Discord Rival Gets Overwhelmed by Exodus of Players Fleeing Age-Verification
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
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.
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.
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.
tl;dr Discord has a moat, but it's not very wide or deep.
Migrating all of that stuff to a new service (which may not even support it all) would be a huge pain.
EDIT: Maybe I completely forgot how Teamspeak works. It seems like there is a global friends list, but I can't remember that it was a thing back in the day (10+ years ago).
Teamspeak, as far as I know, doesn't have a way to solve this.
That being said, after thinking about it, I actually have done what you're talking about before - just not on Discord. When I find someone, I simply add them on Steam, PSN, or whichever account the game uses.
And that is what Discord alternatives will have to solve - the ease of setting up a new Discord "server" by any old random user is hard to beat in terms of convenience. Matrix is the only real alternative on that front.
However, if you have an established community and have at least a little hosting knowledge among the staff, the moat is shallow to nonexistent, and it's just a matter of how much of a pain in the neck Discord decides to be.
Reddit never faced the same pressure. The API thing pissed off mobile users, but all of the Reddit alternatives, such as Voat, were hyper polarized politically and were not good destinations for most people. They collected the "worst parts of Reddit" rather than providing a place for the majority of users.
The same thing happened to Twitter. Bluesky is very polarized and constantly gets poked fun at because of it, even by left-leaning folks. Threads was a much more neutral and inviting space that doesn't force you to wear a particular set of politics on your sleeves.
Discord has a few (small) alternatives that aren't alienating or off-putting.
Digg, MySpace and Vine?
I could see Discord going the same way - declining interest from users while they keep it around for the few 'essential' communities/friends on the platform, but very little tethering them to it if a disruptive competitor comes along.
It's clear age verification is coming from a changing legal environment around the world. Discord may be preemptively moving, but any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content.
Maybe but I just don't see this as a certain thing. The US may implement nation-wide age verification laws someday but it is a long ways from happening. Other discord-like software may be self-hosted by individuals, making enforcing age-verification difficult. There's nothing wrong with this. People would rather have a private place to chat as opposed to a place where your data will be observed by a big company and potentially sold or given to a hostile goverment.
All you're doing is making a profound argument why GitHub should be divested from Github, WhatsApp from Meta, or AWS from Amazon. It's clear many tech companies would not be in dominant positions without the massive advantage of their respective monopolies.
These companies need to be broken up radically and it needs to happen soon.
There can be 2 things.
It can be fantastic for small players to get an influx of customers from a major player thats listing. Its good and healthy for the market.
That doesnt mean that Salesforce/Microsoft/Reddit/Discord is actually going anywhere. But these are still great numbers for the little guys.
>I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat
That would be great. I remember cryptocat was pretty good. But IIRC it died.
I expect discords change will do the same.
Market cap is half compared to all time high, and having old organic data that LLMs want to be trained on is saving them right now.
Rather than "fleeing age-verification" myself, and I largely assume others, are "fleeing surveillance state data harvesting".
This is an extremely rational position.
Which would seem to be a failure to "report the facts".
Everyone involved knows why there is a backlash to this new policy so I advocate to stop obfuscating it.
Now that money has finally run out, it looks like things are reverting back to normal.
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.
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.
I’m kind of salty about making a fruitless effort I’ll admit, but I feel like unless there’s an effortless, perfect, free program that replicates the (voice) channel functionality and screen sharing features people are not going to leave Discord. Even if it does treat its users like shit.
I miss those guys but I refuse to take part in that abuse, and I’m angry about it.
1. To DeDoS a Teamspeak server, it's enough to DeDoS a single server. You may not even need to do that, it may be enough to be such a nuisance that their host kicks them out. To DeDoS a Discord server, it's necessary to DeDoS the entirety of Discord, which is much, much harder, and also much more likely to put you in legal hot water. Discord is the Cloudflare of gaming.
2. Discord servers aren't real servers, they're tenants in an application, effectively "rows in an SQL table", not standalone containers requiring their own tech stack. This means they can be offered for free. You also can't abuse them for E.G. crypto mining, like you can with a VPS where a Teamspeak server can be hosted. Free increases adoption, which makes people a lot more likely to pay for extra features. It's the standard "the rich subsidize the poor" model, common to so many web applications.
3. No technical expertise necessary to set a server up. Bus factor is basically equal to infinity.
4. One service, one account, one interface, many servers, many groups, many people. There's no weird workspace switching and per-workspace DMs like in Slack (not sure how TS does this). If you log in once on a new device, all your server memberships are there, and everything just works. You may be in dozens of servers, and they're all behind the same single login.
Those 4 features are table stakes now, like it or not. If you want to be a real, long-term Discord competitor and attract real users, you have to figure out how to get those 4.
If you want to run a community with SUPER easy access to everything from live video chats with a hundred members to forums, excellent access controls, integrations for absolutely anything especially if you also use bots from the marketplace, Discord is there and it's free, and it always works.
It's really rough to compete with that.
1. Yes and no. Discord "guilds" have their metadata and chat messages managed by a single shard somewhere in GCP. However, voice is managed using servers hosted by ID3, a much smaller provider. If you find the right websocket server you can repeatedly take down voice instances still.
2. Emojis are just lines in a database, and yet they still charge a fee for that. The reason why it's free is because that's the selling point. Also, that sharded "guild" is actually part of a sharded container that still has a cost to run, and manages the write-lock for the data in that "gimme".
The whole tangent here feels weird since I _choose_ what to run on "my" VPS. Noisy neighbors have been a solved problem for decades.
3. This is actually the killer feature, centralization sells because of network effects. You're only on Discord because your friends are on Discord.
4. Teamspeak has this with myTeamspeak now. You've been able to have multiple sessions for a long time, but now it's in a nicer interface.
Yes there is
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
Edit: Just realized they may not have a public repo. If that's the case, then sounds like a way to try to get people to pay for the service.
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.
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.
I used to just engage with my friends. Now it feels like a really noisy reddit. Sure I could leave all of them, but that is kind of my point. There is an identity crises for the product.
I guess no other US state or country has demanded age checks, great journalism from kotaku...
Also technically US is fault of UK too
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.
https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/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...
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.
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. .
Mumble is a labor of love, not a commercial product. I expect they would appreciate your help.
I doubt license authorization and an entry in a list are overwhelming their servers.
[0] https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...
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.
So, for the vast majority of servers, like your high school friends, local Pokemon Go servers, work alumni, etc, they'll still work fine without an ID upload.
One positive note I am actually old man wrinkly balls. I have been there for the rise and fall of many sites. Maybe it will happen for discord as well only time will tell. Cheers
I'm in Australia and have not been prompted to verify my identity for any service (I'm assuming that one of the heuristics is average age of "friends" but I have no idea).
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/
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Absolutely agree that if everything splintered, it would be a mess.
It's still super early in development but it's already been amazing to have a self-hosted 3rd space for my friends and myself. The "living room not a convention center" focus is exactly what I find missing in most of the other options.
IMHO the bits all exists, it just needs to be all integrated in to a distribution that people can easily setup.
* https://github.com/jkleincodes/echo
* https://github.com/ericellb/React-Discord-Clone (not maintained anymore)
""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://discordap...
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.
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.
Such fond memories of playing in a team of people scattered all over the world.
It's not "but", it's "and". Complexity in an app is not a good thing.
Is...is there another kind?