Discord is making a huge change that will enact age restrictions for all accounts until users verify their age with ID or face scans.
  • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    681·
    3 天前

    If the pushback on social media doesn’t get Discord to drop these plans, then I’ll just have to delete the app.

    Not caving to another app asking for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) only for this same data to be leaked months to years later.

    Society will do everything to protect children aside from making better parents.

  • Aielman15@lemmy.worldEnglish
    270·
    4 天前

    Let’s protect the children by scanning everyone’s face and ID and uploading them to a server that’ll get hacked five years from now.

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    3 天前

    discord. the platform that has a huge pedophile problem? the platform that’s sympathetic towards conservative shitheads?

    that discord?

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    200·
    4 天前

    For ID scans, Discord says that documents “are deleted quickly.”

    Just a few months ago they had a data leak which proved that they were indeed /not/ deleting documents and ID’s like they had been claiming.

    Granted in that case it was mostly countries that force keeping that data but, I’m sick of companies lying and saying “lol yea we defo delete the data after”

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      4 天前

      I won’t even give hard drives when recycling a computer, I pull and smash myself. Last set of old drives I cut in half with bolt cutters.

      • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
        72·
        4 天前

        This is not truly foolproof. Data can still be recovered from the spinning metal platter since it can theoretically be removed and put into a recovery device, even in a broken state.

        Im addition to that, hard drives/ssd’s sometimes have small flash memory chips, from which data can sometimes be recovered.

        If you want it to actually be unrecoverable then you have to actually ensure all parts thay store data are truly deleted/wiped, which is more than just the core platter. Or just use encryption and throw away the key, since all data going through the tiny OS on these devices will be encrypted. Or just store them forever in a vault.

        • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          4 天前

          Bud, if you put that platter back together after I snipped it, you deserve every bit of data you get off it, 1000%

          • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
            42·
            4 天前

            It’s not that hard though. There are companies that offer data recovery as a service. If the value of the data on those drives exceeds the cost of those services then it becomes worth it to fish one of the drives out of the dumpster and take it there.

            • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              4 天前

              This is a very specialized job, your avg joe is not going to do it. Also, in the many years I’ve been in IT, I’ve never even seen a video of a platter reconstructed and get data off it.

    • blazeknave@lemmy.worldEnglish
      36·
      4 天前

      My friend is an exec there. After reading this thread bugged him to buy my software that would protect this vulnerability. They confirmed data/file never leaves the user’s device. Sounds pretty safe.

      • Goodeye8@piefed.socialEnglish
        14·
        4 天前

        You do know that it’s bullshit? Unless they’re incredibly incompetent they’re lying to you. If the data never leaves the client then all the checks are client-side, which means it’s relatively easy (compared to a server side check) to bypass those checks.

        • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          3 天前

          For a while (maybe even still, I haven’t kept up with it) you could unlock paid features with a modded client, so they absolutely have a history of using client-side verification.

        • Orygin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          3 天前

          Afaik the files exfiltrated were photos that the on device detection could not identify and were uploaded to verify server side. That would mean not all pictures are sent to the backend, and that corroborates why “only” 70k photos were stolen when discord has millions of users verified.
          Of course you have to put your trust in a closed source system so best not to upload, but if true it’s still a far cry from openly lying about it. It’s probably explicitly stated in their ToS that they may upload the file if the verification fails client side.

  • cheesybuddha@lemmy.worldEnglish
    116·
    4 天前

    I’m actually pretty happy that Discord is killing itself. Far too many people use it as an official platform for stuff like help forums.

    Maybe lets go back to basic message boards that are actually searchable, etc.

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.caEnglish
      14·
      4 天前

      Self-hosted options like Mumble also exist.

      Self-hosted is a pain to get started with but as everything enshittifies if will only get more important.

      • dev_null@lemmy.mlEnglish
        14·
        4 天前

        As someone who doesn’t use the voice chat feature of Discord, I am always confused when people suggest things like Mumble as an alternative.

    • I_Jedi@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      3 天前

      Well there is that one nsfw forum that is VERY active. Said forum also provides a list of file hosters that have escaped enshittification.

      Those guys pirate the shit out of Japanese games but official nsfw game developers sometimes go there to advertise.

    • WraithGear@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      3 天前

      already making plans with my battle group t move to team speak 6, which is only an option because they now have screen sharing

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          3 天前

          Or just get bought out. Discord was supposed to be the answer to Twitch getting gobbled up. Then Microsoft gobbled Discord.

          Does anyone seriously believe there’s an indie third party social media site immune to a multi-million (possibly even billion) dollar buyout offer? One that won’t go the way of TikTok and be legislatively forced into sale?

          • thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            2 天前

            Does anyone seriously believe there’s an indie third party social media site immune to a multi-million (possibly even billion) dollar buyout offer? One that won’t go the way of TikTok and be legislatively forced into sale?

            federated platforms

  • Cris16228@lemmy.todayEnglish
    581·
    4 天前

    Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t they got a massive leak for gov IDs last year? And they still pushing this bs?! Hello?

    • Agrivar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      154·
      4 天前

      Maybe this bullshit will be the spark needed to move us all off Discord. It’s fine for voice-chat in games, don’t get me wrong, but I HATE how its replaced forums/wikis for so many games/mods/etc. Searching disparate Discord servers is like looking for a nonferrous straw-colored needle in a haystack.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        451·
        4 天前

        Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.

        • cheesybuddha@lemmy.worldEnglish
          81·
          4 天前

          What’s wrong with good old fashioned data base backed message forums? There are so many implementations available, I’m sure many are FOSS, and I’m sure there’s managed solutions as well. It’s a mature, tested, rock solid reliable technology that has existed pretty much since the inception of the internet, and can be easily incorporated into other tools and workflows - because there is 40+ years of development work with the concept.

          Seriously, why?

          • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.comEnglish
            12·
            4 天前

            Forums are great for being forums. Real-time instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing are all a very different use-case. They’re two entirely separate products, and comparing them is apples and oranges. People are looking to replace Discord with Discord-like services, because forums don’t fucking do what Discord does.

            The big problem (and the reason everyone seems to compare the two) is that Discord started eating forums, as companies realized it was easier to create a Discord server instead of creating (and hosting, and maintaining) a support forum. And that’s a perfectly valid complaint. But that doesn’t mean forums are a valid replacement for Discord.

            • Spaniard@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              4 天前

              He is talking about forums because the main issue with discord is that it’s cut from the rest of the internet so nothing is indexed and a lot of platforms and services use discord like a forum (it isn’t).

              No one wants our conversations indexed, and discord shouldn’t be a forum.

            • cheesybuddha@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              3 天前

              It is not comparing apples to oranges, there are many companies that use Discord as a direct replacement for help forums or product wikis.

        • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
          61·
          4 天前

          I mean, I share the complaint of Discord having tons of unindexable knowledge locked away in it, but forums are not good replacement for my friend group. So yeah we kinda want a Discord alternative specifically.

    • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
      16·
      4 天前

      Sure.

      But what are you replacing it with ?

      I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it’s pretty far from the same level of comfort.

      Don’t take that the wrong way though, I’m all for supporting open alternatives, I’m just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.

      I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.

      I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4·
        4 天前

        Were you trying Teamspeak 6? The UI is different, but the functionality is on par I believe. Not open source, but at least you can self-host.

        • Fushuan [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          3·
          4 天前

          Have they finally released screen sharing in ts6? I gotta say that the development of that project is pretty comical. Radio silence with the only communication being the community manager shitting on discord every other day while giving no updates on their own product.

          Weird vibes.

          • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1·
            4 天前

            I haven’t followed the development communication much, but yes, screen sharing works now. It wasn’t working on wayland like 8mo ago, but I tried again a month ago and it’s now working.

        • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
          3·
          4 天前

          No. Recently I played a bit using a friends mumble server. And it’s a friend that is already privacy conscious. But these friends are not the norm. They are the exception.

          Interesting to see Teamspeak evolved but still you have to pay to host a server so that’s a huge difference.

          • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1·
            4 天前

            I haven’t tried mumble yet.

            You pay for the hosting resources yes, but you can host it anywhere. I’ve been playing around with it using a docker instance in my homelab.

        • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
          161·
          4 天前

          Well yes, I would say it’s very much an integral part of my social life.

          I spend a lot of time with my gamer friends and it revolves around our discord servers.

          We even have a discord servers dedicated to our role play sessions.

          IMHO Discord is a bit more than just a voice chat app. It’s also rooms with persistant chats. It’s the ability to share media etc.

          Also their noise reduction tech is top notch.

          I knew when I got in that it would be another “Gmail” for me. It’s great but you have to give a bit of your soul to it and I knew it would enshitify eventually.

            • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
              4·
              4 天前

              For context my country (France) is trying to pass a law that forbids the use of social networks to users younger than 15yo. So I suppose this move from Discord is partly due to that.

              Now that being said I would hope the verification process will have much more scrutiny in Europe than it would in the US.

              I would definitely not be happy about it but if they are not allowed to keep any of the verification data afterwards it could be “acceptable”. But if I have the feeling they keep any data I will actively look into building a Stoat instance and try the even harder task of convincing my friends to switch over.

          • Willoughby@piefed.worldEnglish
            2·
            4 天前

            I see luck with “combos”

            XMPP + Mumble is a common one. The room is on XMPP, some users are in a mumble server with info in the topic.

            Matrix is buggy and doesn’t scale imo, it isn’t a sustainable alternative. Stoat looks like a great option and there are lots of open instances.

            • who@feddit.orgEnglish
              1·
              2 天前

              Matrix is buggy and doesn’t scale imo,

              I don’t know what problems you found, but the biggest bugs I encountered in past years seem to be fixed now, at least on recent clients. (Element X is recent, and I’ve seen praise for FluffyChat.)

              Matrix for text and Mumble for voice works well for me.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        4 天前

        I did start a projects aiming to be a more decentralized/federated discord more akin to how IRC was back in the day. Time to revisit it, it seems.

        • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
          2·
          4 天前

          A federation based discord would be amazing !

          But still that’s a big challenge as voice chat will be costly to host.

          Also out of curiosity do you aim for something that would connect through the fediverse ?

          • Fushuan [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            4·
            4 天前

            Voice chat isn’t inherently costly to host, usually the server acts as a broker and then people connect P2P. Do you remember jitsi? It was used as an alternative to zoom during covid, it was a webpage like Google meet where you opened a room, and people joined with the link. Actually under the good the first one that joined the room acted as a host so all voice communications never reached jitsi’s servers.

            Jitsi still exists btw, although I understand that a more integrated solution like matrix is preferable. Matrix IS the federated discord-like solution, although last time I read about it it had some issues with scalability and the typical foss Dev drama.

          • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            4 天前

            Didn’t have much of an aim beyond trying to cook it up from scratch as a personal research project. That includes the protocol, since I’m handling priv/pub keypairs in a creative way to facilitate both encryption and user identity verification.

      • Oni_eyes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 天前

        I’ll swap to a shared calendar and any other voice chat software. Sure I can’t post on those but that’s why we also have a group chat for the different gaming groups I’m in.

  • excral@feddit.orgEnglish
    391·
    4 天前

    My discord account is about 10 years old. Do they assume I created it as a 6 year old? Account age alone should be enough to verify I’m an adult with reasonable certainty.

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      3 天前

      They will have some kind of nebulously described “thing” that will monitor your browsing and chatting habits on discord and use that to decide your “implicit age” and I wish any of that was a joke or rumor.

      They won’t just ask for your face and ID, they are also admitting that AI or something is going to be literally watching you at all times to “determine your age.”

      Tell me again how we’re protecting kids? Where them Epstein prosecutions at? We save any kids yet? How about now?

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      3 天前

      Legally, they can’t be sure you didn’t sell the account, even if the email address is the same.

      Not defending the policy here, it’s bullshit. But I’m simply pointing out that they have excuses to beat any logic you throw at them. Logic has nothing to do with it, so it can’t be beaten by logic either.

      • Anas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        3 天前

        Selling accounts is against the TOS, surely they can’t be liable if that’s the case.

    • python@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      4 天前

      Well no, what if you have a Benjamin Button situation going on and will be too young to use Discord in a year or two?They gotta cover all their bases.

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      7·
      3 天前

      Naw, they assume they can tie all your conversations to some nexus realid and sell all your groups, likes, and dislikes for cash.

  • TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    106·
    4 天前

    I would barely be okay with a bank or government website asking for this information, I sure as shit would not give it to a fucking chat app.

    • 87Six@lemmy.zipEnglish
      23·
      3 天前

      Not really. At the beginning it was amazing. It took 0 resources to run while gaming and the call quality was miles ahead, nevermind the flexibility around servers and what you could do with them.

      Then, as all things, it turned to shit once ot gained market share.

      • Soulg@ani.socialEnglish
        4·
        3 天前

        One of the most predictable outcomes of anyone or anything downfall is all the idiots coming out of the woodwork to loudly proclaim that they never liked it to begin with and actually saw this coming the whole time because they are so very super smart

        • 87Six@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          3 天前

          I mean yea… But whatever man, people can say whatever. It’s not like they’re attacking each other.

      • korazail@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
        6·
        3 天前

        This is one of the real root causes of enshittification, particularly around privacy.

        Once a product is profitable, the profit needs to be protected. That’s not really a slight against it, just a reality of capitalism. Those developers expect their jobs to persist. Middle management probably wants to keep those developers on staff. C-suite needs number-go-up to keep their jobs (fuck them, but if number-go-down then other people lose their jobs too). Adhering to regulations limits the risk of the government suing the company to oblivion.

        Discord has been big enough for a while that it needs to be aware of the legal and political landscape in order to survive. This is just them limiting their risk. It will cost them customers – sort of: I’m gone, and have been since September when they updated their TOS, but I’ve also never given them any money and I’ve never seen an ad other than theirs. I’ve been nothing but a cost, so maybe good riddance?

        Discord is not the enemy here. The enemy is congress/parliament and the power grabs they keep enacting. Big Tech has captured our governments and wants our data. The ‘for the children’ angle is such a trope that everyone who isn’t a potato can see through it, and we need to tell our leaders that this isn’t acceptable.

        • 87Six@lemmy.zipEnglish
          6·
          3 天前

          I agree with everything you said, but Discord is also an asshole itself. It could not sell out, but it did. There are plenty of projects who kept their integrity against selling out even though they could’ve generated millions

        • 87Six@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          3 天前

          Well yes, it was, but it worked, and it was still better than everything else. I’ve been on discord for 9 years.

          Embedded browsers aren’t necessarily bad design. They’re super fast to develop, and if done well, can work super efficiently. A browser can have a billion tabs open and work just fine. The same can go with an electron app given that the devs give 2 shits about optimization.

          Though if the Discord team doesn’t care about optimizing the electron app, they wouldn’t give a shit about optimizing a desktop app either.

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      3 天前

      it was useful when it was new and there were no alternatives as easy to use.

      Now it feels like commercialized app slop that wishes it was actual social media.

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      3 天前

      I had to run a server for work. It was right after they put in boosts. At the time, I had to buy my own fucking boosts one at a time.

      The whole platform only exists because they made the api easy enough that people could build on it.

        • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          3 天前

          When your job has communities that spring up around it, you either get there first, where you can work with the users and help steer, or just sheepishly join in the community efforts.

        • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 天前

          There are lots and lots of companies that use discord the same way they use facebook, just a place to promote and gather “feedback” and such. They likely mean they ran the official company server, not that they use discord to chat between teams.

          Although I’ve done that before too.

            • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              3 天前

              Why not. If we’re stuck with sketchy, lawless apps for chatting we might as well go back to the OG sketchy, lawless chat app.

              • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
                1·
                3 天前

                Using it for more than text gets to be a bit arduous. I was going to make us a matrix instance, but honestly, we kinda love it when slack explodes and we go back tot he dark ages