Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their “support forums” on Discord.
I wish it was only limited to support forums. I’ve even seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.
It’s horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.
🤮
Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?
It’s people that don’t want to have to maintain things, which I understand. It’s trivial these days to host a forum with a cloud provider, or have a github, but Discord is one click. It’s not the ideal tool, but one click, no payment, and you have a place everyone can talk to each other.
I guess, but even without talking about forums, even a subreddit would at least be publicly accessible and searchable. Using discord is effortless but antagonistic, at least a subresdit would be both effortless and in the service of the public.
Sure, I’d prefer an open source self hosted platform, but I’m hard pressed to find anything worse than discord
Sure, except that Discord was accessible when these were set up. There is nothing stopping Reddit from doing the exact same thing next year.
Discord is just as inaccessible from the open internet as it’s always been, if not arguably worse so, although you’re right in giving Reddit no further credit in that department.
It’s too bad the open source community couldn’t find some programmers to help them make an alternative.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.
It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.
But in a success story for open source software, the entire community migrated from freenode to libera.chat in like 2 days.
The way to defeat enshittification is by disallowing lock-in.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. F
For me this is the biggest probem about Discord and Discord alternatives why not just use Lemmy what’s the problem with Lemmy?
Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can’t !lemmy because many of the communities don’t have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.
But you don’t need Google to search lemmy,. lemmy’s internal search is very good and you got whole index (even without an account)
Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
As part of #3, I’d also like to add the ability to publish forums to the open web. That way, people can discover, archive, and access discussions without logging in.
Sounds great. I hope it has video chat and screenshare or will implement it soon.
They do have those things from what I can tell.
As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I’m very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.
@craigers @other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
My issues with matrix were mostly around the voice services.
There is stoat.chat (formerly Revolt). But you wont find much help on Lemmy or Mastodon. A lot of people on the fediverse have an aversion to Discord because when they try it, they have difficulty with it like a senior citizen with a smartphone. Even though Matrix and Discord arent similar, people on the fediverse will still try to recommend you Matrix, because they think Discord is just another messenger and not like having a forum, teamspeak, jitsi and other stuff in one program. And even if you explain it like that, they will be like “but then you can just use a forum, matrix, jitsi and a screenshare program separately” or something like that.
Lol. I can vouch for this.
Hell my friends are still Stans for IRC and will literally argue it has everything you need.
Americans- If you’re thinking “this isn’t so bad” please consider that all it takes is a teeny tiny, insignificant api added to the back end with absolutely no notice to users and suddenly the DHS has a database of dissenters, with cross-referenced IDs, photos of faces, chat history, link share history, raw uploaded photos, and approximate locations.
Say no to this. If you need a temporary alternative that’s quick to get going, create a signal group chat with your friends.
Forget DHS or other government agencies, these companies have been shown to be untrustworthy stewards of our data from regular hackers.
I get that discord is used to groom kids and there is a very real risk to allowing children to use it unsupervised, but that means kids devices are the ones that need to be locked down, not the rest of the world.
No argument there. Just feels particularly relevant right now if you know what I mean.
☝️🤓 Discord said they’re going to delete the data!
note
The “someone” is referring to Discord, not you.
I dig your Netscape avatar
Discord said they’re going to delete the data!
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining
That joke is NSFW, please present facial verification and ID now or you will be banned and reported to the authorities!
Pain fucking ass but deleted my Discord account. Sure wish had a decent alternative. I see a lot of suggestions just don’t which to try? Any that work great with Linux Debian?
Do the people you talk with use Signal?
Signal and Discord are two different types of messenger. Discord is more a hybrid of a forum and like Teamspeak, but with vidchat and screenshare as well as a lot of aesthetic options.
Hear me out. Maybe, if you are a parent, its your duty to keep an eye on your child, and exert some control over the spaces and people they interact with?
Conservatives have been using the “think of the children line” to justify Draconian overeach for years. All while simultaneously doing everything in their power to take away programs that help children.
political parties aren’t real. Their only purpose is market segmentation.
It doesn’t matter which teams win in sports, billionaires own all the leagues.
Bugger off ml bot.
I, too, attack the source when I cannot refute the claim
Let’s not act like the dems don’t do some of the same shit.
And no I’m not both sidesing this shit…just saying that the dems/left uses this reasoning a lot as well.
Minnesota recently used their tax on billionaires to expand education and provide free lunch to children so while the party isn’t perfect they are not at all comparable.
What makes them so similar is first pass the post it guarantees a two party system and the practice of gerrymandering creating safe seats. The worst Democrats are the ones with the safest seats. If you want positive change start there.
We’re talking about trying to pass legislation in the name of “think of the children” logic. KOSA is a fairly recent one that is from the dems.
Average age of Lemmy is too low to remember the democrats always managed to support the war on drugs. Save the children indeed. Think of the children is just the go-to bipartisan reasoning for bad legislation
Oh I know but anytime someone starts saying that they’re very alike I need to remind people that they really aren’t because these upcoming elections will be a fight for survival
Yes it’s an important fight for survival. Which is why the dems will nominate a bunch of corporatists who have been scorned by trump. Let the “good” money back into politics and “save the kids” my benevolent billionaires who are noble and just!!
This is why we need to push for progressives, it’s the only card we have left. Look at the last year if you want to see what not playing gets you.
Off the top of my head I can only think of Lieberman and honestly the ESRB was a reasonable compromise.
Tipper gore? KOSA
Don’t know what KOSA is. Also, Tipper wasn’t a politician.
What’s tipper gore got to do with anything in the last thirty years? And kosa was bipartisan and died in the house.
30 years is a blink in time. You do realize laws don’t magically stop being potential issues after a few years right?
The Patriot Act which was bipartisan was passed almost 30 years ago now (25 years ago) now.
KOSA was introduced by a Dem.
You’re reaching to pull a both sides. Regardless republican platform positions harm children, Democratic ones feed them.
You’re mostly correct, but Dems are not left in any political paradigm with the slightest awareness of the existence of non-American countries.
I’m not both sidesing, but both sides…
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Hear me out: parents are irresponsible, and also can’t watch their kids 24/7
I hear you. I guess shitty parents is a good enough reason to let a company monetize your PII for a bit before they (or one of their customers) gets hacked and dumps to the dark web.
It’s not, but that doesn’t make your argument any more sensible.
Ah, so maybe shitty parents isn’t a good enough reason to let a company monetize and eventually lose your PII to the dark web?
That is what I said, yes.
Okay. Cool that’s what I said too. Just… the way you said it sounded like you were advocating for using bad parenting as a pretext for massive breaches of privacy and identity security.
The way you said it sounded like you were advocating for parents to watch their kids every second of every day, and if they don’t then whatever happens is their fault.
So are you for or against mass surveillance veiled as “child safety”?
Absofucking- lutely!
My 12 year old has zero unsupervised access to the internet. Zero. “But they’ll suffer sociallly!”
Will they? My son has tons of friends and they play sports and Nerf guns. And, he can read. A whole chapter book, on his own, without prompting.
Suffer socially, ask the “incels” who have recovered if the internet access they had as teens “helped them socially”.
My nephew plays lots of on online games. My sister checks in with me to make sure that he is both playing games that are appropriate for him, and with people who are appropriate to play with. We’ve setup a discord specifically for him and his friends, and the account he uses is actually my sister’s account, on her own device, so she has direct control over what communities he’s on in discord, who he talks to, and what content he is exposed to.
He is not allowed to play public lobby games with out her supervision, or a trusted “chaperone” (one of many IRL friend and family members) being in the lobby with him. This is as much about protecting him from harmful content, as it is about teaching him proper gaming etiquette. He was showing some toxic behaviors (greifing mainly) and I shut that down pretty quick.
As a parent: 100% agree
The EU has apparently decided that this has to be done for most public platforms by July 2026, so Discord may not have much of a choice and other platforms will likely follow: (Edit: I forgot, the EU strict age verification stuff seems to be limited to EU DSA’s definition of “platforms” so as a text messenger I’m not sure Discord is part of it. But this’ll still likely be coming to more services near you and perhaps Discord is just voluntarily joining the chaos…)
I could be wrong I’m not a lawyer, assume everything I write from here is bullshit, but see here:
https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say “Online services get up to 12 months to apply age verification, EU guidelines say” This was in July 2025.
EU guidelines in question seem to be:
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https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-guidelines-protection-minors and
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https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226
Quotes:
“[…] the Union legislature enacted Article 28 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and the Council (6). Paragraph 1 of this provision obliges providers of online platforms […] to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors, […]”
“Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below.”
“In the following circumstances, […] the Commission considers the use of access restrictions supported by age verification methods an appropriate and proportionate measure to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors: […] an online platform accessible to minors has identified risks to minors’ privacy, safety, or security, including content, conduct and consumer risks as well as contact risks (e.g., arising from features such as live chat, image/video sharing, anonymous messaging)”
“Age estimation methods can complement age verification technologies and can be used in addition to the former,” (AKA the alternative to a literal gov ID check seems to be big data AI sucking up all user data to estimate user age.)
The in my opinion horrible solution the EU seems to have found to avoid sharing the physical ID for services that don’t want to request one, is apparently this app: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui Which from what I can tell
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The EU app seems to require Google device attestation so all custom ROMs are out and to be a citizen you can apparently no longer own your device,
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Unless you use iOS or Android you’re apparently not a citizen,
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Once everyone is used to using some citizen app like that, I feel like a fascist government could easily tie it to a social score or other authoritarian measures bewyond the age verification.
Anyway, I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. But spread the word, somehow press seems to be ignoring this.
Hi, it’s me your lawyer!
Here’s some legal advice for you: delete Discord, hit the gym, lawyer up.
This has been official legal advice from me, your official lawyer.
Peace!
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Just say it was threatening you or something idk lol
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Y’all just aren’t thinking about the shareholders.
Good.
Discord is overused for help forums and wikis, which makes them extremely difficult to search and dependent upon third party software to be maintained. I hope this will force people away from that behaviour and back to good old fashioned messageboards that have been working just fine since at least the 80s
Wait 6 months, this will have changed nothing for Discord and they’ll carry on. Most likely in 2-3 years they’ll deploy the age verify for all users, not just users trying to access “adult” stuff.
Stop a calling this “age.verification” and start calling it what it is, “identity harvesting”.
Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they’re going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it’s someone else’s problem.
I was using discord with notifiarr for a notification platform for my jellyfin server/*arr stack. Shut all that down and setup a self-hosted instance of ntfy today. Works perfect, should have done it sooner.
So anyone who knows some good altenatives that are either FOSS or EU based?
I found this little substack article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
I am already learning about matrix protocol which is seeming like a good alternative. https://matrix.to/#/#all-topics:matrix.org
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
Like this: spiritual advisory pastor to serve only 6 months after molesting a 12-year-old for years
Morris’s attorney said the molestation was her fault because she was “flirtatious.”
Thats why it is important to have an alternetive ready people can switch to. If there is a backlash (for any platform) and a decentralized alternative is there this is the biggest chance to become the “norm”. So thanks to all the people working on lemmy, peertube, mastodon, etc.
After what happened in Nepal last year, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living. The powers that be saw a small country use it as a tool to affect change. To me, and tell me if I lm jumping to conclusions here, its obvious as to why this policy change is happening at all, to prevent the site from being used in that manner again.
