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Discord Rival Gets Overwhelmed by Exodus of Players Fleeing Age-Verification

267 points by thunderbong 9mo ago

tbrownaw 9mo ago
It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?
- progval 9mo ago
  It's decentralized because you can run a server yourself, but they also offer hosting services.
- Bender 9mo ago
  It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed? Yes, the self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers. Teamspeak can be hosted for free but has client restrictions that can be overcome with a license. On a related note, Mumble self hosted servers can also register with a centralized server if the server owner wishes to have it listed for public use. This is optional as the server owner can also just advertise the connection details on a website and/or in Discord. Mumble [1] has no concept of a license to operate however. There is a light-weight version of the Mumble server called uMurmur that can run on a Linux router or RasPi but the channel configuration is statically defined ahead of time on uMurmur. The full blown version is just called Murmur and by default uses sqlite but it can also use a database like MySQL or MariaDB for storing persistent data like user registrations, channels, bans, and server configuration. . https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/
  - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
    Mumble would be my bigger recommendation for a truly open source Discord alternative, though I'm personally more invested in XMPP as an alternative.
    - foresto 9mo ago
      Mumble is fantastic for voice chat. Its text features are very basic, though, so people fleeing Discord would probably want something additional to handle that. Maybe Matrix.
      - ecshafer 9mo ago
        A single location is a good selling point. Being able to jump into a voice chat, and still post things in a shared text chat is a good feature. Mumble should work a bit on that.
        foresto 9mo ago
        > Mumble should work a bit on that. Mumble is a labor of love, not a commercial product. I expect they would appreciate your help.
        unethical_ban 9mo ago
        Since I don't know stream audio programming, C++ or gUI programming but am well versed on the shortcomings of mumble vs discord, perhaps I can bust out the llm.
  - mmooss 9mo ago
    > self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers I doubt license authorization and an entry in a list are overwhelming their servers.
    - Bender 9mo ago
      Yup. It would be the centralized servers getting overwhelmed with many more voice channels if they did not anticipate the growth demand. I was just explaining how the self hosted servers tie into their centralized systems in that they are decentralized but still phone home.
ecshafer 9mo ago
Wow Teamspeak is still around and looks like they are succeeding again. Teamspeak and Ventrilo used to be such a mainstay of the video game community. I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. It does look like Teamspeak has taken a note out of discord and slacks notebook and have gotten more advanced chat room options now.
- m4rtink 9mo ago
  I think the main reason was Discord basically doumping free server hosting with VC money to eliminate competition. Now that money has finally run out, it looks like things are reverting back to normal.
  - SchemaLoad 9mo ago
    Has the money run out? I still have yet to spend a single dollar on discord.
    - m4rtink 9mo ago
      Reportedly they are plan in IPO & the latest identity verification crap they are pushing seems to be related. So yes, it looks like the money has run out and rather than pushing for direct monetization they try to turn to shadier stuff - get as much personal data as possible to either make the company look juicier for either an IPO or an acquisition.
      - SchemaLoad 9mo ago
        Age verification doesn't seem like money raising at all. More pressure from regulaters.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  > I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting. In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.
mitchell_h 9mo ago
A well known path....bluesky saw it with twitter. Reddit with digg. /. with digg are the ones that come to mind. Interesting to see if this works out better.
- lenerdenator 9mo ago
  Fark, somehow still holding strong.
  - mitchell_h 9mo ago
    A name I hear about once a year and still somehow surprised. I was a totalfarker back in like ~2000. was a great place.
  - hackingonempty 9mo ago
    Florida is still a state.
CrzyLngPwd 9mo ago
I haven't gamed for years, but decades ago TS was the solution for team play. Such fond memories of playing in a team of people scattered all over the world.
s09dfhks 9mo ago
I spun up a self hosted teamspeak server last weekend for my friends and I using their docker container. Its going to take some getting used to. Seems weird that they have a hard cap on 10MB file upload sizes if its self hosted. Also the screen sharing wasn't working quite right Otherwise, voice and text chat is there
- spencerflem 9mo ago
  Doesn’t text chat still have a weird thing where you can’t see the texts unless you’re in a voice call in that channel?
  - tcfhgj 9mo ago
    No
- agumonkey 9mo ago
  Maybe a good opportunity to reduce screensharing (unless pure video content). A lot of people are sharing webpages through video. That's subpar (except for the shared pointer)
  - idiotsecant 9mo ago
    The answer to 'I want to share my screen' is not 'have you considered not wanting to do that?
    - agumonkey 9mo ago
      Maybe I said something stupid but regularly I see people needing a lot of resources just to discuss a bit if text. It's kinda sad.
- ecshafer 9mo ago
  10MB seems like a vestige of old code. What used to be reasonable no longer is. Cameras have too many pixels now for that low of a limit.
- 9mo ago
Winblows11 9mo ago
> Like so many things from history, this is all Britain’s fault. The farcical UK Online Safety Act is forcing all social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to require age verification checks before its citizens can access them I guess no other US state or country has demanded age checks, great journalism from kotaku...
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  The things in politics have a habit of spreading outside of country's borders, as politicians in other countries just go "huh, that's nice kind of oppresion, and their population didn't totally revolt so maybe we should try" Also technically US is fault of UK too
  - SoftTalker 9mo ago
    Lots of people support these age checks. The many tech companies delivering too much filth to young audiences with no easy controls shot themselves in the foot on this one.
    - DangitBobby 9mo ago
      Sometimes manufacturing consent is a little easier than other times.
    - anal_reactor 9mo ago
      No. It's a huge manipulation. 1. If all platforms introduce age verification by law, then no platform gets unfair advantage by not having them. 2. Age verification obviously allows them to gather even more data about users. 3. Age verification creates the illusion of there being "a safe internet" which is extremely important to parents who give their children iPads so that the kids shut up and fuck off, while the spread of brainrot can continue undisturbed.
  - rsynnott 9mo ago
    The first US ones predate the UK one, tho.
nightski 9mo ago
Discord has the momentum but overall I just find the experience awful. It would be nice to use anything else at this point. Joining a server with greater than a handful of people is just a nightmare and practically unusable.
- zadikian 9mo ago
  Isn't this usually cause the admin went overboard? Like a server of 10 people has 30 channels, one of which is a lobby you have to clear first, and 10 bots telling you that you leveled up or whatever.
  - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
    The hardest part about joining a new-but-small-but-not-that-small Discord server is convincing the server admin to turn off the stupid "click this button to spam the channel with a gigantic dancing emoji to welcome newcomers". It kills any ongoing conversation, and imo, convinces newcomers that people don't so much chat in that Discord as they just press shiny buttons.
    - zadikian 9mo ago
      "That's why we have a separate #welcome channel"
- carshodev 9mo ago
  I think it depends on how the servers are setup. Chat channels with 1000s people participating are typically worthless as the signal to noise ratio ruins it. But when the majority of conversations are happening in forums/thread style channels then it works well. You can still have some more niche chat style sections where typically 2-10 people participate Chat channels are also fine for lots of people when its not about conversations but more just about sharing things. Like a "Share what you build" or "memes" channel work well as tons of messages are fine as you only care to see a few anyway. Also limited size voice channels can be good aswell 5 people max.
SilverElfin 9mo ago
That same Peter Thiel-tied verification that Discord is using, Persona, is also used by many other services right? Anyone know who else uses them so I can avoid them?
- calgoo 9mo ago
  I did a quick search and it looks like A LOT of business use it (not 100% on the source,but it gives an idea ). Also looking at Persona's website, that includes OpenAI: `OpenAI uses Persona to screen millions of users each month with zero friction` [1] https://data.landbase.com/technology/persona/ https://data.landbase.com/technology/persona/ [2] https://withpersona.com/customers/openai https://withpersona.com/customers/openai [3] https://withpersona.com/customers https://withpersona.com/customers
- m4rtink 9mo ago
  Looks like VRChat is using persona as well - multiple mentions here: https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/Age_Verification https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/Age_Verification https://hello.vrchat.com/blog/age-verification https://hello.vrchat.com/blog/age-verification And quite a few discussions about the controversy on Reddit, including comparisons with the Discord Persona debacle: https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r0jj7g/with_todays_backlash_to_discords_upcoming_age/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r0jj7g/with_todays... https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r511h4/id_verification_persona_global_surveillance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r511h4/id_verifica... This can be seen possibly as even more invasive in this case, given the larger social aspects of VRChat as well as apparently this being done for more than a year by this point.
therealsreal 9mo ago
It's frustrating how often 'journalism' assumes good faith and uses the language and arguments of corporations. Rather than "fleeing age-verification" myself, and I largely assume others, are "fleeing surveillance state data harvesting".
- footy 9mo ago
  Yeah, I'm 39 years old, I don't need to flee age verification. I just am not interested in having an account on a chat service that would do this. I don't want my driver's license and biometric information to be stored in servers who-knows-where in a country with weak privacy regulations. This is an extremely rational position.
- AlienRobot 9mo ago
  Journalism isn't twitter. A reporter just reports the facts, and nobody wants them to do more than that. If they started inserting their assumptions or making conclusions from the facts, that is no longer "news" that is an opinion piece.
  - therealsreal 9mo ago
    Odd reactionary take considering the headline is talking about me, a player fleeing, and claiming my reason is something different from my own. Which would seem to be a failure to "report the facts".
    - AlienRobot 9mo ago
      Write some random stuff some user on reddit thinks, people call it bad journalism. Don't write it, people call it bad journalism. Poor journals can't win.
      - therealsreal 9mo ago
        Unsure why you are taking this stand on this issue, but calling the company in question "some user on <SOCIAL_MEDIA>" is absurd: https://kotaku.com/discord-palantir-peter-thiel-persona-age-verification-2000668951 https://kotaku.com/discord-palantir-peter-thiel-persona-age-... Everyone involved knows why there is a backlash to this new policy so I advocate to stop obfuscating it.
iwontberude 9mo ago
Matrix is the only solution ready with all the features necessary. My community made the leap months ago and its been worth it.
- xigoi 9mo ago
  All features? Where are the custom emojis?
  - opan 9mo ago
    https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/issues/1256 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/issues/1... https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/1951 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195... https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/2545 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/254... It's certainly on people's radar.
  - iwontberude 9mo ago
    Those aren’t out yet, you’ve highlighted the one feature request which I hear repeatedly from our users too. That’s good news, it helps me to see we really are ready for prime time because there are so few concerns left. iPhone didn’t have copy and paste for years and still they were top adopted phone despite it because of all the other value.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
carshodev 9mo ago
Is there really no open source version of these that people can selfhost? There are multiple free providers for AI moderation models (openai and xai), you can get a vps with 1tb of storage for pretty cheap, just setup an image optimizer/downscaler with Go or Rust so its fast and you can handle probably 10,000 people pretty easily. I guess the main reason that discord is good is because of the centralization as it allows all your servers in one place and super easy link sharing and signup. Decentralized social and chat should be present in this new era, clawbot showed that people are willing to spinup and selfhost useful things even if they are not overly technical. I think we could see a new wave of similar things happening for things like social media and chat.
- cedws 9mo ago
  I think you overestimate the capability and willingness of the average Discord user to go through that. Majority are not technical, they have no idea what self hosting is, what a VPS is, etc. Also self hosting creates an issue of balkanization. Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. The closest we can probably get is the Mastodon model.
  - david_shaw 9mo ago
    I agree that most Discord users do not want to self host. However, > Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. This is already the model. Everyone has "their own" discord server, and you have to connect to it manually via an invite. That would actually be the exact same usage.
    - spartanatreyu 9mo ago
      Clicking a link (discord's approach) is very different from downloading a different piece of software and setting up a new account for each gaming group
      - david_shaw 9mo ago
        Totally. I meant if people were all using the same replacement software, that joining groups' different "servers" would be the same experience. Absolutely agree that if everything splintered, it would be a mess.
_slih 9mo ago
turns out convenience loses when you start asking for face scans.
jjice 9mo ago
I don't think discord is going anywhere. Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown. Look at Reddit after the API switch up. The reason my friends and I moved to Discord in late 2015 or early 2016 was because it blew the competition out of the water at the time. The audio was so much better. I think screen share and face cams may not have been supported at the time, but it later was and was higher quality and a better experience than Skype or Teamspeak, IMO. Now though, that might just be table stakes for a new service now that WebRTC is standard and the codecs have gotten better too. I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat (text, video, and audio) to take off. Right now, all of them have notable flaws. I also think many of them try to compete with the community aspect of Discord, which I personally don't use and thus and am a bad judge of quality. Just a way to chat with people I already know.
- Morromist 9mo ago
  I think discord will stick around, yeah, but it's competitors will also grow a lot more until someday, maybe in 5-10 years, Discord finds itself withering away in favor of some new app. The thing is Discord isn't finished with upsetting people - it still has to do a lot more stuff to get more net income for their IPO. How they will do that without seriously annoying users is hard to say. The more they annoy their users the more the users flee, boosting the value of the competition. Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's - where followers & networks are valuable and can take a long time to aquire - and twitter's competition was able to scoop up a huge number of outraged users despite even that. Granted - I think Twitter's changes annoyed people much more than Discord's.
  - LexiMax 9mo ago
    > Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's More importantly, Discord's communities are silo'ed, private by default, and administered and moderated by human beings with almost no oversight from Discord proper. There is no equivalent on Twitter. On Reddit, going dark makes you subject to administrative subreddit takeover. But if someone runs a Discord community that they want to migrate to another platform, they could easily lock the entire server to posting and post a link to the alternative community. Done.
thefz 9mo ago
They are not fleeing age verification, but surveillance capitalism of the evil kind.
- ishouldstayaway 9mo ago
  > surveillance capitalism of the evil kind. Is...is there another kind?
  - thefz 9mo ago
    Surveillance capitalism just to sell you more stuff is the less evil kind.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
nottorp 9mo ago
Well teamspeak is voice chat only, so I don't see how it's a rival for gaming communities that do ongoing text chats and voice only for group play...
- haunter 9mo ago
  Not anymore. There is text chat and screen sharing for years now
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    Oh? They've grown up. I haven't used it in a million years...
drnick1 9mo ago
Seems like a missed opportunity to move away from proprietary solutions entirely. Teamspeak is self-hostable, but it is proprietary, supports limited numbers of users on the free tier, and presumably send telemetry to the proprietors even when "self-hosted."
- gzread 9mo ago
  To make people move away from something proprietary, there needs to be a better free alternative. "Better" means "I don't need to know what a VPS is"
- Duralias 9mo ago
  Going by how little it is spoken on here I assume it is a localized phenomena, but the word of Fluxer.app is spreading among my spaces and it is open source and selfhostable and federation in the future. The official instance and full time dev is funded by a cheaper discord nitro like premium sub. It very recently became public and since that makes people think it is vibe coded I recommend reading the making off blog post https://blog.fluxer.app/ https://blog.fluxer.app/ It isn't yet 1:1 with discord, no phone app yet, but it is by far the most discord like discord alternative (closer than Stoat), but open source and selfhostable.
  - dphreak 9mo ago
    One downside to Fluxer is its also 100% fully restricted in Mississippi. https://fluxer.app/help/regional-restrictions https://fluxer.app/help/regional-restrictions
losvedir 9mo ago
What's actually happening? From the commentary here on HN I thought everyone was going to have to upload an ID or something. I use a Discord server to chat with some old high school friends, and wasn't wanting to upload my ID to them. But this update[0] from Discord says they're not requiring everyone to, and that "the vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age." So I'm assuming I won't have to, after all. Do we know who will, when, or why? [0] https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-experiences-for-teens https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...
- literalAardvark 9mo ago
  Discord has an age estimating tool that seems to work well. So it's likely that almost nothing will change and this is a huge nothing burger. Besides, if underage mode just means I can't see nsfw marked channels that's... Entirely fine.
  - nitwit005 9mo ago
    I don't think any of us are going to be able to get enough of a sample size to know if their age estimation tool is working well or not. You can know the age of your real life friends, but beyond that it's just going to be self report.
- Macha 9mo ago
  They have a ML model based on shrug emoji that decides if you’re in the automatically approved bucket, the face verification bucket or the ID verification bucket. If face verification fails or you’re in the high risk bucket you’ll need to send them ID to access adult content, i.e. any channels manually set to nsfw, anything their classifier deems nsfw and anything in servers deemed nsfw. Discord would like to imply that most users are in the automatically verified bucket and only like porn is flagged nsfw, but it’s entirely in their control to tighten these screws when they reckon that the controversy is over (and they’ve already been trialling more mandatory ID verification on UK users, before starting the global rollout)
- 9mo ago
jpeizer 9mo ago
My worry is that discord will require the ID of everybody at some point or another. Now that they are going public I think every real user will have to identify themselves. The way they do it I think will be a staggered rollout of requests. So they use the guise of this algorithm to state that no everybody will need to verify but when it’s your turn to provide your ID they just wait for the next instance and lock the account to teen level until you do it. Given they say they will do ongoing monitoring to place an age group, this I don’t think is far fetched and increases the value of the profiles for the shareholders. This would make a mass exodus nearly impossible too as too many people already sit in the side of it’s not a problem if it does not effect me. The result is it will effect just not enough people to cause such a large exodus. I don’t think this spect is talked about enough. Companies that enshitify don’t do it all at once. It’s bite by bite.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
boxingdog 9mo ago
[dead]
k33n 9mo ago
The histrionics around Discord's completely optional age verification mechanism are really entertaining to read.
owenpalmer 9mo ago
> It’s a less complicated piece of software, but that also means it doesn’t constantly fucking pester you about whatever the bloody hell Nitro is. It's not "but", it's "and". Complexity in an app is not a good thing.
absynth 9mo ago
Matrix is looking better by the minute. Anything from other people's experience? I haven't used it at all.
- LexiMax 9mo ago
  I'm already using Matrix for a number of open source communities. It's fine as far as it goes. However, from a community space point of view, it seems to be more similar to IRC than Discord. Much like an IRC server, there's a public list of channels and you join them individually. There is voice and video chat, but as far as I can tell it's only person to person without any voice and video conferencing like Discord has, and I've never actually tried them to see how well they work. Some organizations, such as Mozilla, run their own Matrix server in order to corral the community into one place, but more often than not I see communities creating a single channel on the primary matrix.org server, and "expand" by adding more channels, IRC style. As an IRC replacement, I think it's perfect. But if you are expecting something more similar to Discord in terms of functionality, you'll likely be looking elsewhere. Stoat is what I see most frequently touted, but I can't speak to it personally.
vivzkestrel 9mo ago
Absolutely stupid: what makes them think teamspeak will not implement the same age verification in future. Running from one platform to the other will never be justified
- wiredpancake 9mo ago
  [dead]
ptman 9mo ago
Teamspeak is using matrix under the hood
m3kw9 9mo ago
i still don't understand how discord works with the infamous "claim your account" bs. Every time i use discord, it won't let me use my username, wtf?
1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20221022162930if_/https://venturebeat.com/games/hammer-chisel-pivots-to-voice-comm-app-for-multiplayer-mobile-games/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221022162930if_/https://ventur... ""If you think Skype and Teamspeak had a baby and it hand all sorts of super powers that is parents didn't have," Citron said. "What was basically a skunkworks project appears to be the most promising product we've built." For much of this year, the company has been working on Discord. The networking infrastructure is built in Erlang, a technology that Ericsson created in the 1980s for telecommunications. The system is spread across nine data centers around the world. The company has done tests to make sure that the latency is good. Resmini also noted that esports competitors - or professional gamers who play games for money prizes - were worried about security. With Skype, it's easy to get somebody else's personal internet protocol (IP) address because the communication happens peer-to-peer. Citron said that Discord works through server infrastructure, so it's impossible for anyone to obtain another player's IP address." Perhaps the peers cannot obtain each others' IP addresses but the person running the Discord server has all the peers' IP addresses in addition to their payment details There are few if any meaningful limits on how this data can be used, how long it can be retained or where it can be transferred.^1 Apparently this centralised architecture does not matter to Discord users until something like "age verification" comes along 1. The legal compliance exception obviously allows for "age verification" Example of Discord privacy policy pre-"age verification": https://web.archive.org/web/20200504172025/https://discordapp.com/privacy https://web.archive.org/web/20200504172025/https://discordap...

267 points by thunderbong 9mo ago

tbrownaw 9mo ago

It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?

progval 9mo ago
It's decentralized because you can run a server yourself, but they also offer hosting services.
Bender 9mo ago
It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed? Yes, the self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers. Teamspeak can be hosted for free but has client restrictions that can be overcome with a license. On a related note, Mumble self hosted servers can also register with a centralized server if the server owner wishes to have it listed for public use. This is optional as the server owner can also just advertise the connection details on a website and/or in Discord. Mumble [1] has no concept of a license to operate however. There is a light-weight version of the Mumble server called uMurmur that can run on a Linux router or RasPi but the channel configuration is statically defined ahead of time on uMurmur. The full blown version is just called Murmur and by default uses sqlite but it can also use a database like MySQL or MariaDB for storing persistent data like user registrations, channels, bans, and server configuration. . https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  Mumble would be my bigger recommendation for a truly open source Discord alternative, though I'm personally more invested in XMPP as an alternative.
  - foresto 9mo ago
    Mumble is fantastic for voice chat. Its text features are very basic, though, so people fleeing Discord would probably want something additional to handle that. Maybe Matrix.
    - ecshafer 9mo ago
      A single location is a good selling point. Being able to jump into a voice chat, and still post things in a shared text chat is a good feature. Mumble should work a bit on that.
      - foresto 9mo ago
        > Mumble should work a bit on that. Mumble is a labor of love, not a commercial product. I expect they would appreciate your help.
        unethical_ban 9mo ago
        Since I don't know stream audio programming, C++ or gUI programming but am well versed on the shortcomings of mumble vs discord, perhaps I can bust out the llm.
- mmooss 9mo ago
  > self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers I doubt license authorization and an entry in a list are overwhelming their servers.
  - Bender 9mo ago
    Yup. It would be the centralized servers getting overwhelmed with many more voice channels if they did not anticipate the growth demand. I was just explaining how the self hosted servers tie into their centralized systems in that they are decentralized but still phone home.

ecshafer 9mo ago

Wow Teamspeak is still around and looks like they are succeeding again. Teamspeak and Ventrilo used to be such a mainstay of the video game community. I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. It does look like Teamspeak has taken a note out of discord and slacks notebook and have gotten more advanced chat room options now.

m4rtink 9mo ago
I think the main reason was Discord basically doumping free server hosting with VC money to eliminate competition. Now that money has finally run out, it looks like things are reverting back to normal.
- SchemaLoad 9mo ago
  Has the money run out? I still have yet to spend a single dollar on discord.
  - m4rtink 9mo ago
    Reportedly they are plan in IPO & the latest identity verification crap they are pushing seems to be related. So yes, it looks like the money has run out and rather than pushing for direct monetization they try to turn to shadier stuff - get as much personal data as possible to either make the company look juicier for either an IPO or an acquisition.
    - SchemaLoad 9mo ago
      Age verification doesn't seem like money raising at all. More pressure from regulaters.
Aurornis 9mo ago
> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting. In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.

mitchell_h 9mo ago

A well known path....bluesky saw it with twitter. Reddit with digg. /. with digg are the ones that come to mind. Interesting to see if this works out better.

lenerdenator 9mo ago
Fark, somehow still holding strong.
- mitchell_h 9mo ago
  A name I hear about once a year and still somehow surprised. I was a totalfarker back in like ~2000. was a great place.
- hackingonempty 9mo ago
  Florida is still a state.

CrzyLngPwd 9mo ago

I haven't gamed for years, but decades ago TS was the solution for team play. Such fond memories of playing in a team of people scattered all over the world.

s09dfhks 9mo ago

I spun up a self hosted teamspeak server last weekend for my friends and I using their docker container. Its going to take some getting used to. Seems weird that they have a hard cap on 10MB file upload sizes if its self hosted. Also the screen sharing wasn't working quite right Otherwise, voice and text chat is there

spencerflem 9mo ago
Doesn’t text chat still have a weird thing where you can’t see the texts unless you’re in a voice call in that channel?
- tcfhgj 9mo ago
  No
agumonkey 9mo ago
Maybe a good opportunity to reduce screensharing (unless pure video content). A lot of people are sharing webpages through video. That's subpar (except for the shared pointer)
- idiotsecant 9mo ago
  The answer to 'I want to share my screen' is not 'have you considered not wanting to do that?
  - agumonkey 9mo ago
    Maybe I said something stupid but regularly I see people needing a lot of resources just to discuss a bit if text. It's kinda sad.
ecshafer 9mo ago
10MB seems like a vestige of old code. What used to be reasonable no longer is. Cameras have too many pixels now for that low of a limit.
9mo ago

Winblows11 9mo ago

> Like so many things from history, this is all Britain’s fault. The farcical UK Online Safety Act is forcing all social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to require age verification checks before its citizens can access them I guess no other US state or country has demanded age checks, great journalism from kotaku...

PunchyHamster 9mo ago
The things in politics have a habit of spreading outside of country's borders, as politicians in other countries just go "huh, that's nice kind of oppresion, and their population didn't totally revolt so maybe we should try" Also technically US is fault of UK too
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  Lots of people support these age checks. The many tech companies delivering too much filth to young audiences with no easy controls shot themselves in the foot on this one.
  - DangitBobby 9mo ago
    Sometimes manufacturing consent is a little easier than other times.
  - anal_reactor 9mo ago
    No. It's a huge manipulation. 1. If all platforms introduce age verification by law, then no platform gets unfair advantage by not having them. 2. Age verification obviously allows them to gather even more data about users. 3. Age verification creates the illusion of there being "a safe internet" which is extremely important to parents who give their children iPads so that the kids shut up and fuck off, while the spread of brainrot can continue undisturbed.
- rsynnott 9mo ago
  The first US ones predate the UK one, tho.

nightski 9mo ago

Discord has the momentum but overall I just find the experience awful. It would be nice to use anything else at this point. Joining a server with greater than a handful of people is just a nightmare and practically unusable.

zadikian 9mo ago
Isn't this usually cause the admin went overboard? Like a server of 10 people has 30 channels, one of which is a lobby you have to clear first, and 10 bots telling you that you leveled up or whatever.
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  The hardest part about joining a new-but-small-but-not-that-small Discord server is convincing the server admin to turn off the stupid "click this button to spam the channel with a gigantic dancing emoji to welcome newcomers". It kills any ongoing conversation, and imo, convinces newcomers that people don't so much chat in that Discord as they just press shiny buttons.
  - zadikian 9mo ago
    "That's why we have a separate #welcome channel"
carshodev 9mo ago
I think it depends on how the servers are setup. Chat channels with 1000s people participating are typically worthless as the signal to noise ratio ruins it. But when the majority of conversations are happening in forums/thread style channels then it works well. You can still have some more niche chat style sections where typically 2-10 people participate Chat channels are also fine for lots of people when its not about conversations but more just about sharing things. Like a "Share what you build" or "memes" channel work well as tons of messages are fine as you only care to see a few anyway. Also limited size voice channels can be good aswell 5 people max.

SilverElfin 9mo ago

That same Peter Thiel-tied verification that Discord is using, Persona, is also used by many other services right? Anyone know who else uses them so I can avoid them?

calgoo 9mo ago
I did a quick search and it looks like A LOT of business use it (not 100% on the source,but it gives an idea ). Also looking at Persona's website, that includes OpenAI: `OpenAI uses Persona to screen millions of users each month with zero friction` [1] https://data.landbase.com/technology/persona/ https://data.landbase.com/technology/persona/ [2] https://withpersona.com/customers/openai https://withpersona.com/customers/openai [3] https://withpersona.com/customers https://withpersona.com/customers
m4rtink 9mo ago
Looks like VRChat is using persona as well - multiple mentions here: https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/Age_Verification https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/Age_Verification https://hello.vrchat.com/blog/age-verification https://hello.vrchat.com/blog/age-verification And quite a few discussions about the controversy on Reddit, including comparisons with the Discord Persona debacle: https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r0jj7g/with_todays_backlash_to_discords_upcoming_age/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r0jj7g/with_todays... https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r511h4/id_verification_persona_global_surveillance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r511h4/id_verifica... This can be seen possibly as even more invasive in this case, given the larger social aspects of VRChat as well as apparently this being done for more than a year by this point.

therealsreal 9mo ago

It's frustrating how often 'journalism' assumes good faith and uses the language and arguments of corporations. Rather than "fleeing age-verification" myself, and I largely assume others, are "fleeing surveillance state data harvesting".

footy 9mo ago
Yeah, I'm 39 years old, I don't need to flee age verification. I just am not interested in having an account on a chat service that would do this. I don't want my driver's license and biometric information to be stored in servers who-knows-where in a country with weak privacy regulations. This is an extremely rational position.
AlienRobot 9mo ago
Journalism isn't twitter. A reporter just reports the facts, and nobody wants them to do more than that. If they started inserting their assumptions or making conclusions from the facts, that is no longer "news" that is an opinion piece.
- therealsreal 9mo ago
  Odd reactionary take considering the headline is talking about me, a player fleeing, and claiming my reason is something different from my own. Which would seem to be a failure to "report the facts".
  - AlienRobot 9mo ago
    Write some random stuff some user on reddit thinks, people call it bad journalism. Don't write it, people call it bad journalism. Poor journals can't win.
    - therealsreal 9mo ago
      Unsure why you are taking this stand on this issue, but calling the company in question "some user on <SOCIAL_MEDIA>" is absurd: https://kotaku.com/discord-palantir-peter-thiel-persona-age-verification-2000668951 https://kotaku.com/discord-palantir-peter-thiel-persona-age-... Everyone involved knows why there is a backlash to this new policy so I advocate to stop obfuscating it.

iwontberude 9mo ago

Matrix is the only solution ready with all the features necessary. My community made the leap months ago and its been worth it.

xigoi 9mo ago
All features? Where are the custom emojis?
- opan 9mo ago
  https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/issues/1256 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/issues/1... https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/1951 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195... https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/2545 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/254... It's certainly on people's radar.
- iwontberude 9mo ago
  Those aren’t out yet, you’ve highlighted the one feature request which I hear repeatedly from our users too. That’s good news, it helps me to see we really are ready for prime time because there are so few concerns left. iPhone didn’t have copy and paste for years and still they were top adopted phone despite it because of all the other value.

deleted 9mo ago

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carshodev 9mo ago

Is there really no open source version of these that people can selfhost? There are multiple free providers for AI moderation models (openai and xai), you can get a vps with 1tb of storage for pretty cheap, just setup an image optimizer/downscaler with Go or Rust so its fast and you can handle probably 10,000 people pretty easily. I guess the main reason that discord is good is because of the centralization as it allows all your servers in one place and super easy link sharing and signup. Decentralized social and chat should be present in this new era, clawbot showed that people are willing to spinup and selfhost useful things even if they are not overly technical. I think we could see a new wave of similar things happening for things like social media and chat.

cedws 9mo ago
I think you overestimate the capability and willingness of the average Discord user to go through that. Majority are not technical, they have no idea what self hosting is, what a VPS is, etc. Also self hosting creates an issue of balkanization. Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. The closest we can probably get is the Mastodon model.
- david_shaw 9mo ago
  I agree that most Discord users do not want to self host. However, > Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. This is already the model. Everyone has "their own" discord server, and you have to connect to it manually via an invite. That would actually be the exact same usage.
  - spartanatreyu 9mo ago
    Clicking a link (discord's approach) is very different from downloading a different piece of software and setting up a new account for each gaming group
    - david_shaw 9mo ago
      Totally. I meant if people were all using the same replacement software, that joining groups' different "servers" would be the same experience. Absolutely agree that if everything splintered, it would be a mess.

_slih 9mo ago

turns out convenience loses when you start asking for face scans.

jjice 9mo ago

I don't think discord is going anywhere. Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown. Look at Reddit after the API switch up. The reason my friends and I moved to Discord in late 2015 or early 2016 was because it blew the competition out of the water at the time. The audio was so much better. I think screen share and face cams may not have been supported at the time, but it later was and was higher quality and a better experience than Skype or Teamspeak, IMO. Now though, that might just be table stakes for a new service now that WebRTC is standard and the codecs have gotten better too. I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat (text, video, and audio) to take off. Right now, all of them have notable flaws. I also think many of them try to compete with the community aspect of Discord, which I personally don't use and thus and am a bad judge of quality. Just a way to chat with people I already know.

Morromist 9mo ago
I think discord will stick around, yeah, but it's competitors will also grow a lot more until someday, maybe in 5-10 years, Discord finds itself withering away in favor of some new app. The thing is Discord isn't finished with upsetting people - it still has to do a lot more stuff to get more net income for their IPO. How they will do that without seriously annoying users is hard to say. The more they annoy their users the more the users flee, boosting the value of the competition. Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's - where followers & networks are valuable and can take a long time to aquire - and twitter's competition was able to scoop up a huge number of outraged users despite even that. Granted - I think Twitter's changes annoyed people much more than Discord's.
- LexiMax 9mo ago
  > Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's More importantly, Discord's communities are silo'ed, private by default, and administered and moderated by human beings with almost no oversight from Discord proper. There is no equivalent on Twitter. On Reddit, going dark makes you subject to administrative subreddit takeover. But if someone runs a Discord community that they want to migrate to another platform, they could easily lock the entire server to posting and post a link to the alternative community. Done.

thefz 9mo ago

They are not fleeing age verification, but surveillance capitalism of the evil kind.

ishouldstayaway 9mo ago
> surveillance capitalism of the evil kind. Is...is there another kind?
- thefz 9mo ago
  Surveillance capitalism just to sell you more stuff is the less evil kind.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]

nottorp 9mo ago

Well teamspeak is voice chat only, so I don't see how it's a rival for gaming communities that do ongoing text chats and voice only for group play...

haunter 9mo ago
Not anymore. There is text chat and screen sharing for years now
- nottorp 9mo ago
  Oh? They've grown up. I haven't used it in a million years...

drnick1 9mo ago

Seems like a missed opportunity to move away from proprietary solutions entirely. Teamspeak is self-hostable, but it is proprietary, supports limited numbers of users on the free tier, and presumably send telemetry to the proprietors even when "self-hosted."

gzread 9mo ago
To make people move away from something proprietary, there needs to be a better free alternative. "Better" means "I don't need to know what a VPS is"
Duralias 9mo ago
Going by how little it is spoken on here I assume it is a localized phenomena, but the word of Fluxer.app is spreading among my spaces and it is open source and selfhostable and federation in the future. The official instance and full time dev is funded by a cheaper discord nitro like premium sub. It very recently became public and since that makes people think it is vibe coded I recommend reading the making off blog post https://blog.fluxer.app/ https://blog.fluxer.app/ It isn't yet 1:1 with discord, no phone app yet, but it is by far the most discord like discord alternative (closer than Stoat), but open source and selfhostable.
- dphreak 9mo ago
  One downside to Fluxer is its also 100% fully restricted in Mississippi. https://fluxer.app/help/regional-restrictions https://fluxer.app/help/regional-restrictions

losvedir 9mo ago

What's actually happening? From the commentary here on HN I thought everyone was going to have to upload an ID or something. I use a Discord server to chat with some old high school friends, and wasn't wanting to upload my ID to them. But this update[0] from Discord says they're not requiring everyone to, and that "the vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age." So I'm assuming I won't have to, after all. Do we know who will, when, or why? [0] https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-experiences-for-teens https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...

literalAardvark 9mo ago
Discord has an age estimating tool that seems to work well. So it's likely that almost nothing will change and this is a huge nothing burger. Besides, if underage mode just means I can't see nsfw marked channels that's... Entirely fine.
- nitwit005 9mo ago
  I don't think any of us are going to be able to get enough of a sample size to know if their age estimation tool is working well or not. You can know the age of your real life friends, but beyond that it's just going to be self report.
Macha 9mo ago
They have a ML model based on shrug emoji that decides if you’re in the automatically approved bucket, the face verification bucket or the ID verification bucket. If face verification fails or you’re in the high risk bucket you’ll need to send them ID to access adult content, i.e. any channels manually set to nsfw, anything their classifier deems nsfw and anything in servers deemed nsfw. Discord would like to imply that most users are in the automatically verified bucket and only like porn is flagged nsfw, but it’s entirely in their control to tighten these screws when they reckon that the controversy is over (and they’ve already been trialling more mandatory ID verification on UK users, before starting the global rollout)
9mo ago

jpeizer 9mo ago

My worry is that discord will require the ID of everybody at some point or another. Now that they are going public I think every real user will have to identify themselves. The way they do it I think will be a staggered rollout of requests. So they use the guise of this algorithm to state that no everybody will need to verify but when it’s your turn to provide your ID they just wait for the next instance and lock the account to teen level until you do it. Given they say they will do ongoing monitoring to place an age group, this I don’t think is far fetched and increases the value of the profiles for the shareholders. This would make a mass exodus nearly impossible too as too many people already sit in the side of it’s not a problem if it does not effect me. The result is it will effect just not enough people to cause such a large exodus. I don’t think this spect is talked about enough. Companies that enshitify don’t do it all at once. It’s bite by bite.

deleted 9mo ago

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boxingdog 9mo ago

[dead]

k33n 9mo ago

The histrionics around Discord's completely optional age verification mechanism are really entertaining to read.

owenpalmer 9mo ago

> It’s a less complicated piece of software, but that also means it doesn’t constantly fucking pester you about whatever the bloody hell Nitro is. It's not "but", it's "and". Complexity in an app is not a good thing.

absynth 9mo ago

Matrix is looking better by the minute. Anything from other people's experience? I haven't used it at all.

LexiMax 9mo ago
I'm already using Matrix for a number of open source communities. It's fine as far as it goes. However, from a community space point of view, it seems to be more similar to IRC than Discord. Much like an IRC server, there's a public list of channels and you join them individually. There is voice and video chat, but as far as I can tell it's only person to person without any voice and video conferencing like Discord has, and I've never actually tried them to see how well they work. Some organizations, such as Mozilla, run their own Matrix server in order to corral the community into one place, but more often than not I see communities creating a single channel on the primary matrix.org server, and "expand" by adding more channels, IRC style. As an IRC replacement, I think it's perfect. But if you are expecting something more similar to Discord in terms of functionality, you'll likely be looking elsewhere. Stoat is what I see most frequently touted, but I can't speak to it personally.

vivzkestrel 9mo ago

Absolutely stupid: what makes them think teamspeak will not implement the same age verification in future. Running from one platform to the other will never be justified

wiredpancake 9mo ago
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ptman 9mo ago

Teamspeak is using matrix under the hood

m3kw9 9mo ago

i still don't understand how discord works with the infamous "claim your account" bs. Every time i use discord, it won't let me use my username, wtf?

1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20221022162930if_/https://venturebeat.com/games/hammer-chisel-pivots-to-voice-comm-app-for-multiplayer-mobile-games/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221022162930if_/https://ventur... ""If you think Skype and Teamspeak had a baby and it hand all sorts of super powers that is parents didn't have," Citron said. "What was basically a skunkworks project appears to be the most promising product we've built." For much of this year, the company has been working on Discord. The networking infrastructure is built in Erlang, a technology that Ericsson created in the 1980s for telecommunications. The system is spread across nine data centers around the world. The company has done tests to make sure that the latency is good. Resmini also noted that esports competitors - or professional gamers who play games for money prizes - were worried about security. With Skype, it's easy to get somebody else's personal internet protocol (IP) address because the communication happens peer-to-peer. Citron said that Discord works through server infrastructure, so it's impossible for anyone to obtain another player's IP address." Perhaps the peers cannot obtain each others' IP addresses but the person running the Discord server has all the peers' IP addresses in addition to their payment details There are few if any meaningful limits on how this data can be used, how long it can be retained or where it can be transferred.^1 Apparently this centralised architecture does not matter to Discord users until something like "age verification" comes along 1. The legal compliance exception obviously allows for "age verification" Example of Discord privacy policy pre-"age verification": https://web.archive.org/web/20200504172025/https://discordapp.com/privacy https://web.archive.org/web/20200504172025/https://discordap...