Discord Alternatives
- Stoat;
- Matrix;
- Rocket.Chat;
- Zulip;
- Discourse.
Beginning with a phased global rollout to new and existing users in early March, users may be required to engage in an age-verification process to change certain settings or access sensitive content. This includes age-restricted channels, servers, or commands and select message requests.
only changes for the unverified:
- Channels, servers, and commands set to age-restricted will be inaccessible
- DM requests deemed “sensitive” will be inaccessible
- “Sensitive content” will be blurred
- Won’t be able to become a speaker in “stage” channels, a special type where a few videoconferencers have a meeting where anyone else can watch and type but not videoconference; verified watchers can be invited to speak
- DMs from unfamiliar users will be routed to a separate “warning”
nothing else
I think this is business as usual…
Youtube age restricts pro-Palestine stuff and the government age restricts the Epstein files, so I can imagine this would target political or LGBTQ spaces, which are some of the worst spaces to require ID for. There’s a local political server I’m in, which due to this I’m strongly urging to migrate to Matrix with Discord bridges, and am offering to help with.
Server owners must apply an age-restricted label to any channels that contain sexually explicit content involving adults or content involving adults that is shared solely for the purposes of sexual gratification.
nothing else needs to be age-restricted, and age restriction of topics you mentioned would be big news for discord. pluralkit’s home is discord and has great influence there, and the lgbtq+ community definitely has a larger presence than the plural community
This here says that Discord can automatically age-restrict channels and specifically mentions channels focused on sexual content in a different section, implying that this is not the only “mature” topic they will age restrict.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005292701-How-to-Access-an-Age-Restricted-Server-FAQ clarifies that Discord would only do that for servers that otherwise violate the Community Guidelines’s provisions on adult content, whose only mention of which I quoted above.
That doesn’t look like clarification to me. It explicitly mentions sexual content then gives a vague “age-restricted themes” and “18+ content” that they can apply arbitrarily like YouTube did with “Hind’s Hall”
Can someone help me figure out if matrix/element would work for what I need? So far it looks decent, but my main issue is figuring out integrations/bots.
Is there a way to integrate something like PluralKit there?
Matrix does have a bot API, but there is not even close to as robust an ecosystem of bots to choose from. Whatever you want is probably possible, but depending on your needs you may have to write it yourself.
That makes sense. Thank you!!
Is Matrix a self-hosted alternative to Discord? I’ve been looking for one but the closest I can find is RocketChat, which is meant more for corporate environments. I’m going to be launching a radio station for Lemmy soon and I need a suitable solution for chat platform that I can integrate with my website (and eventually app).
Matrix is sort of a mishmash of things, not a fan of the UX but it has federation and encryption and isn’t Discord, and also has bridges to various platforms
It seems like the restriction should be lifted for accounts without verification after 5 years. After all, you’re not even allowed to sign up if you’re under 13, so by 5 years you have to be at least 18.
Well, the day it asks me for ID/face scan is the day I delete my account. Their days are numbered.
You think they’ll let you access the account settings to delete the account without scanning your face first?
Just log in with a third party client where people in the Issues are complaining about being banned. Or use your Discord token and spam their API with illegal calls until they ban your account
If they don’t they would open the door to people committing spam or abuse intentionally to receive a suspension as the next best thing. I know I’ll do it if they don’t let me delete my account.
They won’t let you send messages without finishing verification
Then I’ll email their support and be rude to them until they get fed up. I’m sure I can be nasty enough in some way to get them to suspend me no matter how bad they want me.
I love how photo-based age verification scanning is the worst of both worlds - it destroys your anonymity, but not in a way that makes it easier to run a community where you can ban a person by their digital ID since they can just make a new one with the same face since facial recognition is too crude for that.
I hope that discourages open source projects and similar communities from using discord as forum / user support.
Yep, hate when I want to follow some project and they link you to X, Reddit and Discord lol
Need support? Contract us on @SupportThatNeverReplies on Shitter (the nazi-everything app)!
Stoat looks promising as an open source alternative
Theyve been around for a few years and I’m still not really impressed. No E2EE, No federation if the people running it go belly up. You might as well use signal ATP.
Looks promising…
but why is it always electron?
FOR REAL BRO
I just tried to sign up for it. Installed app and signed up, it wouldn’t go through. So I go to web interface and create an account there. I’ve waited ONE HOUR for email verification, and NOTHING. Asked to resend verification, they made me click through 5 captivas, and still NOTHING. Moving on from stoat.
Misconfiguration with SMTP is likely or their SMTP server is under maintenance and you just tried at a poor time.
Granted for a production environment there should be some notice to users.
I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn’t. We’ve discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn’t stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.
I’d be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that’s a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I’m still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.
I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.
Putting valuable help, trouble solving and FAQ stuff into a discord is … annoying. You cant find it again. So it will only help the original poster
We do also maintain docs. I put a lot of effort into the Setup ones but got burnt-out before really getting into the other ones (which need a lot of work). And for actual bugs, we use GitHub.
Discord’s search functionality is reasonably robust, and as long as you’re already there, you can usually find old conversations about the problem you’re having. The biggest problem is that it’s gated off from the wider Internet, which is shitty.
I think what we all like about it over forums for providing support is that it’s closer to real-time communication, it’s more flexible (conversations can flow in and out of each other instead of being permanently stuck in one subject-specific thread), and it’s more casual.
Maybe they’ve changed something since I last tried getting help via Discord, but I found the search feature extremely lacking. I never have trouble finding someone else with my same question/problem, but there’s no means of viewing replies to the message in question, or even whether anyone replied at all. One is required to manually browse potential hours or days of messages in the hope of following a conversation chain that might not even exist. This is made even worse by the fact that replies to a message aren’t necessarily registered as replies because they’re just subsequent chat messages.
I get it, but if bigger projects don’t move to alternatives, those alternatives have a lot less pressure to evolve. If a big project bites the bullet and moves, then there are more technically minded folks with a vested interest in making the platform better.
Damn it. I did not come here for a reasonable and valid explanation.
ಠ_ಠ
Begrudgingly puts away pitchfork
Thanks for the insight.
There are layers to this.
Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.
As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.
As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago… Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help…
Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap. And… you should really try to avoid being dependent on said EOL software. Not always possible but… yeah.
And that isn’t going to change. So they’ll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable… like Matrix.
This is bad.
Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years.
It isn’t just long-term, it causes issues right off the bat; no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.
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For the user this causes significant delays. A problem that could be solved in minutes with a search now requires hours or days for someone to respond to their specific problem. A problem that likely was already solved 10 times before. And god help you if the server is active, your problem might get burred instantly and no response will ever come.
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For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.
These issues compound on each other as support staff burn out and users get tired of waiting. Leads to people just going elsewhere.
For me, a lack of support forums signals the creators don’t care about the software working right and don’t care the software will be unmaintainable the moment they step away. Ie: a lack of support forum is a strong signal to find greener pastures.
It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.
Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.
What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.
As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.
It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.
For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.
Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.
Yeah, I have to back you up here. This person’s alleged experience is completely divorced from my experience working on PCSX2 and tells me they have no idea what they’re talking about. We have to answer questions over and over and over again, but usually there’s a command to quickly give a canned answer.
And the questions aren’t repeated because there’s no way for users to search (there is); it’s because it’s usually lightning-fast in that kind of environment to just ask and because dedicated help forums are a form of selection bias. You’re generally going to get more thought-out questions from users who use dedicated, thread-based support forums because either a) they needed to make an account just to ask that question, b) they already have an account and so are more dedicated than the average user, or c) all the others who didn’t want to make that investment either just gave up or found the answer some other way.
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I refuse to verify my age with a face scan or government ID for an online account/profile… It’s too easy to imagine how fucked up that will go.
The more I delete profiles to platforms with
unwanteddisturbing features the more recluse I become. It must look to acquaintances that I don’t care to speak (to them) but what can I do? I cannot imagine convincing even computer-literate friends to switch to something - as they will have the same problem.Do I need to retire my Discord gaming server before I’m locked out of controlling it?
What alternative should we all switch to?
Also thinking AI fake IDs will end up being an easy way around this.
I hope people using fake IDs to bypass it becomes common knowledge. Felony or not it’s effective and the ID verifying part isn’t.
Drop anything that’s not opensource and federated, except if you want to live the enshitification process over and over.
Matrix might be the closest to Discord. XMPP should also be considered.
I’m still trying to understand why XMPP isn’t more widely used. Probably the whole no single centralized service thing like most other federated protocols/services
XMPP biggest issues:
- The absurdly and laugably slowness of the protocol evolution on critically needed features: it was bleeding edge years back. The XSF totally screwed up the VoIP extension management. Google dropped a working out-of-the-box solution on the table in 2005: “Take it and use it! You’re welcome!”. They took 4 years to improve it before declaring the extension stable. Only then did clients start implementations, and bummer: the spec was not perfect, there were a lot of hiccups and “client A can make calls to B but not C” issues, because, who would have guessed, the only way to improve a spec at some point is to test it out there, and not stare at it and make some minor changes. By the time, most XMPP users of the time who wanted VoIP had moved on to others tools, XMPP went from at the top to very late. They’re doing it again with MIX (next gen rooms): the first draft is from 2015. It’s still “experimental”, though some servers team started implementation (such lack of patience…)
- An ocean of servers/clients with no consistency. You get to Matrix, and you have Element for all platforms. It can be native code everywhere, but it’s the same look and feel. You can tell your pops “just install Element”. In the XMPP world, there is no equivalent, though Snikket seems to be going there (consistent UI across platforms): all clients are different, different UI, platform specific with different set of features, some are a 1 guy project. If you’re not guided by a tek-savvy person, you have no idea where to start.
With all that said, I run a server for our family and its resources consumption is barely a blip on the radar. The lightest Matrix servers are an order of magnitude hungrier. And the difference increases with scale!
XMPP is the absolute best solution to multiply small servers, a very good thing for a healthy federation.
Appreciate the info, thanks for taking the time to reply. I loved when Google was using XMPP for their chat just because that meant I could chat with people who insisted on using their Google accounts, without having to use one myself
Zulip is great for text based communities, but doesn’t have built in voice or video.
Discord genuinely thinks they got the users by the balls… Thing is, people move platforms extremely easily. It happened to MSN Messenger, it happened to Skype, and it’ll happen to Discord too.
For those who are looking for something very similar, look at Stoat (formerly known as Revolt). Their URL is https://stoat.chat/.
One problem will be that there are way too goddamn many software projects that use Discord as a shitty replacement for a blog and documentation, and they’re gonna be a pain to move to proper content platforms.
Sometimes the only way thru is shitty. And those devs might have to learn the hard way not to overcentralize- or to not use a damn chat software for what is way more suited to forums.
I’ve been complaining about this for years. Hope we’re finally starting to see the end of it.
I’m in like a hundred of those. Honestly, they’re not that useful. Burn it all down and start over.
“Look, Discord requires me to upload a pic of my face or ID, to which i can’t legally agree to. Please provide another channel or i can’t contribute.”
That’ll work for individual users, but getting all that chat history out will be a problem for the owners once the users dry up.
And I’m sure Discord will do their best to make it impossible.
Serves them right for picking chat software in the first place, let alone one they don’t control.
Mass migration like that occurs (from my memory at least) when the newer alternative has much better functionality, performance, and ease of use compared to the status quo service and has a low barrier to entry (sign up is quick and straightforward). Do any of the decentralized Discord alternatives fit these criteria (honest question, not rhetorical)?
Well, Stoat has the same features as Discord, including many premium ones for free, the ability to write HTML/CSS for your own server, with the only thing missing being video feed. Otherwise, it functions the same while being much faster.
Also sign up is very quick, but right now they’re getting hugged to death, so sign up emails might take a while to arrive.
Sign up is QUICK? It’s been more than a hour. I’ve tried through the app, through the web, it hasn’t sent me back NOTHING for verification. Still not signed up. What’s quick for you? 10 hours to sign up?
I literally fucking said they got hugged to death. Why are you mad at an app/website that literally had its email crash from everyone trying to sign up at once??
They absolutely have their users by the balls and I guarantee most people will continue to use the app after this, unfortunately.
Yeah, my group of friends will be very resistant to moving away from discord. They’re all aware of the issues with it, but It’s too convenient of a platform. Personally, I will give up most of the comforts to not be under the thumb of a corporation, but I’m an outlier in my friend group with that perspective.
I’m in this boat too. Most of my online friends I only really get to talk to via discord. Not sure what I’m gonna do, because they won’t end up budging.
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I did. That’s my opinion, most people won’t care I care, but most people don’t.
Revolt (suppose stoat) had problems with noise cancellation and people complained to me the UI wasn’t intuitive.
I just went through an EXASPERATING experience installing and signing up for Stoat. It DOES NOT WORK. Don’t recommend it.
Sounds like everyone and their dog trying to sign up at once due to this Discord news is overwhelming them, give it a while and try again later. I’m waiting a bit before I try. im_doing_my_part.jpg
“Content filtering” is just corporate jargon for subjective censorship, dynamically and discriminately restricting access to knowledge. I abhor all censorship.
Care to make a remix of “7 Words You Can Never Say on TV” for blahaj? YOU might abhor all censorship, but your admins don’t, and I’m inclined to agree with them.
Yeah … A complete anything-goes free for all is always going to devolve into a nasty cesspool dominated by the worst actors who have driven everyone else away. I get it, there’s a lot of awful censorship out there, but on the flip side you need to have at least some rules to prevent the otherwise inevitable descent into the worst environment possible
Didn’t they just get busted for leaking their verification data that they totally weren’t keeping?
Guess I’m not using discord anymore lol
Not if I read it correctly: not uploading anything (and fuck you Discord) means I won’t get invited to view adult content, right? That’s it? And we’ll all be teens forever?
Pfft. Whatever.
For now… maybe 6 months or a year and everyone might need it. That’s the way everything seems to be going.
Maybe. That’d be an easy goodbye though.
I agree, already made a post in my server to follow me on X, Y, Z etc and how they were recently hacked 70,000 IDs leaked so they can’t be trusted.
Back to post order catalogues.
You know what doesn’t require full face scan? irc
I love IRC, just need some user friendly client recommendations if we want wider adoption by less tech savvy folks. Though I get the impression there are a good few IRC users who prefer how that filters out the “normies”
/poke
/trout
irc
now there’s some letters I haven’t seen in quite some time.
