Due to Discord's new age verification policy, I am in the process of evaluating alternatives that will not be prone to this sort of enshittification. Communities deserve to have control over the information that their members share. I had known Discord wasn't a great platform going into it, but this surpasses my tolerance for bullshit.

What's the deal?

Discord's current approach is to send all your messages through an LLM to "guess" your age with different tells, or to ask users to consent to having their face scanned and analyzed.

This presents a privacy threat. While Discord has indeed had a problem with grooming and other behavior on its service, there are other ways to combat abuse that don't require every single user to be prone to this authoritative and surveillance-enabling requirement.

Discord has also suffered a data breach, just in the last year. We're supposed to trust a company that can't keep its own records secure? Get serious. I'm not alone in seeing this irony.

What's the problem?

I've told people my age online. It isn't about just age, it's about whether or not you consent to an automated system determining your social access, and being sorted into one hat or another based solely on an unthinking machine acting on metrics. That flies in the face of an open and free Internet, and erodes trust in these platforms. It also introduces a slippery slope. First, the tech will be used for age verification. What next? Anti-pornography? DRM-enforcement on file uploads? Silencing unpopular political viewpoints? Yes, these have all been seen on other platforms. So, what's stopping this rot from proceeding? How will Discord distinguish itself from other rot happening across the social media space? My guess is that they won't. There's an IPO looming in the future, and if Reddit is anything to go by, we can count on Discord getting considerably worse after going public.

With this practice becoming more common, it is safe to assume that any corporate-owned communication medium will eventually submit to surveillance, analytics, and data brokering to make money, at least in today's America. All in the interest of "protecting children", something governments have been failing to do for their entire existence. They have no metrics for "children saved", no proof of threats they've neutralized, no evidence that authoritarian practices actually solve any of these problems or keep anyone in the general public safer.

What's the solution?

For now, contenders look to be:

• Matrix
• Movim
• Mumble
• Root (proprietary)
• Spacebar
• Steam (proprietary)
• Stoat

Competition is brewing in this space now, so it's exciting to see who's going to take the first strike against Discord. I would prefer something I could self-host, but I don't mind a hosted alternative that I can migrate away from later.

The Discord server will remain around until I either can't run it without breaching my privacy, or we find a new thing to migrate to. Until then, people should rely on the Twitch channel, Ko-Fi page, or this blog for further news.

A Stop-Gap Option

If you don't already know, I operate a Mumble server that exists precisely for these times where other platforms suck and people need encrypted comms.

Server: zlg.space
Port: 64738

I'll see y'all there! You'll need to create what's called a "client certificate" to connect. (The wizard will guide you through it) That's also your encryption token, so you can move it around all of your devices and have access to the same account.