easymode

With now discord age verification and it asking ID for it, what are your predictions for the future of the program? Do you think there will be an exodus of user? Do you think everyone is going to just give their IDs?
Let's discuss. In my part I think a significant amount of people will just continue to use the platform and this won't be as big of a hit for them like some people make it sounds like.
Personally I plan on just delete my account.

I am not sure what to do, I manage two servers on discord and built up a small community and all my friends are there. I will see how the experience is if you don't give them your ID. I have been considering TeamSpeak however I think most normie people will hand over their ID's to Discord just out of convivence.

Discord is just so pervasive in the gaming/tech community and the fact most of the alternatives you have to pay for hosting I think most people will just keep using it imo. I am also in a tech focused server and they even agreed with the ID thing, my worried is the companies backing this and all the sketchy stuff they are doing.

Be interested to hear about alternatives also and what ya'll are doing or have been.

I don't want to downplay it, but the age restrictions already apply to me (UK) and nothing really changed. I haven't needed to hand my ID over for anything I'm using discord for.

That said, a mass exodus to self hosted alternatives would be great. Why have we reached a point where VOIP and text chat need to run through a centralised server anyway?

My prediction is that Discord will continue to push the enshittification onto users. First, you'll only need to provide your ID for age-restricted servers; at some point, you'll only be able to have an account for x amount of months before you're required to verify via ID or face-scan. When people get up in arms about having to provide an ID or other verification method, Discord apologists will say, "Well they've given you plenty of time to verify, haven't they? If this was such a big deal then you should have stopped using Discord as soon as they required ID!"

@Spooky I'd also like to know why VoIP and text chats fell off to the wayside so hard. I guess it's that everyone wants a one-size-fits-all solution, and it's tough to support and maintain all of these protocols in a single program, especially for small teams that don't get paid.
Looking back, I feel like it's always been tough to find a full-package program that handles all of these. Discord had shown up just around the time that Skype was sunsetting and had all the same features that people were looking for.

I've been playing around with some alternatives both for myself and as a favor to a couple of friend groups. I only manage one small Discord server myself and probably won't relocate it unless all the regulars are moving elsewhere, and I don't plan to quit using it entirely until it becomes impossible to without giving them my face. I did cancel my subscription though.

Of the alternatives I've played with, Fluxer seems like the easiest to get people on board with. There's another one called Valour that I haven't looked at yet but its UI is similar as well.

Matrix is pretty nice from what I've seen but it's hard to get non-techy people to put up with federated stuff. I'm trying to write up an explainer with pictures for some folks who were interested, we'll see how that goes lol.

EDIT - the CTO has published a response to the backlash:

https://discord.com/blog/getting-global ... s-changing

It's a lot better than the initial response but we need to hold them to it.

I think they've already calculated just how many they think they'll lose. Will they care? probably not because they know most people will stick around and either provide their ID or just stick with the teen accounts.

While I'm not running my own Matrix homeserver, I'm enjoying running my own space within the matrix.org homeserver as a replacement for Discord. I actually have an invite link to share to join, which I'll share below. The folks on my Discord server are mostly people I see IRL on a semi-regular basis and they're slow to switch, lol.

One thing I like about the way I run my space is that when a new user joins, they have to see the other rooms (text channels) invite-only by default. This means that if I know the person, I can already invite them to the topics I know they're interested in, and leave them out of the ones they're not so as to avoid them getting spammed. Anyway:

https://matrix.to/#/#chief-chat:matrix.org