Discord recently announced that all accounts will soon be assumed to belong to minors, and ID verification or face scans will be needed to unlock full access1. The company claims that the majority of users won’t need to explicitly verify themselves, but rather, background algorithms will profile most accounts and guess user ages. Age-restricted accounts are unable to use certain features or view restricted content. Discord was already doing this for accounts in the UK and Australia, but now the changes are being enforced globally.
Obviously, people are angry about this change. Discord can attempt to dampen the announcement by making whatever privacy-friendly claims they can, such as profiles never leaving the user’s device, or near-immediate deletion of data, but these are all damage-control statements. The timing of Discord’s announcement is also borderline satirical, considering that there was a massive data breach of IDs gathered from Australia and the UK just a few months ago2. This breach included government-issued photos, parts of billing information, emails, and names. With a very recent scandal still in short-term memory for many people, it’s puzzling to see Discord double down and enforce the same policies to the rest of the world.
Combined with Discord’s generally poor reputation, there has been a sudden spike in Discord refugees snapping and deciding to leave. Even though privacy is a low or non-existent concern for most people, it seems that Discord took a step too far. It’s been entertaining reading what the refugees have to say about leaving and discovering alternative platforms. I’ve seen people mention solutions that range from new, Discord-like alternatives such as Stoat or Fluxer, to even reviving ancient TeamSpeak.
While a serious movement to leave a platform like Discord is a good thing, there are still problems with the alternative solutions. Most alternatives are proprietary or centralized (or both), which are the main reasons for why Discord was prone to becoming worse. Stoat and Fluxer are free (as in beer and libre) and open source, but they are centralized (for now). This means that everyone is at the mercy of the people that run the central server; were they to make an unpopular move, there is no recourse. Platforms like TeamSpeak are centralized and proprietary, which means it is simply a sidegrade from Discord, and nothing else improves. This is like saying Slack is a good alternative to Discord. And of course a big complaint from most normies is the lagging features disparity of alternative platforms. Everyone wants a free, privacy-respecting Discord, but is no one is willing to pay for it, accept compromise, or focus on the real reason why Discord got so much worse.
The real solutions for a Discord replacement already exist: Matrix and XMPP. They’re free and open source, so the code can be audited. They are decentralized, which means you can create your own physical server and have full control over it, without liability to a central provider. XMPP has been around for over 30 years now and is a tried-and-true protocol. Matrix is much younger and less stable for now, but I believe it has great potential. Are these drop in Discord replacements? No. Does Discord have features that are dealbreakers to you? Most likely. Are XMPP and Matrix as good as Discord to the end user experience? Not yet. It’s not realistic to expect a polished product at no cost like Discord, there is no free lunch. But these two won’t ask for your government IDs or try to sell you a subscription. And if people can’t figure out how to adapt to less intuitive alternatives, that means we’re experiencing a great tech filter.
The whole Discord exodus scramble makes me feel somewhat vindicated about changes I made several years ago. I tried relying as much as I could on Signal and my own Matrix server, trying to replace big tech services when I could. While I still had to keep ties for people that wouldn’t migrate platforms, I held on to the belief that my efforts would one day pay off. And with the chaos Discord users are facing, I think that time has finally come. It feels nice to know that I have real evidence that shows benefits of decentralized, open source platforms instead of promoting it a tinfoil hat theory.
May this Discord incident be a lesson for people on how to choose their communication platform. Although realistically, not much will change.