Personally I'll stick with discord until it makes my computer explode, too many people I'd rather not leave behind.

It's not that you even need to leave anyone behind, but adding more apps to the rotation can be a lil cumbersome.

Me too!

Like an enduring fungus I shall spread some roots to places such that if my main home is burnt I may regrow in those smaller sanctuaries.
I have heard whispers of them pairing up with governments to identify dissenters.

I suppose it doesn't hurt to at least set some stuff up as a just-in-case. Alternatives are good to have. Just gets a lil cumbersome to juggle if too many are chosen at once.

I am sticking with discord and telegram as well

I'm at the age now i've put down roots and am not interested in moving unless it was absolutely necessary to do so.

I'm fine with some up-rooting, but I just hope if it is happening, that it's a bit more organized.

While I agree that it's somewhat overblown- I don't intend to ditch Discord until it starts requiring me to scan my face just to DM my friends- don't you think you're being a little condescending?

I didn't mean to come off as condescending. I'm usually pretty loose and goofy. So I meant to be a lil funny about it. I mean, I do get the concerns. Shit like this always raises an eyebrow. My main point though is that it seems like there's a huge rush to already replace it and I've noticed that different people are going to different places already, and it's fracturing to communities to make hasty decisions this way. I've also seen this kind of cycle play out many, many, MANY times before. FA itself has been the center of issues where people flee, and quietly fall back after people spread out to 5 different places.

Variety and alternatives for anything is good to have though, but I just worry about some things becoming harder to keep with when some say App X and anther one says App Y, and then another says App Z. Even years ago, there were SO MANY chat apps that I ended using "Trillian" to manage them all in once place. (I'm gettin old, lol) I think many apps are too complicated now to make something like that viable. I guess my window-grouping app solves part of that.

yeah you came off as extremely condescending

Alright, I'll edit some clarification in with my intent. Wasn't my intent to come off that way.

Ya didn't come off as condescending at all to me, but I suppose part of that is a certain amount of "I've seen this before" so that I guess creates some buffer for it.

As someone part of the Discord exodus, I've been wanting an excuse to leave Discord to go elsewhere for quite a while. Fluxer in particular seems quite promising. Something I've been doing is taking advantage of the grace period to ease communities into making the switch.

I seem to mostly hear that one, and Stoat the most right now. If a lot of people DO move to one or the other, I probs will get at least one of them. I'll probs still be stuck on discord because of a particular set of communities like the IkemenGo server.

I have noticed a lot of people going to Stoat as well. Stoat and Fluxer seem to be the biggest post-Discord platforms at the moment.

Having everyone in one place is nice for convenience, but the end result is in our faces. Discord thinks they can do whatever they want because they have a monopoly on community servers. The result of companies, projects and so-forth putting all of their documentation and resources solely in their non-indexed Discord server, on a platform that's (poorly) moderated by AI, demonstrates a clear need to diversify our common apps. I'm down with a few replacements sprouting up. I'm down to bring back the old internet if it means these corporate fucks step up and serve the consumer again. The ID requirement is just one part of a big piece of why we should throw Discord the middle finger and go elsewhere.

This I can agree with. I mean, discord doesn't HAVE to have the monopoly, and I do think it's good to keep them in check if it works out with competitors. And yeah, the moderation is dogshit, hahah.

I suppose maybe I just like the neater tidiness of less apps running. But I get it. I'll keep an eye on the situation, and anything at least that comes of this will be interesting if other options end up looking good.

This may just be me being stupid, but I like the idea of branching out to other apps just because of Discord's 100-Server Limit. If we branch out to other sites, then I can join more servers in general.

The internet was built by innovators coming up with solutions that fit their needs. I'm sure we can come up with a solution that doesn't sell our souls and our data.

Something to keep in mind (least last I heard) is that Discord is actually part of a lobbying group trying to fight the face id verifiy laws.

But well, they keep cropping up and eventually the question is less "Keep fighting it and risk lawsuits or having to disconnect from certain counties (and thus lose money) or sigh, shake head, and go along with it."

[NOTE: I just read the Edit, not the main]
Absolutely agreed. I now that Discord is putting users through some tough shit right now, and I LOVE that we're looking for alternatives; but deleting our accounts and/or jumping ship right away is not going to help. We gotta keep the other options open, but stay using Discord until they either PROVE that they're worth trusting again, or straight-up kick us off themselves. If I'm not mistaken, we have about a week until they make their decision, and if we end up finding the "Give us your ID" page, then we leave and not look back.

They just put out an announcement today that they are backstepping a bit because of the backlash. They claim they are pushing the global rollout until later this year and will apparently offer more, less intrusive options. They also claim that "90% of users" won't have to ID check.... X to doubt. The CLAIM is that certain national and local governments are forcing them to do this.

I'm glad that it's being postponed, but I do not trust them just yet. Twice they have asked for our IDs, and twice they have had a Data Breach that basically doxxed a bunch of people. I'll keep using Discord, but (as we've said above), there's no harm in expanding our options.

I’ll still be on Discord too. I want to see them lose. >:)

I don't really want to help the NSA track the shit of everyone I know, and their pets too. They got my parents generation with Facebook. It's really upsetting that more people aren't aware that it's NEVER FUCKING ABOUT THE KIDS. They want to be able to track everyone and feed it into AI overwatch, both for money and security. AI needs massive amounts of data to ingest, and they are eager to feed the beast. Which is exactly why your face is immediately feed to AI to determine age. Its doing a lot more than that. It's not going to stop the pdfs from snatching or anything like that. At best it displaces the problem, to somewhere else like roblox. At worse it's glowie activity for the sake of because they can.

Dystopian to the max. Don't forget this is a community/gaming platform, there is zero reason for any of this.

Precisely

The shitty thing about this though, is that more and more apps and platforms are slowly being required to do this shit. Various countries and states are trying to adapt this because they want to ID and track everyone. It's honestly an issue, far beyond Discord itself. They use "save the kids" as an easy excuse to roll out all sorts of invasive and nanny-state type shit. They always have other ways to go about making these places safer, but that's never the real point. It's creeping in from much higher places.

Just don't give them your ID, plain and simple. They'll be forced to backtrack when their plan doesn't work. Watch em squirm. And most importantly, do not let them get away with their 1984-ness.

We kinda need people to splinter off and find other potential digital homes for folks! It's how Bluesky ended up being the go-to after Twitter became Xitter. There were other competitors for attention, mastodon, pillowfort, itaku- but without people 'panicking' and jumping off to explore the world wide web for alternatives, we'dve just sat and suffered with Xitter stubbornly. (not to say there arent people STILL using X but w/e, it's a much less substantial amount now in my circles)

So sure it might seem like some people are too skiddish, but see it as the silver lining that finds gold for the rest of us who don't wanna jump ship at the first sign of enshittification. :)

It's thanks to the people exploring that you can NAME those 3 options.
One of my potential options is actually STEAM.

1) All of us already have a Steam account. Don't need to move! That's mighty convenient.

2) This solves one of the big issues Discord has created- gated internet communities for games. It's my biggest frustration- I don't want to have to join dozens of indie game servers to look up FAQs and welcome messages just to figure out info on features in a game or guides or known bugs, bug fixes, or bug reporting- Steam literally has a Community Forum for every single game listed. This isn't perfect of course- itch.io games not on steam or indie games that don't want to be on steam would be left out.

3) People don't realize it, but Steam actually has voice chat, the ability to make group chats with multiple text and voice servers, and you can upload images!

....but no solution is perfect. Steam's chat features wipe text from them after a few weeks- havent seen if thats the case for groups. But that would be a major adjustment or constant nuisance, especially for rulesy groups.

And culturally, many people would probly moan about using a stuffy slow forum. *shrug*

We don't need the internet to be one centralized hub. That makes us easier to be bought and sold and controlled. Our digital footprint is what makes discord and google and twitter, facebook, et al, money.

I don't think splintering is what we should be worrying about. If people care, if people are friends, we'll find ways to connect, bridges will be built.

Sorry for the late reply! But yeah, I don't think the mega centralized hubs is exactly a great thing. I do agree that options being available is a good thing. I do feel like thing on the net have almost become TOO centralized to just a handful of sites and such, all owned by the same few companies.

My only concern with it was the worry of communities fracturing. Every time communities make a jump, there's always a split and fracture, people are lost in the chaos. Othertimes, it often feels like a panic, people scatter, and slowly, fall back. My opinions have shifted a bit, and I do hope that some good alternatives do arise.

The Xitter situation is one that I did notice. It does seem I get less engagement there now, but the traffic over on my Bsky feels Iike I'm posting into the void, and given other focuses right now, trying to build that up hasn't been a priority at the moment, starting over is also frustrating when I already put effort to get the Xitter following I have but don't even feel worth it anymore TBH, but that's a whole other issue. It's just kind of difficult to keep track of so many things.

Let me be clear that your opinions here are perfectly valid; I am also very conscious of communities fracturing over this; however Ill provide my two cents with some minor critique.

Whilst it is perfectly valid to stick with Discord, people have had every right to make noise to make Discord change its mind using Persona, that has been the least Discord could do to remedy the situation.

Having alternatives is good and it’s wise to adopt alternatives. If we all adopted a single platform all our eggs would be in one basket. Also, there will be people who just refuse to use Discord anymore and there needs to be a means to stay in contact.

Staying in contact is far more important than platform loyalty. I am always assuming a platform can collapse at any moment and Discord has a history of tempting fate over and over again like a bad ex.

I made a Fluxer server which I’ll maintain alongside Discord. Its not so much a replacement as an option.

Sorry for the late reply! Similar to what I just posted above, I think alternatives are great. I'm glad they are out there. My only issue with it is the splitting and fracturing of communities. I mean, yeah, the net is way too centralized. Same few companies seem to own everything and corral everyone to the same few hubs. Splitting off to competitors can be a great thing. Stuff kinda gets hard to keep track of if too many people run in too many different directions, but an experimental period is a good thing to see what alternatives work out.

Were gonna be like marcher ants; when something sticks we will follow the pheromones and become a collective again.

I'll probably stick around in Discord until the critical mass move happens but until then I'll do what I can to keep up on other chat locations as well.

One of the major problems though is the method they were going to use for ID verification has some not very great ties to surveillance company Palantir. They might have our data already, but they haven't compared it against other data sources like we're some kind of criminal like Persona does. We can yap about it more on Telegram if you'd like, but your feelings about it are fairly valid.

Most folks will wind up sticking with Discord. Some folks will migrate. Then those same folks will have another panic when those other apps and services wind up being required to verify ages too when the wind continues to blow things in that direction.

I've been too busy lately to really do much yet, but I do intend to check out Stoat or Matrix or other alternatives. Maybe set some things up. Although I'm not completely jumping ship off Discord yet, I don't really blame people for doing so and I share their sentiment about it. Plus, I really can't take their claims seriously after the Australian data breach where they rolled out their age verification, and it got completely compromised and affected a lot of users. Discord was already volatile with other risks and vulnerabilities, so even though I believe them when say that certain governments are forcing this change, it doesn't change the inherent issue.

As a content creator on Twitch, I feel like switching from Discord, myself, would only hurt me in the long run, since there would be a lot of different apps people would run off to, not just one.

If Discord will ever demand my face photo or ID, I'm getting the fuck out of there and not looking back.
"It would be private and secure" or "encrypted" or "deleted imminently after verification" or whatever other bullshit claim they would make, I ain't fekkin' buying it. Once they would get it, it ain't ever leaving their database. They are already known for "Oopsie, we had a data breach that we definitely didn't planned it and definitely didn't got paid for it, we'll totally do better and it won't happen again, pinkie promise.", and sharing all kinds of data with Tencent. If I was chatting there more and with more serious things, I already would've moved to some kind of alternative, at least to chat with specific few people.

PS: In my humble opinion you didn't sounded condescending at all, and anyone who thinks you did, might be "a tad" oversensitive and "a tad" too easily offended.

Same. I'm not gonna download a bunch of different apps just because people are fleeing Discord. I'll add Stoat, and I already have Telegram and an email. That's enough.

I have hated Discord with a burning passion for at least 5 years now but used it cause all my friends thought it was cool. This is the excuse I finally needed to tell them I'm out, so I'm out regardless if they roll this out. I'm not a super social person so losing communities isn't a huge bother to me personally as long as I still have an art site like this to stay on, but I do hope for other people's sake that communities don't get broken up. An artist friend is planning to move to Stoat and already set up his info, so that's where I decided to move. Also been using Telegram for ages, never understood why everyone was so wary of that one.

Tbh, you don't know how much of a relief to see a journal that is thinking on the same wave length with me on this whole Discord situation. I feel like people are being waaaaay too hasty.

Plus I kinda already settled down into discord and made a place for myself there. It's already tough to keep up with just two apps. (Other one being telegram) x.x

I feel like the big thing that feels wrong about face or ID verification is that the face verification has been broken both ways already. It doesn't work to try and stop child predators like legislation keeps wanting to push for (TLDR: Contact government representatives and tell them to turn this all down)... but at the same time, the US government is asking for any information on people critical of ICE with a form of subpoena that they don't have to oblige and did so anyways (probably to make their IPO smoother when it does happen), with the US wanting to suppress speech by calling people terrorists... so yeah, people don't want their name and face attached to their online personas if possible.