Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
It’s absolutely feasible; it’s just not painless. The network effect is real. This is something most of us here on the fediverse should be well familiar with: I’d wager we’ve all left a big proprietary centralized platform for a smaller one with less content that doesn’t exactly fit our needs. Yes, it can suck; yes, you’ll miss out on content and discussions that you would have seen before; yes, you’ll be fine in a year anyway.
That said, it sounds like Discord is doing some backpedaling at the moment, and that the vast majority of people won’t have to do this. If that’s so, there’s some time before it enshittifies further. I’m going to use that to check out alternatives. My first step will be spinning up Matrix and a Discord bridge to see if that meets my needs. Then some of the other platforms, probably Stoat and Spacebar. I’m going to treat them as beta tests and give lots of feedback to the dev teams, which I hope will help incentivize development. I might even throw a few bucks at promising projects.
The ultimate end of centralized platforms is decay. It’s time to get serious about Discord replacements, at least for me.