm curious if there are any better ways to suppress these propaganda machines?

How do I know that this message isn't divisive propaganda posted by a bot?

Because it's not posted by a Russian/Indian account, duh!

I don't see how disallowing viewing "age-restricted" 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.

IIRC EU was going for a zero-knowledge-proof of age system, but I guess discord isn't going to be using that then. (I don't think the ZKP system is available yet)

(here's part of it: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-rel... )

It's kind of surprising that no-one has really come out with a proper privacy-preserving approach to this yet. It is clearly _possible_; there are reasonable-looking designs for this. But no-one's doing it; they're just collecting photos and IDs, and then leaking them all over the place.

Here's my solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282

The problem is privacy activists and free speech activists (though there's some overlap between the two they aren't the same) oppose age verification by any means since it has the potential to infringe on both ever so slightly. Meanwhile age verification gates are being demanded and thrown up all over the Internet at a frightening pace. So we get only the maximal data collection solutions implemented by people who don't give a shit about privacy or free speech. And the mass surveillance cheerleaders egg them on.

If privacy and free speech activists understood that a proactive, privacy-preserving approach to age verification is the best outcome we'd be better off.

You need to process that other people disagree with that claim, and do not believe we'd be better off.

We should not accept the Overton window shifting here, and say "well, if we do it to ourselves, in a privacy-preserving way, that's less bad".

> You need to process that other people disagree with that claim

I think I already said that in my original post.

> We should not accept the Overton window shifting here

Great! Let's say you and I refuse to accept it. How do we keep Discord from demanding passports or selfies? How can we get France[1] or Finland[2] to roll back age restrictions on social media?

You'll never convince a majority of voters in democracies that nothing online should be age-restricted. These are the people that the enemies of anonymity and free speech are counting on to advance their agenda.

At the same time a majority of voters is currently quite content with the state of age verification for access to tobacco and alcohol. Both its strictness (or lack thereof) and privacy preservation (almost perfect).

I'm not saying my proposal is the one that should be adopted. I honestly don't care which idea gets picked and I don't want anything from it. But it's a virtual guarantee that in the absence of a competing good-enough, privacy-preserving implementation, only the most privacy-invasive idea will be implemented.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776272

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838417

The issue with your solution still comes down to yet another centralizing middleman with no real incentive to be efficient. And all the incentive to lobby governments and extract more wealth from the people.

This can of course be done government by government, but that isn't scalable for a global company.

It doesn't have to be 1 middleman. Multiple companies can issue the cards, just like there are multiple beer and cigarette and lottery companies.

I wish I could edit my post because a lot of people had the same misconception when I first wrote it.

> ever so slightly

It’s not “slightly”. They’ll start with claiming to protect people under 18 from obviously problematic content — porn, grooming, etc.

It won’t stop there. The scope creep will extend to expressing or reading “incorrect” or “dangerous” views.

They’ll probably call some of it “hate speech”, but hate speech is whatever the people in power say it is; on X, “cisgender” is designated as a slur and gets your post censored.

The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy if the slope isn’t slippery — “think of the children” is a wedge bad actors are once again trying to use to open the floodgates of censorship.

They don’t even need to target adults; if you control what children can see and express, you have enormous control over all future generations of voters.

I agree, but the powers that be loathe the phrase "hate speech". I'm betting the next encroachment will be on "violence", "terrorism" or even Russian-style "promotion of nontraditional values".

It's already happening. What's your alternative? Not VPNs because every jurisdiction and website will eventually have equivalent laws or terms of service.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-expands-tools-t...

What are your thoughts on Apple's approach? You still have to provide your birthdate to apple. But after that, it only only ever shares your age range with other companies that request it, not your birthdate.

This is great, but if and only if it remains an opt-in choice that enables parents.

There is a stark difference between enabling choice or compelling it.

Somehow in the last 15 years, we have completely lost sight of agency-based ethics as a founding and fundamental principle of western liberalism.

This has been replaced with harm-based ethics. Harm has no fixed definition. There is no stopping rule — when will we have eradicated enough harm? It’s declared by fiat by whoever has the means to compel and coerce — and harm inherent in that enforcement are ignored.

It is only a matter of time before ID verification means the camera is always on watching the face of the person looking at the screen.

They do not want to solve the problem, they want to collect our IDs. If they would have wanted to actually solve it they would not have done this on legislations where it is not a requirement.

> It is clearly _possible_

Is it?

I don't think it is.

I truly don't believe that there's any possible way to verify someone's age without collecting ID from them.

It would seem like a naive solution would be some arrangement where Discord would ask for a proof-of-age from an official service ran by the State (which issues your ID)

Well you could have government-run cryptographically signed tokens. They're already in the business of holding ID data (i.e. they don't need to collect it and this wouldn't increase the attack surface).

But assuming it has to be a private solution, you could do the same thing but make it a non-profit. Then at least _new_ services you wish to use don't need to collect your ID.

It's possible to (cryptpgraphically verifiably) split up the age verification and the knowledge of what the verification is for.

As others have said, it’s obvious that no real attempts have been made by anyone to create a privacy-focused solution because the end goal is to collect photo IDs.

Occasionally in my free time I have been tinkering with a certificate-based solution that could fulfill this sort of need for age verification. It’s not the most robust idea but it’s simple enough using most of what we already have. Creating a minimal protocol which doesn’t share actual identifying information nor metadata of the site you’re accessing is trivial. If I can make an 80% solution in less than 100 hours of my free time then some groups with more money and intelligence could propose a dead-simple and easy-to-adopt solution just as easily.

No privacy is simpler and the simpler solution is cheaper. If there's no real incentive to go with another option, companies will go with the cheaper option.

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Okay, i'm not very good at coding, especially web.

It seems to me that the "logical" solution to this is some sort of local key like "sudo" that the user enters/has access to. This key is on a cookie or request or something that says "This request is being done by a verified adult" and then the website goes "cool here's your data". If the request does not have it, then the website says "Sorry you need one of these keys/permissions to access".

I see this as elegant because like modern IDs, YES THEY COULD GET AROUND IT, but at least it gives parents and users who want to abide and try the ability. Kids get fake id's, they get stuff they shouldn't. So long as audits show that the businesses are trying to catch this and punishing those who ignore procedures properly, things are "fine".

How infeasible is this from a coding perspective? I get that we're fucking with standards here, but I figured it would make most sane users and companies happy. Companies don't have to keep PII, just a log of "yes this access from this IP was approved, but we discovered is was used falsely and banned that key", and users have a tool that's setup once locally (or refreshed when you want a new key).

I guess you'd need some way to authenticate these as if it's too easy to spoof whats the point, but it strikes me as leagues better of "store everyone's colonic map"

How off base am I here? Is the theory somewhat sound or is this just dead from the ground up?

Good, this will hit hard on nazi-incel-related "communities".

If you're looking for an alternative to Discord, check out Stoat (formerly Revolt). [1] Especially if you're an iOS dev with some free time as the iOS client could really use some love... [2]

(not affiliated with the project, just really want to see it succeed)

[1] https://stoat.chat/ [2] https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios

It took all of 2 minutes to delete my account and block Discord from my network. Credit to Discord for making the process very easy using the mobile app. I'm not going to put up with this crap just to occasionally use this app to play games with friends. My kids sure as hell aren't going to comply with this policy either.

> After completing a chosen method, users will receive confirmation via a direct message from Discord’s official account.

Why isn’t this delivered via some sort of notification, menu, pop-up, etc? DMs seem prime for phishing

Jump here, you can see Lucca (as we say in Italy, more or less..)

> and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive.

I didn't even realise discord scans all the images that i send and recieve.

Really I'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'm using actually says.

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't external Tumblr hotlinks also a thing back in the day?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/16uy0an/not_sur...

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.

Until the current administration, I was much more bothered by private misuse/abuse of date than the government. Now I worry about both.

Good. Being OK with authoritarianism because they are on your side is never good.

That was always the wrong threat model hierarchy. I have always been more concerned what the federal, my state and my local government can do when given more power/informstion than the federal government

Why? People who volunteer to work for these government drag nets must be total psychos.

Volunteer? I mean they do get paid.

The thing is it's a mix of both.

You have the fervent that love recording everything "for the good of the people". But then you'll just have piles of people with separation of duties that do things with very little understanding of where they fit in the process and very little care to.

We gave those brogrammers the keys to the machine when we made programming more accessible.

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

And E2EE platforms like Mega are now being censored on some platforms specifically because they're E2EE, and so the name itself must be treated as CSAM.

As people who want to talk about words like "megabytes" or "megapixels" or "megaphones" or "Megaman" or "Megan" on Facebook are finding out.

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

They have to at least for CSAM.

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

My social group are moving to a private IRC server already. This is probably the best outcome really. I don't think any of us are under 50. But we have relatives who remember when this would have resulted in some of us being killed. I wish I was sensationalising but I'm not.

Good. Maybe then we'll stop having Open Source projects using it as their only store of knowledge :)

Based on the (lack of) people I see refusing the optional facial recognition check at the TSA checkpoint for flying, I can't imagine this will be anything other than an overwhelming success for Discord and the surveillance state.

it's like there's an inherent user-hostility in every platform that is expressed in a less-than-ideal user experience in it's usage or in the ways that the host will harvest all of your personally identifying information for various purposes (which it will also inevitably fail to properly secure, resulting in a near guaranteed leak at some point in the future).

I personally don't find ease-of-use to be worth the price of my privacy but most people are more than happy to sell themselves out piecemeal in the form of data until there's nothing left but a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet to attest to their ever having existed.

I truly do hope this sinks Discord. It's a dreadful platform and an information black hole.

> Facial age estimation

This clearly doesn't work and they're surely aware of it. Perhaps it's even intentional as a choice to give kids a way out, just trying to cover their own asses in regards to regulation.

When you try to use the law (or the threat of legal action) to force people to "do something" about anonymous, unsupervised kids on the public internet using their free platform, this is the type of solution you're going to get: the cheapest, most scalable one they can get away with.

Previously that was a checkbox or a line in their ToS saying "I'm over 18". Now that lawmakers are pushing to make that no longer sufficient, "AI face scanning" is the next step up.

Which goes to show that lawmakers probably should be working more hand-in-hand with technical experts before making such laws. A regulation that provides a good technical solution would be more useful, especially if lawmakers could have helped work on ways to prove a person's age cohort estimation without say checking an entire physical ID (and all of the identity theft that can enable), or yes relying on "AI detection" that is quite game-able (literally so as reports are Death Stranding's Photo Mode is a reliable workaround for Discord's primary AI scanning vendor k-ID).

F** that, guess I'm leaving that platform too now...

I think this will be the kneejerk reaction of many, but then you'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't even think about it.

Then you decided to cave in and forego your privacy. Don't assume others will falter in the same fashion.

Not everyone, but most people. Privacy has been around for a century, at most. I'm fine with it going away. This neurotic overprotection of personal data is just you all larping as super spies. Too many hacker movies, dude.

>Too many hacker movies, dude.

Too much fascism. They've used these relinquishes to build a database of people to go after based om race or political affiliation.

Maybe they still will get me. But I'm not making it that easy for them.

>but then you'll have to face the consequences (de facto social isolation) and probably acquiesce.

Nah I'm used to being lonely. Leaving these platforms shows how few truly deep friendships you have.

You get used to it.

>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'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.

"I used to resist the boot, too. Then I was successfully conditioned by the environment that's been engineered around me. Now I just lick it subconsciously."

I also thought like you when I was in my 20's. However... the addolescent need to "rise up" is the first thing to go when you actually start a family and develop a well balanced social network. If you play your cards right, soon enough, you won't care about all this.

I'm 45. My friend, I still resist licking the boot. Stop believing that your experience is somehow more universal.

I have a rich social network, I have a family, and now more than any time in my life do I think it's important to resist.

Stop saying you'll get less radical as you age, it's just not the axiom you think it is.

Your solution is subservience.

Read again, I never said it was a solution. I said I don't care.

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

Every 90 days? Wow. Can you elaborate on how that logically works? Like what about for doctors offices having your number on file and other similar situations.

He doesn't have the kind of life you and I have. He is probably convinced someone is out to get him. No medical records, no kids, no library card, etc. I've seen some cases like his.

People in my country are being shot on the streets by the government. Let's not pretend that there are not in fact malicious actors out there who want you hurt for their amusement.

You're free to make your own choices on life, but I don't like you chastising others' lived experiences as if everyone has a cushy safe life with a government working for them.

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

It protects the investors so they can IPO

Medium term, moving to another platform is the best solution. In the short term, I think using some other platform for the locked features is best?

For example, if we are in a server for coding, maybe we will have to use zoom or google meet as a stopgap. Curious if others have better alternatives.

So how do we know (other than obvious, NSFW servers) if we are in a server that is not "teen appropriate"? I don't feel the need to prove I'm old af, so if I'm in a server for sports betting, is that not teen appropriate? What about a pokemon server with a lot of swearing? Or just a custom server made by a friend for web dev, but has lots of random politics thrown around?

I really just don't know what isn't "safe" for teens, so hopefully this will be pretty clear somewhere.

Wow.

On one hand, I'm not surprised.

But on the other hand-- I would be terrified to be in charge of a company who needed to make this ask. It's just such a big deal, such an important bit of information to protect from hacks.

I hope they lose most of their customer base. But I'm terrified they won't.

The gradual erosion of privacy is no longer gradual.

In case anyone else can’t read it: https://archive.is/PvpAx

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'm not the only one [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1q0ewh1/do_you...

I set up a forum when I started my site for Linux content creation. Discord had become a black hole for technical know-how on a scale IRC could never dream of, and finding answers to common questions was nigh impossible since the technology has changed and the modern way to solve problem X was never asked in a forum and never indexed by a search engine. Granted, Reddit provided a bit of a stopgap over the last decade, but the solutions in the comments these days are more often than not a confidently incorrect copy-pasta from GPT.

I use Discord for chat and voice calls since that is what I expect from a chat app, but the amount of companies that have built their community / knowledge base / support system around Discord is worrying. You know they can just delete that, right?

I'll continue to use Discord for chat until prompted to put my face in the hole :)

I'm only on a few programming related discords and not going to lie, even those are slightly toxic. So bye discord.

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

FOSS, optionally self-hosted alternative built on nostr: https://flotilla.social/

And how much does Discord commit to paying in damages if my face scan or ID scan leaks from their servers? Via security vulnerabilities or employees making some money on the side?

It was nice while it lasted. Account removed. I understand the rationale and I don't care anyway. It is a shame, because one of the niche forums I was occasionally visiting there does not offer other locations.. but I would like to think this may change people's mind.

Yay to further fragmentation:D

Based. Kids should start gamefaqs again!

https://docs.k-id.com/concepts/verification-methods/

The company that Discord uses lists the methods they accept above. Notably, they do not accept any privacy-protecting digital identity standards from US or EU citizens; they only implement national ID verifications where they receive a full birthdate, with the sole exception of AU where they allow banks to attest to age-majority.

Leveraging this press to highlight their clear desire-for / dependency-on being provided an explicit birthdate, rather than simply a bool backed by the government, would be an effective lever to pull through e.g. New York and California governmental privacy efforts — especially if one somehow got them classified as a data broker in California and therefore bound to a much more expensive set of laws, due to their insistence on being provided PII when more privacy-protecting alternatives are available there.

Yes, this isn’t a scorched earth response. Every other thread of discussion here has that covered already and I have nothing new to add there. But for anyone looking to force privacy into the budding age checks verification market at an early stage rather than trying to shut it down, here’s your roadmap to effecting real change on the matter. Good luck.

So a good EU OpenSource alternative : https://stoat.chat/ formerly known as Revolt.

People have dropped platforms en masse over lesser things. This is not going to go well. Are they even going to make it to their IPO?

I use Discord to talk to university students (top 10 in CS) and it only works with university email. I am wondering if I am going to be treated as <13 from now on as well or if they waive it in our case.

It is possible for 12-year-olds to attend university.

So where we all jumping to?

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

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

Every single forum I see now is using this:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.

I hate the scrollbar hijacking and lazy loading on larger threads.

I just want pagination and to use my stock browser features...

You could take a look at https://nodebb.org/

Thanks, I'll check it out :)

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

The only viable option, of course: https://escargot.chat/

Is this open source? Would be cool to self host this..

Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(

Jokes aside, I've played around with Campfire and it's very, very simple, but pretty nice to use and easy to set up: https://once.com/campfire

> Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(

There's an actively developed open source server that allows the clients to connect!

https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server

I wish Smarter Child was still around so we could see how LLMs interact with it.

I got you: https://github.com/mk6i/smarter-smarter-child

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

IRC never died.

Time to spin up a mumble server again...

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.

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.

I gave up running my TS3 servers (after nearly a decade) because they added a trialware system that required getting approval/serial code from the company every month to continue operating. They were squeezing everyone on TS3 trying to force them to TS4/5/etc. Have they stopped this or walked it back?

And to be clear, Teamspeak from version 5 on is not teamspeak. It's matrix with a skin. Not that that's terrible, but it's not great for running it on low power/cost VPS like actual teamspeak was.

Could use mumble instead?

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

People talking about moving to Revolt. It's the most similar

Yeah Stoat is the closest, but no video calling still. But that's in the pipeline at least

our groups are discussing [stoat](https://stoat.chat/).

I don't know it well yet.

.......yet.

[dead]

Key changes are

- ID verification to see porn on Discord.

- Also, some warnings to not befriend stangers.

Not very heavy handed, you can google porn anytime. I am not sure who this serves.

It serves UK, EU, and various US States' regulations to "protect the kids".

Discord is only the next biggest canary in the coal mine. These regulations are going to force a lot more websites and apps to do this, too.

I wish these sorts of regulations had been written hand-in-hand with a more directly technically-minded approach. The world needs a better technical way to try to verify a person's estimated age cohort without a full ID check and/or AI-analyzed video face scan before we start regulating "every" website that may post "adult content" (however you choose to define that) starts to require such checks.

Good riddance Discord. Any alternative for the masses?

They’re not gonna use Slack or phpBB.

Why would Slack not be affected by the same stupid laws?

If you're a Slack user, I don't think they need your ID to tell that you're an adult

More seriously, it will become a problem on there is a significant user migration to there and a repeat of the mass hysteria. Due to being more niche, these smaller platforms are probably not in danger right now.

to everyone that tried to persuade me to move my projects from forums to discord :

phpBB never made me scan my face.

This is coming for all web-based services soon. Don't think for a second it's just Discord.

It's just a small step ahead of "phone number required" auth.

There's a bright side to this. With people getting used to every website casually requiring a face scan and ID pic, setting up phishing campaigns and opening rogue bank accounts is going to become easier than ever.

Discord's about to Tumblr over themselves with this one.

I miss the era of Internet forums. They didn’t need to be federated, just simple deployments of MyBB, vBulletin, PHP, Xenforo and so on.

I made a lot of friends on those communities growing up, and it inspired me to go into software because I saw how it brought people together.

And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn’t make any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music which still reverberates through me today.

Even with the reinvigoration of new ideas from LLMs, tech feels like it has been languishing for well over a decade at this point. The playbook is to disrupt traditional industry at a loss, then enshittify when competitors are gone. A lot of tech plays really feel like some form of: bring the yellow pages into the digital realm and overcharge for facilitating that access. Finding a firm that even uses AI outside of a chatbot UX is rare.

>And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn’t make any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music which still reverberates through me today.

Could not relate to this more. Spent my formative years in those forums and they genuinely helped mold many of the tastes and interests that have stuck with me into adulthood. Not to over-romanticize, at the end of the day it was just a forum on a music tracker - but the sense of community and sheer diversity of thread topics made it such an interesting place to peruse.

Discord certainly has its applications. But since it became the defacato community tool, I find it essentially useless. Discussions are ephemeral (from a UX standpoint at least), and much more constrained. Its difficult to lurk and only chime in now and then unless you're regularly online.

Discord has always been IRC with extra censorship and spying. Nothing really new, here. Just use IRC.

If you have any hope of replacing Discord, you need to actually understand Discord. Among many other things, people use Discord because it has persistent history, integrated images and videos, video and audio calls, and screen sharing.

it’s not that simple. many (if not most) people would rather be where everyone already is, even if there’s less privacy

IRC sucks tho. It doesnt have half the features that make discord enjoyable.

If you can't think of good reasons for why someone might use discord over IRC, you probably haven't thought about this enough.

> Teen-by-default settings to roll out globally for all Discord users

Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?

> use facial age estimation

Surely a kid won't be able to ask someone else to pass the check for them. But let's talk about false positives. If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?

> submit a form of identification

If you have a picture of an ID document, can you verify that it's real? You'd have to ask the government for that. And at least in one country there is no process for that.

> On-device processing

Oh, a client-side check. Must be secure.

> Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?

Yes, it's global

> If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?

Not until a court case on the topic gives us precedent.

One thing that could happen is that someone might decide to vibe code a Discord clone, without all the extra crap. I'm sure there are people out there doing this already.

There's this interesting arc of growth for apps which are successful. At first users love it, company grows, founders get rich, they hire expensive people to develop the product and increase revenue until eventually the initial culture and mission is replaced by internal politics and processes.

Software starts getting features which users don't want or need, side effects of the company size and their Q4 roadmap to 'optimize' revenue|engagement|profits|growth|...

Users become tools in the hands of the app they initially used as a tool. This model worked well so far and built some of the biggest companies in history.

AI could make this business model less effective. Once a piece of software becomes successful and veers off into crap territory, people will start cloning it, keeping only the features that made that software successful initially. Companies who try to strong arm their users will see users jump ship, or rather, de-board on islands.

At least I hope this will be the case.

I predict out-of-the-box deepfake live-camera software will get a bump in popularity, there's already plenty solutions available that need minimal tinkering. It should be trivial to set up for the purpose of verification and I don't see those identity verification providers being able to do anything about it. Of course, that'll only mean stricter verification through ID only later on, much to the present-and-future surveillance state's benefit.

https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam

Is this the final straw that kills their platform?

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.

> Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels

I 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.

Here'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 "NSFW", which doesn'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 "NSFW mode" (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).

Are you saying that you can "mark" the channel as "NSFW", 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't host illegal content. Or does "NSFW" enable some kind of end-to-end encryption?

That has always been the case, yes, though I'm not sure what you mean by "illegal" content. There is only a small overlap between NSFW and illegal content, and the NSFW filter has never been concerned with, uh, violating photograph copyright or something.

You don't have to take my word for it, just check it yourself, although it seems that this week, they renamed the NSFW setting to "Age-Restricted Channel" (in preparation for this change, no doubt). The verification-related portion of the behavior I described was implemented for the UK months ago.

The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."

EDIT: IANAL (or american) but if Discord was policing content for legality rather than age-appropriateness, wouldn't they lose DMCA Safe Harbor protections?

> The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."

Wait! This does not mean they do not scan it. What I understand from that statement is that they filter explicit content, as in they prevent it from appearing on the user's screen.

When you enable the "NSFW" mode, you tell Discord "it's okay, don't filter out anything". But Discord probably still scans everything.

So that makes sense to me: if you don't validate your age, then Discord will not allow you to join channels that disable the "adult" filtering. I can personally live without adult content on Discord...

OK, but you're not the one making that decision and you don't know/can't control how that decision is being made.

Well you're not using Discord in the hope that they are censorship-resistant, are you? :-)

They can read everything that you send already, if your problem is that they may filter something that they consider NSFW and you don't... well I am not sure how big of a problem that is.

> 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.

https://use-their-id.com/

Been meaning to cancel nitro and move off to Matrix or something, thanks for the push Discord!

Good to reduce fraud, isn't this zero trust in pracice.

It's a relief to finally read that Discord is indirectly shutting down and getting rid of it'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/or get back on IRC. It is a genuine shame how much culture and information will be lost inside their walled garden though.

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'm not sure what the alternative is for that. TeamSpeak is the closest I can think of but it's not a 1:1 replacement for a number of reasons.

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

it's possible to integrate jitsi in such a way that the chat has a function that will open a jitsi room and share the link to that. on irc this could be a bot. for people used to irc that's seamless enough. for something more convenient you'd want to integrate that feature into the chat client interface such that it can track who is in which jitsi room, etc...

of course this has yet to be built.