Mastodawn

🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)

The correct response is still "Fuck you Discord, too little too late".

They're only pulling back from March to later this year, and adding credit card options instead of face scans isn't addressing the issue of "fuck you, you don't need to know who I am".

@Em0nM4stodon https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon/116127786561206440

Em :official_verified: (@[email protected])

YES! This is AMAZING! 🎉 Keep pushing against abusive practices, and keep fighting for your privacy rights! IT WORKS! ✊🔒 https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/24/discord-just-canceled-its-planned-age-verification-rollout-for-now/ Edit: Just to be clear, I still encourage everyone to move to better platforms and delete your Discord accounts (even if there was no age verification at all). Discord isn't a privacy-respectful platform. But this small victory means we should keep pushing for better privacy practices, everywhere. This means they are listening. This means you have the power to make things better, for yourself and for others. Celebrate that. And keep pushing back. #Privacy #AgeVerification #Discord #PrivacyWin

Infosec Exchange

@IanAMartin HAS MOVED!Feb 25

@alice Also notice the “…for now” in the headline.

The Orange Theme Feb 25

@alice @Em0nM4stodon Please, y'all, do NOT let Lucy yank that football away from you. Discord didn't find its heart overnight, it found a PR person who was available to send a few emails. They will absolutely try to do this again.

tiny frights Feb 25

@alice @Em0nM4stodon
Heh, just today got the email confirming full deletion of my Discord account.

Ms. Que Banh Feb 25

@alice @Em0nM4stodon I'm with you, Alice.

@alice

Discord pulled off it's mask, partnered with fascists, and are trying to put the mask back on. When a company tells you who it is, you believe them. Discord is hardly the only chatting platform. I can promise you, that if enough people leave, friends will follow. If they don't because having a second option for instant messaging is more trouble than respecting your choice not to be on a platform that treats your confidential conversations and very existence like products to be sold, then maybe those friendships aren't worth keeping.

Fuck Discord. And frankly fuck every proprietary social platform. I don't know if decentralized and open source social platforms are the future, but it's the future that we should fight for.

@Em0nM4stodon

Krampus 🌰Feb 25

I mean even the news is like "well we were gonna be openly fasc about 50% of our users but we decided to only do 10% for now but the rest we're just doing more secret-like, but still fasc!" so yeah, still garbage

@Em0nM4stodon @alice

This Account Kills Fascists Feb 25

@AstraCeleste @Em0nM4stodon @alice UGH. That's disappointing.

BACK TO IRC!

Andrew Zonenberg Feb 25

@violenteastcoastcity @AstraCeleste @Em0nM4stodon @alice I've been waiting there for years to welcome the refugees from whatever chat platform imploded next

Morqendi Feb 25

@violenteastcoastcity @AstraCeleste @Em0nM4stodon @alice

Ever heard of Signal or Matrix? There are alternatives to a 40 years old, (by default) unencrypted chat...

Mary Beth Rudis Mar 1

@AstraCeleste @Em0nM4stodon @alice I’m curious - (as someone who, back in the day, participated in multi-player game “ops” via Ventrilo or Teamspeak) - what do y’all think of Element (same folks who started Matrix)? Or is it too new to recommend yet?

@marybethR

For the Matrix clients, Element is what I'd personally recommend, yeah. I find it to be one of the more mature clients with FluffyChat being the other best option. Depending on your preferences either of those I think are the best clients to use for Matrix at this moment. (I am eyeballing Commet though 👀

That said, I think there could be QoL improvements. One issue I have is that if you want to make Spaces, which are Matrix's equivalent to Discord servers, you can't really arrange things meaning you should probably know what order you want things to be in from the get go, and if you want to add moderators, you're going to have to add them manually in each room in that space.

Unless there's something I'm missing. Before recently I primarily used Element for one on one chats or normal group chats. So there's some information I'm missing. Not sure how that would compare to Ventrilo or TeamSpeak as I haven't used either of them and only heard about them recently. 😅

@Em0nM4stodon @alice

Mary Beth Rudis Mar 1

@AstraCeleste @Em0nM4stodon @alice thank you! Honestly I miss the elegant simplicity of Teamspeak. I’ve gone on people’s Discord servers and feel like I’m in a maze of twisty passages, all alike… trying to find the right subgroup to join within a larger community/group. Teamspeak would put you in the right “room” from the moment you logged in. For large player owned corporations you had different chat rooms for different ops/purposes. 1/2

Mary Beth Rudis Mar 1

@AstraCeleste @Em0nM4stodon @alice 2/2 … then, as a player/user, you could simply move to other rooms if you want to chat with someone there… using a much easier to navigate menu of options than Discord. When Discord first became “the thing” it was folks migrating there from Skype and/or Teamspeak, because TS was showing signs of age. Then, there was no text chat option. Only voice. Now, that’s no longer the case. Self-hosting is free for TS client.

@alice
It's still a great example of public pressure changing private plans. It's also nice for those that need time to migrate.
@Em0nM4stodon

disorderlyf Feb 25

@alice @Em0nM4stodon It's not even just "you don't need to know who I am." For me, it's "I don't respond well to extortion where the option with the least friction involves handing you something I either can't change without re-issuing documents and possibly physically moving in the case of IDs, or something I need to get COSMETIC SURGERY to change in the case of facial recognition data" especially when they already have a history of shitting the bed on security and lying to our faces about retention.

bUt YoU cAN jUSt uSe YouR CrEdIt CarD!

A) Not all of us have a fucking credit card
B) If y'all fuck up with my credit card data, I'm potentially even more fucked than if you fuck up with my ID.

RealGene ☣️Feb 25

@disorderlyf @alice @Em0nM4stodon
Before cell phones were ubiquitous, credit card usage was how they tracked people.

carsen 🦖Feb 25

@alice @Em0nM4stodon do y'all know of any discord alternatives?

George B Feb 25

@himbokisser @alice @Em0nM4stodon

Mastodon is moving the internal team chat and I think their patron supporters chat to @zulip although it's more similar to Slack than Discord (identity is managed separately per-server rather than global)

George B Feb 25

@himbokisser @alice @Em0nM4stodon @zulip

I think the main thing that gets people to dismiss it is a lack of end to end encryption (server can see all messages) but how relevant that is depends on your threat model and since it can be self hosted, a lot of threats E2EE is designed for can be heavily mitigated if you use a server with an admin you would trust enough to have in those group chats in the first place.

the elder sea Feb 25

@alice @Em0nM4stodon

I think this covers some angles that are worth considering.
https://furry.engineer/@soatok/116053305864626029

Soatok Dreamseeker (@[email protected])

On Discord Alternatives Next month, Discord is going to start requiring age verification. The backlash from gamers everywhere has been predictable and justified. I guess their company name checks out. I've had a few people reach out to me because of my prior vulnerability disclosures and criticism of encrypted messaging apps. (Thanks, Toggart.) Unfortunately, asking a cryptography-focused security engineer for app recommendations is like asking a rocket scientist to… http://soatok.blog/2026/02/11/on-discord-alternatives/

Furry.Engineer - Duct tape, hotfixes, and poor soldering!

@himbokisser
There is Fluxer. https://fluxer.app/
@alice @Em0nM4stodon

Fluxer: A chat app that puts you first

Fluxer is a free and open source instant messaging and VoIP platform built for friends, groups, and communities.

Fluxer

Adam Honse Feb 25

@momo @himbokisser @alice @Em0nM4stodon There's also Spacebar (https://spacebar.chat/) which is reimplementing Discord's API in a self-hostable, open source way. The main issue is issues with voice chat but they're actively working on it so I'm hopeful. It already feels like Discord but better as there's no stupid Nitro paywall, you can just have banners and animations and use emojis everywhere like you should.

SpacebarChat - Selfhosted, secure communication that you're already familiar with

Spacebar is a free and open source reverse engineering and reimplementation of Discord, including both the backend and frontend. It's a chat platform similar to Slack and Rocket.chat

@CalcProgrammer1
Fluxer uses Livekit as voice/video backend, which works well (at least in my Foundry stack for TTRPGs). There is an option to self-host it but they want to further improve it when their code refactoring is done. They also plan a federation option between selfhosted instances. I have planned to revisit the project and set up an instance when federation is implemented
@himbokisser @alice @Em0nM4stodon

@Em0nM4stodon @alice Discords response to the pushback is basically

"We hear you! We know you aren’t happy with our torment nexus implementation, but don’t worry, we’ve already got so much personal data on most of you that we don’t need to put you through the nexus. And for the remaining 10%, we’ll still put you in the torment nexus, but not until later in the year, and as a bonus, you’ll be able to pick which colour you want your nexus to be!

@ada @Em0nM4stodon @alice "... premium customers can opt for either the misery mall or the molestation plaza, we call this the Nitro Glycerin tier!"

@alice
Ah, the "Activate now" - "Remind me later" non-consent move. Classic!
@Em0nM4stodon

Assimilateborg Feb 25

@alice I was once in the situation to need age verification. And I opted for the "payment method". Outsourceng the problem to some payment processor.
To stay anonymous, I used paypal, as that's a nice way for people to have an anonymous account.
At least anonymous towards myself. If the government steps in, then it's over anyway.