Flit's Nest

this was originally a reply to my discord bad thread but it's ballooned so much and i think it's so important that i think it deserves its own post.




you may have heard (or experienced) some feature restrictions for users who haven't verified their age using a government ID or selfie. up until now, this was only in the UK and Australia.

unfortunately, it was announced yesterday that this will be rolled out globally. accounts will be marked as "teenaged", and to access some content (channels, servers, commands, and files marked as or determined to be nsfw) and use some features (disable message requests, speak in stage channels), users of those accounts will need to submit their government ID or a picture of their face. (which, by the way, they were already doing for years... via unencrypted photos sent over email to support...)

additionally, a discord staff member replied on reddit that:

The idea here is that we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know (not including your messages!), and that looks to get us pretty far here. No face scans, no IDs, for the vast majority of adults.

alongside this, the blog post was updated to convey this same information.

...okay, so here's the problem with this:

• discord was involved in a data breach back in october that included government IDs of over 70,000 users. they have allegedly switched providers since, but regardless it was certainly enough to make many people wary.
• how the fuck would discord know that i'm an adult with enough certainty to not ask for my ID, when they are obviously not trusting that i was 13 when i made my account, nor that i was truthful about my birthdate? i never told them that i was and never gave proof. the only way they might know is through information that other people gave them, most likely advertising companies. so they are reassuring me that i don't need to give my identity, by... telling me that they already know my real, actual age, through information i never gave them? what kind of stupid logic is this?
• what will discord do about the unencrypted photos that were sent to support via email over multiple years? will they still do this for locked accounts?
• discord is locking basic features (speaking in stage channels) behind a demonstrably untrustworthy gate.

from the reddit response:

I honestly wouldn't be happy if we didn't build something good and I am excited about what we’re launching, but please let us know what you think when we share more details.

And I really appreciate everybody's feedback here today. We’re definitely reading it!

why are you HAPPY about this? and if you're actually reading feedback, why are you still DOING this? this reeks of someone being dragged out to the angry mob to deliver obviously fake corpo speak.




and finally...

who am i kidding, most people aren't going to give a fuck or do anything about it.

i've started experimenting with TeamSpeak. it has some glaring UI issues, but otherwise it's been nice so far.

...but that's the thing. it has compromises. Discord has the comparatively unfair advantage of being a public, venture capital backed monstrosity of a service, that has lots of glaring issues nobody cares about (really, have you been reading the discord bad thread?), but at least all of its features work.

meanwhile, in TS6 on linux, i cannot minimize the window with the UI button, and the free license for servers is limited to only 32 concurrent users. thirty-two. that's fine for my use case of a small friend group, but what about larger servers with more than that? oh, well, they can pay we-don't-know-how-much for a server license! it feels like they are ignoring the reality of things now because they're comfortable hiding behind the "we're just a small little team!" and "oh well it's in beta so please be patient!" excuses and not doing anything. (if i'm wrong, maybe prove it by letting me minimize the fucking window with the UI button...)

okay, what about Matrix? well they're having funding issues, so probably not viable long-term unless a miracle happens. and last i checked, setting up a homeserver is a bitch and a half, and very resource-hungry.

XMPP? not a lot of developers. also, one of the major desktop clients (gajim) doesn't support voice calls despite saying it does and, for some reason, deciding to overhaul the entire UI instead. and no other desktop client that i know of lets you categorize rooms.

IRC? ...maybe if IRCv3 ever actually gets done, and even then it doesn't have voice calls.

Mumble honestly is not a bad way to go, it's very similar to TeamSpeak. the UI is more minimal, which i prefer, and it's open source which is really nice. but of course, it can't replace Discord on its own. it's mostly a voice call app, you have to be in a voice channel to participate, and most of the time i'm at least not in a call when using Discord. and you can't see messages unless you're connected. ...also no video streaming of any kind.

okay, well, what about using TeamSpeak or Mumble alongside something more permanent like a forum board?

what about that???

...you clearly haven't looked at this forum board's activity if you actually thought that.

which leads into the reality that nobody gives enough of a shit to try new things.

every time i propose it to my friend group, i get the same arguments/concerns back. "what about my friends?" "what about the compromises?" and even though i wasn't asking them to entirely ditch discord... that's the thing. most people are comfortable with what they have, with what works. dealing with discord's little quirks is a recurring thing that they're just used to. trying a new platform is simply not on their list of priorities. and while i can't blame them for that, it is also very revealing: they believe they cannot afford to care, because caring would mean potentially ditching the things they care about. even though, it. doesn't. in this case.

...also the fact that i have pointed out, loudly, multiple times, that discord has done objectively and morally wrong things to people. so it's bad when meta does it, but "oh discord is fine, i'll keep using discord." ...sure. obviously they don't give a fuck.

sooooo, yeah. will things change? will people actually ditch the objectively problematic platform and go somewhere else?

don't count on it.

frankly, i'm surprised there was any movement from twitter when it was bought by a nazi. hell, you can't really tell that reddit was any different even after people tried moving to lemmy in response to the api incident.

if people didn't move from discord in response to literally anything that has already been covered in the discord bad thread, i'm not sure if literally anything bad they do will change this.

It's expected that people are surprised. Discord has been on this track for at least 5 years now (and that's a lowball) but nobody really pays attention to the signs or things getting worse until it's too late.

A grand majority of people don't care, or don't have a choice. It's why society has been stuck in stasis for almost a century now. Idk. I've been using Telegram for a while now and the app is just straight up broken. WhatsApp is decent but it's run by Meta. I don't know any options that people would, at minimum, be willing to also use to keep up with someone who doesn't use Discord. The company is taking advantage of how normal it's become, and what originally was meant to be a small alternative is just as corrupt.

I'm still looking for places to instigate migration to. People won't budge without reason, but right now there's very little reason. I think people forgive and forget for all the wrong reasons.

gamers nexus coverage!!

i saw this tweet get posted somewhere: https://xcancel.com/Pirat_Nation/status ... 1097808285

discord is not backpedaling in any way. this tweet doesn't link to a source to back up its claims, nor do its claims mention any sort of backpedaling anyway.

Persona is the vendor with ties to Peter Thiel, who has ties with Epstein. if this cutting of ties is actually true, that is almost certainly the reason, not privacy concerns (if discord cared about privacy concerns, they wouldn't have done this to begin with!!).

discord will have only backpedaled if they edit or delete their blog post announcing the change. this has not happened, so assume that the age verification update is still on track for a week from now.