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Sounds like a creepy way for discord to take millions of photos of children and feed them to an AI.
my time with discord was short. but the amount of pedophiles or people who supported pedophiles was so high I never went back.
my point is, this is on-brand for them.
Oh look, I found the uninstall
I find absurd that many political groups including the Pirate Party moved to Discord. People who that claim to be fighting for the rights of user privacy then invite you to join Discord. Looks like they have been assimilated by big tech.
In all fairness, I think the FOSS community lacks good messaging tools so people end up using:
- for personal messaging: WhatsApp (very popular in Europe), iMessage (in the US), Telegram (Brazil and Asia)
- for communities: Discord and Telegram
- for businesses: Slack (popular in tech) and Teams (~all the rest)
Signal has been gaining momentum for personal messaging but its unrelenting focus on privacy comes with some significant usability tradeoffs: (1) it doesn’t have a web-app that I can use from other computers that I don’t control (eg a work laptop), (2) it doesn’t sync well between my phone (primary) and desktop apps (secondary), (3) it doesn’t have a "bots" API like Telegram does so its creative uses are very limited, (4) third-party clients are officially disallowed.
Matrix might be a good fit for communities and businesses (which have very distinct moderation needs as in a business you can just report users to HR hehe), but in my experience it (or its flagship client Element) has lots of performance issues that makes it unpleasant to use. It also reminds me of XMPP with its different extensions and not knowing which clients supported which extensions; for example, go to https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ and click around to discover that many clients don’t support threads yet. All that being said, I think Matrix is still the one that’s best positioned to win the communities.
For businesses, I think the "open core" model is pretty competitive: you have Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip. In fairness I think they made significant strides so I’d consider them pretty successful in their own regard, despite Teams dominating the market by abusing Microsoft’s monopoly and Slack’s popularity + coupling with Salesforce. Now, the issue is that those three "open core" software aren’t very useful for communities because again, their moderation models are very different. Moderation is a ~non-issue in a business setting where you have HR and other functions to enforce the rules and penalise accordingly.
Long story short, what’s your FOSS alternative to Discord for communities? Revolt maybe?
Revolt relies on community self hosting last I looked at it, which means it would never be a "mass" solution.
Should Discord ever collapse (something I don't see in the near future), the free alternatives that I see benefitting would be XMPP and Matrix — though there's new contenders that could make name for themselves by then too.
Revolt relies on community self hosting last I looked at it
I think on the contrary they are not big on self-hosting nor federation so they have a better chance at becoming a "mass" solution. While you can self-host, it doesn't federate like Matrix and in practice everyone is on the "first-party" instance (revolt.chat).
Requires a phone number.
Requires a phone number.
Which one? Revolt?
Signal
How? My PC doesn't have a camera. Also couldn't you just hold up a video of an older person
Pretty much any adult has a smartphone capable of running discord and with a camera. You only have to verify once on any device.
Also couldn't you just hold up a video of an older person
Based on my experience with similar things in the past, it activates the camera for a few seconds and you have to pan to give it a 3d image of your face.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for explaining how the system works. I'm not even taking any sides here.
I don't use a smartphone
I gathered, but (people like) you're like 0.0001% of the population. Discord doesn't care about your demographic.
I mean… there ARE privacy respecting options, but guess what they chose to do so.
Like, to protect the children UNPROTECT the children by uploading the face to a thirdparty company, so not even directly to discord. I didnt read their TOS or Privacy Policy, but i bet they save the images for “improving” their model and selling it to other AI / ML companies.
I will uninstall and refuse to use any tool that requires this on the penalty of death.
I tried out matrix recently, it's pretty good.
Fuck is wrong with Mumble?
Same thing that’s wrong with Teamspeak and the other old standby, IRC:
A dated look and lack of shinies like inline GIFs scares the youngsters, the lack of history/persistence drops them and everyone else.
Ah, the many logging bots of IRC. Going to a website or getting daily sized text files DCC’d to you so you could search up if your problem had already been solved, or so someone said they think it was solved on one of those days…
history/persistance is the problem; I don't think anyone seriously cares about inline GIFs.
You would be surprised
I don't see anything wrong in preferring a higher level of expression through GIFs or whatever.
Well fuck me if history/persistence isn’t really a problem in an age when we were being warned the government was spying on everything.
See I still remember when I didn't have to scan my face to get a machine to do something. And that's the way it will always be. For me.
I remember those days, as well!
Well. Anyone got a Discord alternative recommendation if I use it for text messaging? Would rather not upload my ID or face. I looked at Revolt, but they're apparently histed in the UK, which is mandating age verification.
If your state requires ID verification, then most apps will probably comply. You can try Matrix with Element or just Signal with a group.
More more "off-the-line" alternatives you can look at Mumble and own your own server.
https://simplex.chat/ is what I use and would recommend instead of signal
Element is the best option for people who need the "discordlike" features such as sub "room" in a community
You can totally get by with just making multiple simplex groups IMO but some people coming from discord don't like that
We use simplex here, but if I want to also use it from the desktop it's really clunky. I hope they find a way to unclunk that.
It's not that inconvenient considering how shitty the Signal desktop experience is: it's slow, bloated and has moody sync.
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IRC, matrix?
Thank you for suggestions!
SimpleX is anonymous and works well.
Huh so are you saying revolt must do the image age verification thing now?
I used revolt a few years ago before this age verification stuff started popping up
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Actually look at the way Discord works in your network, like all the raw IP addresses and and connections with no clear ownership or human readable name, with dozens of changing connections to get any of it to work. Then go try to ask questions about what is going on and who you're connecting to. Discover that none of it is documented or described anywhere. Then realize that this means no one running Discord is doing so on a fully audited and logged host. You simply cannot be without a bunch of effort. I made it to the 6th layer of whitelisted raw IP addresses, and still nothing worked while trying to connect to Discord in a fully logged and documented network. I am simply unwilling to write a script to annotate that many connections so that all of my logs make sense. I seriously doubt anyone on Discord is doing so, and they certainly lack any understanding of what they are connecting to, why, or the protocols. So the Discord user is telling me "my opsec and privacy awareness is as nonexistent as a pig in a herd running off a cliff, and my system should be assumed compromised with no idea of what might be connected." Everyone else doing it is a garbage excuse. That no one appears to have gotten hurt – has tissue thin merit, but also reveals that the user runs blind in herds while hoping for the best. Such information infers a lot about a person, their depth, accountability, and ethics – in certain scopes.
Guess I better get my picture of Elon ready /s
Or who is the CEO of Discord?
Tim Discord
Use Mastodon. You can use a server outside of your country. And even if your country attempts to find the operator, 10% of their global turnover of zero is still zero.
Mastodon isn’t really a replacement for discord though.
True. Matrix is more for that. Or possibly SimpleX.
Unfortunately there's not really anything that comes close to Discord.
Revolt is the closest, as it's open source and self-hostable but still lacks many of the features and isn't federated.
Element is almost identical.
Not even close.
I only used it once a while ago. What doesn't it do that Discord does that you also need?
Scan your system for running processes 😅
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Everyone keeps recommending Revolt but I tried it last week and it's janky as hell and the voice chat just straight up didn't work. This wasn't just me, too. Our whole group tried it and gave up.
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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