Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with their identity.

Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are:

- Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade.

- Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)

- Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about data protection, identity, etc.

- It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and maintainable codebase that ~1500 people have successfully contributed code to. I don't think you'll find modern alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going out of business.

- We are a values-focused organization (https://zulip.com/values/) where providing a public service is important to us all.

- Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is free for community use and soon to be E2EE).

I'm happy to answer any questions.

The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has that in spades - which makes me not want to exit.

Thank you for the work you do. Hanging out in CZO watching the Zulip team work in public is inspiring!

my experience is exact opposite

You lost me there. I need to have all my contacts on Zulip. Nothing else matters to me

Could you expand on this?

Kind of like if each slack thread discussion had a title and was discoverable from the left sidebar and didn’t get in the way of the other threads.

But also, critically, if you want to, you can drop back to the "show me everything sequentially" view. Threads hide discussions away - which is good when you want to focus on something else, but bad when you can't remember where a discussion was.

https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/1...

Among customers, one reference that I can quickly cite is this one:

https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/

> Agents at GUT contact use Zulip every day to communicate with their team leads. “Most of our agents are in their 60s or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That’s why we love Zulip,” says Erik Dittert, who’s been leading GUT contact’s IT team for the past 20 years.

I would recommend doing a little training/handholding call/video when moving over a community -- but this is true for any new app.

My mom needed training to do basic things in Squarespace, and I had a friend who worked at Slack whose manager started every chat message with "Hi <name>" and ended it with a signature, like you would an email. :)

    > and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video

That's an automatic fail.

Echoing this. Navigation is better and clearer on desktop. The mobile apps works really well once you know what you're doing. Part of onboarding into Zulip is being able to get an "overview" of the community and the discussions that are currently happening, and this is easier on desktop.

As a developer I don't like it, but reality doesn't have to appease me.

I would also like to note that Slack did not pass the grandma test in our case. I highly doubt that Discord would given how hyperactive the UI is.

(Thanks for making Zulip, I love it)

Rules for thee, free love for me.

And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1) control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the contrapositive is also true.

1. No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-impossible to accurately and objectively judge the present-value of many types of assets. Even the case most-familiar to working-class folks, property taxes, nobody really likes/trusts the outcome.

2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual transactions between people with "skin in the game" are harder to fake. The extent to which wages are preferred as a subset of income is separate from the wealth-vs-income split.

Also because taxing income (or other cash) is disinflationary. Taxing assets is inflationary because it forces sales.

I think you are confusing cost inflation with an increase in the money supply. The way the US government funds deficit spending is not by increasing money supply (though it could) but by issuing debt in the form of US Treasury bonds. That is a transfer of money from bond investors to the government. No new money is made. This is distinct from the way that banks issue loans which is by creating new money in the form of credit (but that credit money gets "burned" as loan principal is paid back). So federal taxes do not actually control inflation in the way you are describing. Since federal deficit spending is not financed by increasing the money supply, it can only cause price inflation if it increases aggregate demand over the current productive capacity of the economy. An example would be paying more for healthcare subsidies when there's a shortage of doctors. Or subsidizing demand for housing with more mortgage subsidies when there's a housing shortage. Taxes could also increase inflation if they have the effect of reducing supply of some goods or services (like tariffs do).

Edit: I want to mention that the Federal Reserve can and does increase money supply by buying US Treasury Bonds from banks (converting the asset into cash reserves). There are various reasons why they do this but overall it's done with their dual mandate in mind: control inflation and minimize unemployment.

Degrees of liquidity matter as M1 vs M2 vs M3 etc don’t all impact inflation in the same way, but there is an impact.

Except for the fact that, without first solving the problem you responded to, yours is impossible to solve

This sounds like a 2-party government problem, not a tax problem. Plenty of countries do just fine spending that money to provide healthcare, unemployment, etc to their citizenry. Only really seems to be the US that views this as a negative

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

The USA is very corrupt, true. But getting rid of the "huge administration" and burning tax receipts is not going to solve that. How could it?

One of the roles of the state in a modern society should be to ensure no one is left behind to starve, wither and freeze amongst the incredible resources we (as a society) have accumulated.

That takes administration. That takes resources. That is what your taxes should be used for.

I agree that far too much is used to give aid to the powerful, but the solution to that should not be to condemn the weak.

Burning taxes and de-funding the administration is exactly that: condemning the weak.

The real solution though is for the legislative branch to not be beholden to those same people and be able to quickly and effectively close tax loopholes as they are discovered.

Also the term "asset" exists and is used in accounting

How? What is the difference between "stock" and "inventory"?

We all know that 10 million Ys maybe not sold for $10 billion dollars but it gives you enough leverage to buy a social network and name it Y

Taxes raise inflation as they increase the production costs. If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave, and take their capital away to invest it elsewhere. This as a result will lead to inflation due to lack of available capital for production.

Are we not tired yet of the various versions of the Reaganomics boogieman? When are we going to grow out of trickle down economics mentality?

Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup. jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"

To me they have the classic problem as with non-profits: “If we solve the problem we cease to have a cause to exist.”

Taking a look at what’s been accomplished this past year, it’s a lot of token Executive Orders on renaming things, a token deportation effort, no material change on mass legal immigration, nothing happening on the voter ID front.

It’s just theater until they lose out in the midterms and they to rally their base again in 2028 to “Save America” or “Keep It Great” or whatever hokum.

Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.

https://www.project2025.observer/

* Jan 6 was a fedsurrection, and also simultaneously all innocent people that needed pardoning (Pardoning the feds?)

* World Liberty Financial receiving billions selling out American interests worldwide? Never heard of this but Burisma was worse!

* The Raffensperger call was no big deal there were attorneys on that call. Trump's personal (now disbarred) attorneys, of course, not there to represent America's interests but how's that the big deal?

* Also who's Raffensperger? But did you see those boxes under the table! What do you mean the clip is longer than 6 seconds that's all I saw on the infinity scrolling apps.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/15-years-after-c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...

This is the infamous call where Trump, according to the recorded tapes, tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results by demanding that Raffensperger "find 11,780 votes".

If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm fine with that.

PACs are just groups that do advocacy of some sort. Some do things like advise congress people on legislation they'd like passed, some run ads to campaign for positions or candidates, some advocate for movements.

What they're not supposed to be doing is directly coordinating with a candidate, or running ads just for a candidate. But that's a line that has been continually fuzzed.

An example of a good PAC might be something like the HRC (human rights commission) that campaigns for LGBTQ rights.

The supreme court is majority activist judges. Why cant new judges undo the old activist judges wrongly decided law? Why are the other new judges suddenly activists?

China’s qualifications for influencers thing is interesting by fundamentally doesn't address the power of social media publishers.

People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved into alien agendas on which they have no agency.

(although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads at the expense of the more established Conservative and Labour parties)

Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes it very easy for those people to be removed. This is typically the model that works best in business and other cooperative pursuits anyway.

Throwing more people in the room with different opinions will ensure significant decisions can almost never made. Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by centrists who can't really change anything and anything they do change will be disliked by everyone.

For example in the US, the executive order is a massive problem. Citizens united as well. And for all democracies the natural appeal of strongman politics is a huge problem.

Every attempt at government overreach really needs to be questioned. I don't say rejected, just questioned. How will it be used by future powers? Is the tradeoff worth it? Can it be temporary? Do we even have a way to claw it back if it turns out to be detrimental? Is it too subtle and nuanced that the majority will miss seeing it? etc.

I think this is an inherent human problem that prevents us from overcoming it... history has proven that the more equal everyone is, and the less individual ownership they have, the lazier and more bored they get.

Look at the previous attempts at socialism... people stop caring when there's no goal to work towards, they can't all be doing the same thing and just be happy, because humans are naturally competitive. We desire things other people don't have, like possessions, money, or power.

Like a pragmatic meritocracy. We accept that there will be cheaters, and we won't catch or stop them all, but we have some hard limits. Do we care if you stop working so hard once you hit $1b? Maybe we'd even prefer that you did stop working (against societies interest!)?

This wouldn't even remotely resemble the communism bugaboo. It's basically saying, yes greed can be good, but at some point it gets ridiculous.

And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would need to ratify it.

It costs money to run for office. Before Citizens United, it was hard, limited, traceable donations, from individuals. No corporations, no soft money, no legal dark money. Now money has flooded in, with far less accountability.

Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping.

And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept.

The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate.

If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.

It is apparently not much of a risk to your seat if you don't represent the interests of your people because the people have become tribal and it is only their tribe they vote for with very little effective criticism of the leaders in their tribe. (it's not that complaints are nonexistent, they just don't result in anything)

The hard part is this has been true going all the way back to the stone age ever since we elevated the first person arbitrarily to chief. There has been no model of government developed since that is immune to this. I really don't know how to get around this and it depresses me that we will always be held back by the slimiest who abuse systems.

Corruption is happening out in the open and there's still so many people shrugging in response. One good push back from everyone all at once would fix a lot of things quickly. But that implies the people are united and not instead driven into manufactured conflict by said interested parties. It's basically enough that we're in a post truth era as of now. I don't know how we come back from that

Anyways, repealing Citizens United would be a good first step.

That, and the fact winning a senate seat costs on average $26.53 million [1]

You can't self-fund, that's 152 years of your $174,000 salary.

Where do you suppose the money comes from, and what do you suppose motivates the donors?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...

Our media landscape has people focusing on basically everything except what we need to be. I am not sure that liberal democracy will survive the information age. So much effort goes into the process of argument, we aren't as a whole really thinking about how to solve our very real problems.

China's technocratic rule, after some, shall we say, growing pains (hunger pains? Is it fair to say that when millions of people starved to death?), seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power.

One of my great fears is that democracy was the right model in the past decades and centuries, but that it won't keep up with the laser focused technocratic rule that a competent bureaucracy can potentially muster.

But I take and am a bit heartened by your main point - while the best case authoritarian regime can plan and execute more quickly and with greater efficiency than representative government, the worst case authoritarian govt is much much worse than the worst case possible with a functional democracy.

This requires that those in/with the power actually have altruistic, or at least not solely selfish, concerns. How rampant is government/bureaucratic corruption in China?

I elided the population starving part in order to not distract from the possibility of truly selfless governance strategy. It may very well be the case that millions starving is considered "acceptable losses" ("the needs of the billions outweigh the needs of the millions") in executing on that strategy. Which, make no mistake, would be truly tragic and should be undesirable. But that not everyone sees it that way is really what we're fighting against.

"I have a machine that feeds everyone, no one shall go hungry."

"But mah profits!"

"You only need profits so you yourself can eat, but that's now a solved problem"

"But mah profits. How will we know who's winning?"

Millions starving during the Great Leap forward was very much NOT part of the plan, it was the result of some very misguided agricultural practices.

My point is that in the same period, China has gone from "oops we accidentally caused the 2nd largest mass starvation event in history" to "we have the largest high speed rail network and manufacturing base in the world and nobody is even close."

While the US went from "what's a postwar superpower to do? How bout some megaprojects?" To "I'm drowning in entitlements and houses now cost the same as the average lifetime GDP per capita".

Get involved with politics. Be part of politics. That is how freedom is earned & maintained.

40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas.

Nowadays, our societies are old on average (especially the politically powerful).

Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.

The government generated most of those too. As technology became more capable they utilized it more but that doesn't mean they were standing around with their hands in their pockets prior to that.

> Nowadays, our societies are old on average

Do they have an unfair access to technology? If not then does this actually have any impact?

> Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.

In your experience perhaps. I doubt the reliability of this logic.

Moo.

We have known this to be the case, for quite some time, yet majority of the public still thought that a convicted felon was good enough to be president.

It's all about the kids, unless, idk, you're rich enough?

It takes only a brief glimpse of the real world and its most wealthy to recognize that an abundance of virtue is not what's reflected in reality. In fact, the benevolence Carnegie describes, serves as a smoke screen for cruelty, degenerate acts, and the slaughterhouse of the soul. We've sold out every moral for a bait and switch and it's well past time to reneg on the social contract.

1. https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/

In today's era those expectations do not exist. The public-facing, gilded age palaces, which by their public nature tend to enforce good behavior by forcing them to physically interact with the society they profited from, have been replaced by private, gated bunkers behind tall hedges blurred out on Google Maps. The wealthy wear jeans and hoodies to "blend in" or appear common, when they are very much not. A rail tycoon in a 10X beaver tophat might offer a beggar something on the street. A tech mogul in a hoody might not even get solicited.

Income tax - and broadly speaking many other changes to the social contract between upper and lower classes, like the bureaucratization of welfare - has not just allowed but incentivized the wealthy to shirk the responsibilities of old, and outsource their morality to a (corrupt, as many have pointed out) government. And it's not good. There is no honor in giving anymore.

Is that something you believe?

You're shooting the messenger.

> Unequally or unjustly, perhaps, as these laws sometimes operate, and imperfect as they appear to the Idealist, they are, nevertheless, like the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.

Or (to shorten it a bit): "These laws (of capitalism) [...] are nevertheless [..] the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished". So this is only an unlimited belief in the virtues of capitalism, not in the virtues of rich people.

From the introduction:

> Carnegie believed in giving wealth away during one’s lifetime, and this essay includes one of his most famous quotes, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” Carnegie’s message continues to resonate with and inspire leaders and philanthropists around the world.

I really wonder what Carnegie would think about his successors dismantling USAID?

It's about control and monitoring of civilians. And creating a dragnet to ensnare any new politicians and business leaders.

Freedom of speech is insufficient. We need freedom of privacy and from monitoring and tracking.

The decision was quite literally between a known criminal and already even at the time known to be likely pedophile (and now it's basically a fact) and someone who is none of that.

Criminality among the rich and the politically connected is off the charts. It’s way beyond any group of immigrants for example that these same people are trying to demonize.

Chat control? Every single politician should have that on their phone.

Musk was hanging out with child sex trafficker and is allowing kids to create porn with grok on X.

In most cases a lot more than simply "hanging out".

But we have to decrypt everything to protect the kids.

Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up in the same place.

The problem is not them. The problem is us.

The optimistic take is that this phenomenon is a characteristic of the _emergence_ of an information age (through the agricultural and industrial ages), and will no longer be true of the internet-connected human.

By definition, debauchery with durable constraints can't be normalized, as its appeal is the overstepping of norms.

There's also an argument to be made that normalizing debauchery invites scope creep.

They are hypocrites. In the UK there are hundreds of thousands of girls who have been raped between the 1990s and now (17 000 cases of sexual exploitation in the UK in the year 2024 alone). At least one UK politician refer to the girls who've been raped as "white trash" and recently people are shocked because many are implying that these girls, who are typically mass-raped, have been considered to be consenting.

It's known for a fact they tried to bury the story once it's been revealed. Turns out the same method is used by these grooming gangs in countless cities nearly all across the UK.

It's not just that the richest and most powerful do frequent child sex trafficker: it's that many politicians and judges all over the west are totally fine closing their eyes on the mass raping of girls (some boys are victims of rapes too but it's mostly girls).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal

> Rules for thee, free love for me.

Rules for thee, free love for me and for my voters base.

Its users who value their privacy will be in their rights to leave and we will.

What could possibly go wrong this time...

So at least some lay people easily realized he wasn't worth getting involved with.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1180481...

"The victims described herein were as young as 14 years old at the time they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein... Epstein intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his victims were in fact under the age of 18, including because, in some instances, minor victims expressly told him their age."

> why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew the details of what he did wrong?

Some of them were emailing long, long after his conviction.

A month later, the account was suspended for supposedly breaking guidelines. I never posted a single message, never reacted to any posts.

They then required me to upload a video scan of my face to prove I was a person.

We aren’t quite at the end of the internet, but man I can really see the end of this journey coming sometime soon.

We created the account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of consumer authenticity. But after she added five of her relatives within half an hour, her account was locked for suspicious activity.

There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.

Sometimes it works with the front camera on one smartphone but doesn’t with another (iPhone 17’s distortion), sometimes it recognizes your face on one day, but desperately fails to recognize you on another. I had to repeatedly record videos for it only to fail over and over again. Anything their system flags as suspicious, anything, will trigger the same video identification flow again, which effectively blocks your money in the account.

I’m closing my accounts with a couple of banks with these video id flows. Simply because it’s way too easy to lose access to my money in the account with them. If their QA is not good enough for this vital requirement, I don’t want to know how they treat other requirements. They simply outsourced the id verification to some third parties that are way too unreliable.

I could still tell because their profiles were sterile and had few normal comments or likes etc. Also a high school class has a very narrow age range. We recently landed a fatal blow by disallowing joins by "pages" and adding a few questions. A trickle continued but stopped recently.

The hamfisted false positive response you described is probably a result of the above.

At least Facebook tells you that you are banned.

https://reddit.com/appeal

So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I am, still locked out of all this information lmao

I feel very badly for your friend. Unfortunately, those completely benign actions look identical to a common identity theft pattern.

Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to create our own spaces again Our own little groups that exist independent of the corpo-sphere.

The only reason ‘the way things used to be’ went away was because the new thing was convenient. Well, now it isn’t anymore. So let’s just go back to the old thing.

On the other hand: It was kind of awful when even my dialup access would get screwed up because someone's IRC server got DDoS'd -- again -- and clogged up the pipes.

---

These days, the local ISPs are mostly gone. But the pipes are bigger -- it's easy for many of us to get gigabit+ connections at home. Unfortunately, the botnets are also bigger.

How do we get back to what we had?

Piggy back off of an existing community that has already built trust -- for instance, build a forum for a local activity that often attracts 10+ years of participation and involves equipment. Your board will become the best place for users (who already trust one another) to swap used gear, discuss local venue closures, etc. Adopt moderation metrics that sustain your community (don't let bullies and spammers spoil everyone's experience.)

In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.

And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it comes down to the fact that scaling such communication isn't free.

We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?

So don't scale. There is a sweet spot where a few $2 classifieds (e.g, for motor vehicles) will sustain your operating costs, and the high-trust environment keeps moderation efforts/costs low, while the total target audience is too small for most bad actors to bother with.

Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation.

But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table.

So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was.

What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?

Very possible. I'm on Tildes and its invite only structure prevents the infamous Eternal September effect. It also means that it's nearing a decade and is very much not going to compete with other forums as a platform.

I'm perfectly fine with that. But that doesn't seem to be what people en masse want. They want to connect with all their friends and family, and discover new ones through specialized communities. On a scale of a billion people, that's hard to manage. And if no one principled fills that void, the unprincipled will.

>What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?

Plenty of methods for that, centralized or decentralized. It's less a matter of "do we have the technology/ingenuity" and more "can it defeat the massive network effects?"

Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30 years of people used to free and open mass communication. How many will give that up for proper freedoms and protection from state actors?

Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or timeline.

But leaving is never free. There's a lot of gaming communities (especially niche subcommunities like emulation, speedrunning, modding, etc) that are mostly on Discord and not anywhere else. Many probably won't move. A lot of tribal knowledge will be lost as it's locked in these communities.

Heck, even some FOSS communities communicate mostly on Discord. I have more faith they will move. But not all.

And they have always organized society to make sure this is the case. It's not a wacky conspiracy theory. These are just the interests of the people who create and have most influence over tech, and these interests are shared in common amongst most elements of that class. So, this class, the capitalist class, will just plan (conspire) to make it necessary for you to participate.

Viewing tech in this way makes one see that the historic development of tech is not happenstance occurrence, just tech skipping along, unconsciously, into authoritarianism, but as tech being influenced by the interests of the people who have the most influence on its development: those who own it, who are often the same people who determine standards.

The internet was never a free form idea upon which everybody could sway, its a technology owned, controlled and influenced by those who produce it.

They WILL absolutely try to place social/state/labor functions behind this wall of authoritarianism. As they already have, and are currently doing with the growing ban on VPN usage, anti phone rooting measures, anti-"side loading", etc.

It should not be absurd to suggest that the people in power have used, are using, and will use power in their favor.

I don't know ... around these parts (Santa Fe/ABQ) while Marketplace is very popular, Craigslist continues to be widely used for this, especially since an ever growing number of younger people are not on Facebook (either at all, or not regularly).

But instead of paying Instagram for reach, consider taking the same budget and spending it delivering samples and coupons to other local businesses mid/late morning. Bonus points if you make the coupons unique for each delivery so you can track which local businesses are your biggest fans. Office managers are generally receptive to this kind of cold call and you can leave a catering menu. Catering gigs can keep your kitchen busy during the off hours.

However, “think of the children” will always result in more restriction in western countries, not less. We are watching countries prove that it works to isolate from each other. Europe is not isolating from America in exactly the same way, but is isolating business processes from American services.

We are not on the cusp of the end of the internet, but the cliff sure seems in view to me.

I hope for it to happen in my country, with local companies and developers competing to create the new social networks. The current arrangement fine foreign entities too much power.

Discord tried to do it to me a few months ago but I refused, contacted support instead. Eventually they made it work but it took forever. Lucky for me I hate Discord so tried to avoid it anyway.

I don't see it as the journey's end. But it's gonna be a much quieter road if most people don't walk away from this stuff. Maybe that's for the best.

*CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason)

This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.

Now that I think of it, I bet I could host a decent instance of some open-source alternative in a public cloud for around the same cost as what I paid for Nitro ($100 a year)...

I don't expect the masses to change their incomprehensible habits just because of this.

Telegram, Slack, Facebook, Team Speak, Reddit, GroupMe, nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup that Discord does.

Apart from the open voice channels, what Discord features is Slack actually lacking? (and huddles can sub-in for voice channels much of the time)

I suppose the silver lining is that they are putting the responsibility for age verification adults. Which imo is better than requiring everyone; kids get a free pass to the kids stuff...

I don't know if this will personally affect any servers I use since they're not obviously adult, but I assume the slope will be slippery and if they're doing a faceID system now it will only get worse. Article says "analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device"

...are they really going to implement a facial recognition algo in the browser, or is this a "download our app or fuck off" situation? I'm guessing the latter.

And that's the thing, these policies are always loose and will be abused.

- M rated game? Okay, it's adult only now. Sure.

- Emulators? Well they can play adult stuff. Now they just happen to add friction on something that is convenient for billionaire studios.

- LGBT content? Well you're talking about sexuality. Of course you need to be an adult. Here let's take face scans and totally not be a sitting duck for any malicious parties looking to identify traditionally disenfranchised people

The escalation is fairly obvious at this point. We've seen it happen in real time.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

> Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, says official ID photos of around 70,000 users have potentially been leaked after a cyber-attack.

However, their senior director states in this Verge article:

> The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information.

Why they didn't do that the first time?

This is also contradicted by what Discord actually says:

> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.

What are the non-most cases?

To say nothing of insider threats of which likely exist across every major social media platform in service to foreign govs.

Along with such weird (to us) things as applying for an exit visa from your current town when you want to move to a new town...

> And what do you mean by “us”?

US folks are pretty used to being able to up and drive across the country with a suitcase, without filing any paperwork (at least till the taxman comes knocking next April)

Everyone says this, including the TSA. But they never say they don't keep a hash, or an eigenvector of your biometric. Which is equally as important.

TL;DR: The IDs were used in age-related appeals. If someone's account was banned for being too young they have to submit an ID as part of the appeal. Appeals take time to process and review.

Discord has 200,000,000 users and age verification happens a lot due to the number of young users and different countries.

Appeals are done in the actual Discord ticketing system.

The company they hired to do the support tickets archived them, including attachments, rather than deleting them.

I call it bollocks. Likely they have to keep it for audit and other purposes.

Expect any claims that things are being deleted to be a bold faced lie.

The purpose of things is what they do. They're an adtech user data collection company, they're not a user information securing company.

Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control.

> The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional secrecy” rules.

https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-...

What about my "PERSONAL SECRECY" ?

If this is what it means for a parent to “do their job” then what do you propose happens to parents who are unwilling or unable to police their kids’ Discord account?

For this reason, I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of low-trust social media. They can’t tell if a user is a child or even a human. People will move to things like group chats because they don’t rely on sending your ID to a verification service in the Philippines.

I’d love to have my kids in relatively small, intimate online spaces where I can’t necessarily assume they will be perfect (nor do I want them to be - they deserve to have some room to learn to navigate problems for themselves) but I can at least assume they won’t be overwhelmed by the impossibility of successfully navigating life in a globalized fishbowl. But if there’s one thing late stage capitalism abhor, it’s a self-contained community of real humans from which the powers that be can’t extract “value”.

I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just ignore what your kids are doing.

It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the government.

Can we normalize “it takes a village” again? After all, we do let bars and liquor stores get a slap on the wrist for selling to minors. If you let a child into an adult movie theater you’d be in jail. Why do we pretend we don’t live in a world with laws and standard conduct the second we connect to a modem?

Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they can’t enforce everything in one place, domain filtering isn’t practical, some sites (like YouTube) are needed for schoolwork and they include adult content intermingled with no sane way to bifurcate those. It’s also impossible to disable the forced short-form video push onto toddlers and teens.

Saying that companies should face some level of responsibility for their products is the dangerous move. That’s part of why the Internet has barely been regulated.

you can say this, but it is not enforced, so this part of discussion is not really productive.

Also, why should I need to identify myself at all ? I used to use IRC for the better part of my life, I still do infact. So to have to Identify myself by sending my ID to a random company is insulting to me.

In fact its worse. Every site must also implement this security check. Or everyone must agree to just use sites and services that follow this policy. Otherwise anyone can just use another, often 'less safe' website.

Though, with AI being used I suspect it wouldn't pass any longer.

So, I suppose you shouldn't give your fake id (digital or physical) to a government officials. It also seems "obvious" that it's similarly unwise to give it to a bank. But you can do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel? To a delivery service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)? Dicsord? Where is the line between a bank (a private commercial corporation) and Discord (a private commercial corporation)?

The "legal" line is usually around fraud - trying to obtain some financial gain by providing false information. There is nothing to gain by giving a fake ID to discord - but it probably violates some rules around unathorized access to computer systems.

But not even worth that effort for this. Not a subscriber, but probably won't ever use it again, either.

Guessing they probably just ran some rudimentary OCR on the image to compare the name and DOB. I modified the actual license# as well as the picture.

Not having a correct photo or license number didn't really mean anything to them if their OCR didn't have any half-decent verification that would look at the fields where that information was expected to be, anyway.

- Underage people who do not have the emotional maturity to deal with digital public spaces

- Emotional manipulation through "algorithmic" timelines (chronological or bust)

- Waves of unwanted interactions

Social media seems like it can be a positive tool to me. I would love to be able to continue to use it as I am. I do think there is a conflict of interest issue between the mental health of the people that use social media, and for-profit corporations that provide social media services. Regulating social media in a sane way has become difficult due to how much financial sway social media companies have on legislation, but it's an important fight to fight.

[0] I have a thread on my bsky account with a bunch of group photos, if you're interested it shouldn't be hard to find. I'm not linking it because I'm not interested in people engaging in it from here.

A subtle but important distinction

In ~media~, you have a few specialized ~creators~, and doom scrollers.

Compare Lunarstorm anno 2000 and instagram 2026.

I can understand what this means in the context of visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on TT in that a number of very large creators there record from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ specialized production.)

In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not social media?

> On a network, people interact with each other.

On any platform that would be considered social media by any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than a subreddit, but they serve the same function.

I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't understand the distinction.

Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while it is not in "social media". You may as well call it "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use it most of the time.

Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while 'social networking' is primarily based on social connection and interaction.

Meanwhile, HN would be closer to media. It technically has a few personalities, and one default feed to doom scroll.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...

More seriously, I have seen similar exchanges many times on this social media where one party tries to exempt what is clearly a social media from his anti-social media agenda because he finds it personally more palatable. Usually he tries to exempt Reddit or HN but in this case it is Bluesky, which has the same features as Twitter ten years ago and is notorious for being always politically charged. It makes me think whatever criticisms he may have against social media are actually less about social media but about people he does not like being on social media. Like a driver complaining about all the other cars causing a congestion while he sits in his own car.

But fear not, because our blessed regulators (totally different from their tyrannical censors) will save us from the Big Bad. Never mind when Nepal blocked WhatsApp in its social media ban or when UK came after Wikipedia!

It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.

If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.

The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.

What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out there. It's not. It was founded by jack dorsey and copied the UI and features of old Twitter. Its main selling point is "twitter but no Elon musk" and is, from my perspective, almost exclusively inhabited by politically antagonized people seeking a refuge which then resulted in US politics sucking the air out of everything else on that platform.

Can people forge constructive relationships on bluesky? I am sure they do, but they can also do it on X, Reddit, Facebook or whatever "bad" social media out there.

I propose passing laws that make parents who let their kids on social media pay fines and risk having social media sites blocked by their ISP rather than just making all adults have to get an "internet license".

Make META a criminal organization. Put Zuckerberg behind bars.

This lives in opposition to the people who own the websites/apps goals. So it won't happen.

Eat the rich is a good mantra and banner, but not an action plan. Here in America we have at most 3 years of this left and at median 1 year (with a huge nebulous cloud based on the reaction to trying to seize power). There's a lot we can do to build up to the ultimate mantra.

Does tiktok have good intentions keeping your hooked all day on end?

Pretending that's what the anti-social media stance is, is hilariously dishonest.

Anyone pretending there is any anonymity and privacy to protect on the internet, right now, has their head in the sand, especially if they use social media.

I expected all of them to have become Discord channels at this point.

Cesspit of AI-driven "validated" accounts for pushing propaganda.

It's the worst of both worlds.

People under 18 are the largest disenfranchised block of citizens.

More importantly, it's a powerful political spin used to justify often heinous actions. People want to protect kids.

But it's the non-government entities you really need to be worried about. There are plenty of brokers buying up this data, making up assertions/predictions about the data, then selling it along downstream to secondary vendors who just blindly accept the data as true.

These are how people online get doxxed. It's not the government or FBI, it's these brokers who mine/buy data from sites/credit bureaus/local governments, link them across various social media, then build out profiles of individuals that they then sell to anyone with a big enough check book.

I've looked into these vendors before and their profiles on people are often wrong on several dimensions. So you don't want to do anything that's going to increase their ability to map you across the internet, because that's just going to improve their ability to identify you, while still selling lies about your personality.

1 - Piles of parents too stupid or lazy to, well, parent the children they made;

2 - A very reasonable societal expectation that it shouldn't be easy for young kids to access, or even be exposed, to the worst dregs of the internet;

3 - Very different use cases (gaming, kids stuff, free/affordable slack for communities) all on the same platform;

4 - A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method. It's a government-wide game of underwear gnomes.

This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's actual malice, not just incompetence. Leaving aside that this shouldn't be done at all, there is no desire to do this in a privacy-preserving way, because destroying anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be avoided. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for generations.

https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...

The whole thing is security theater designed to conceal the fact that child security is not the objective, it's the justification.

>> nobody should escape the consequences

There are no consequences whatsoever for this.

>nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.

We can already do that without needing ID stored on servers. Blame lazy enforcement with an incentive to retain even bad customers.

Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their names.

A part of the Discord users is from countries from which Discord isn't even officially accessible (eg China) or where involvement in LGBT discussions could result to death row (Afghanis are still on Discord)

For me, a company that open sourced 70,000 IDs and ask for moooooore just weeks later is just a joke about the sharing economy

The problem isn't even for new users. Some users have over a decade of private hobbies and will now need to associate their governement ID to their profile. Discord pinky swears they ask but don't keep this time, which isn't enough.

Companies shouldn't be allowed to change such fundamental ToS after an account is created.

It's a push out.

That's fine. We'll take our attention elsewhere.

I wouldn't mind showing my ID to a person (in person), but there's no way I'm letting some company get a scan of my ID or passport to store in some giant database that's a rich target for hackers. Might as well give them access to all my bank accounts (Plaid) too.

(It sure would be nice if there were a national privacy law in the US.)

Also, it's illegal for companies to use facial recognition in my jurisdiction, so if I allowed them to "verify" me, they'd be breaking the law.

Are they shipping a video classifier model that can run on all the devices that can run Discord, including web? I've never heard of this being done at scale fully client-side. Which begs the question of whether the frames are truly processed only client-side...

May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the masses.

You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability to communicate with each other.

The ideal outcome is for everyone to stop using the intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That's even what often happens over time, but not always immediately. Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.

Discord is a good design, and should be replicated rapidly with mutations from competitors galore.

Sounds like you want https://matrix.org/

> Discord is a good design

Then the main, reference client https://element.io/ or https://fluffy.chat would work great for you.

... With the only caveat being that general experience of using Matrix is awful.

I second the other commenter's suggestion of using https://stoat.chat/ or as it used to be called: Revolt, which matches the "Opensource Discord" requirement perfectly.

(Incidentally, this is also the incantation that will cause its primary maintainer to show up in the comment thread and tell me that I’m not using their seemingly annual complete new client rewrite that fixes all of the problems and makes it perfect now.)

Soatok covered it very well here: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...

I'm quite sure most of these issues were fixed by now, but the fundamental issues remain, at least in this federation.

Nobody scales free, high-bandwidth services without some dark money support from feds or worse.

Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to a fledgling app.

WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government boosted Signal.

Sooooo, what is a good discord replacement?

I've never been a regular user of Twitter, pre or post elon era, but a lot of people I follow in other ways used to be very active on there and discussions would often spill over into other venues. That still happens a bit, but much less than before.

Discord is even more niche than that. There's tons of IRC esque group chats of that's what you need. But a community: not so easy to replace.

I left Facebook, left Reddit (never really had a Twitter). This won't be different.

Today, though, no chance that happens. The current generation literally grew up with it, same for most of the other established social media apps. The concept of alternatives largely does not exist for them. And besides, they were probably already sending pictures of themselves and other personal data to each other through the app, so it's not like Discord doesn't already have all of that.

People will migrate, some will stay, and it will just be yet another noise machine they have to check in the list of snapchat, instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter, twitch, discord, group texts, marco polo, tinder, hinge, roblox, minecraft servers, email, whatsapp and telegram, and slack/teams for work.

Absolutely exhausting to be honest.

I mean it, the tech illiteracy of gen Z/alpha is out of this world, I did not expect a generation that grew up with technology to be so inept, but here we are. But they grew up with a 4x4 grid of app icons, not with a PC.

  - Not understanding that a dead battery means it won’t turn on
  - Trying to use them without an internet connection
  - “The screen won’t work” when trying to non-touchscreen models like a tablet
  - “I can’t see my stuff” when using the guest mode rather than their login, or when they used a PC and they couldn’t see the docs icon on their desktop

There’s a mountain of issues along those lines we ran into, and it was honestly frightening to watch.

> why don't you make a separate account for your sibling

> I don't know how to make an email

> but you needed an email for your account

> yeah, I just use my school email

By that time my age as a young teen I knew how to make new accounts and research what I didn't know. And I'm not sure of its my place to help them create an email without knowledge from their parents.

The most complex concept they can understand is mail/post attachment or capcut, but then this is it. 10 minutes later they will download phone flashlight app that requires Google services for app delivery.

Shocking.

I ended up with refusing to help with anything related to technology in any other way than pointing to help/manual/search engines and asking questions.

It's not like we haven't seen closed source applications become hostile to their users before. And it's not like we didn't warn people about it.

Anyone have any experiences to share with moving their discussion groups from Discord to Groups.io?

You do understand the difference?

Pardon me if I don't have a lot of trust in their ability to keep it safe.

- Matrix

- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)

- IRC + Mumble

- Signal

I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.

Now if anyone wants to differentiate their Discord alternative, they want to have most of discord functionalities and add the possibility to be in multiple voice chats (maybe with rights and a channel hierarchy + different push-to-talk binds). It's a missed feature when doing huge operations in games and using the Canary client is not always enough.

For now, I think they do it through their Jitsi integration. I don't know how easy it is, as I haven't tried it.

https://docs.element.io/latest/element-cloud-documentation/i...

https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/

(Not affiliated)

This is your chance to start Bluesky for discord. A competently built, VC backed competitor to exploit a misstep only caused by government overreach due to their colossal market share. 26 million daily active users is a nice guaranteed market to start whittling away at, with an effective marketing campaign to drive a wedge between "little gamers, and big corporate enshittification."

I don't think I would need VC to get off the ground.

I keep coming back to the gigantic headache of content moderation, and it gives me pause not to do it. There are some truly terrible people who will try to tear the platform apart.

How would you avoid the same problem that discord ran into that made them require ID verification? I doubt they're doing this for fun. Incorporate in the Bahamas?

So they are forcing users from countries that haven't passed these laws to abide by them. They don't have to do this, they could just require brazilians use face-id.

I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.

That would be my answer.

Nevertheless, I don't like the new name either, oh well...

I like this comment though:

Imagine you make a free software project and it runs into trademark issues because people have more money than you to register in more classes than your project.

And then even though your project existed first, they still come after you anyway.

And from that an even more expensive rebranding from this as well.

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225, not sure how accurate it is, but it makes me want to revolt .

Argh. If there's no stoat emoji, petition the Unicode Consortium for one, don't just use a beaver. It's not even the right family; the badger emoji would be closer.

The concept that every message belongs to a topic and the async communication focus makes so much sense to me. I read conversations, not timelines.

It is highly ranked on some platforms that do validated reviews, like Capterra.

(I lead the Zulip project).

We're planning to roll it out at our company (foundata) in Q4, so you’ll get at least a few bucks from us. I'll also happily recommend it to our customers. As an OSS company and service provider, I can very much relate to the lack of marketing budget and the constant SEO spam.

I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron. Total waste of time.

How does this impact you in any way?

A lot of these things are normalized already, but requiring IDs is not and I don't want to see it become normalized.

Ultimately, they are free to do what they like (or perhaps being unnecessarily pressured by various govts) and I am free to leave the service.

If you don't use Discord as a source of "nsfw" content you can comfortably ignore these requirements. I do realize there are some communities that may fare a lot worse than my gaming / software dev interests, and may be falsely claimed "nsfw" just for their existence. Which yeah, that absolutely sucks.

Mandatory age checks with biometric or ID data can create long-term privacy and reuse risks that the ecosystem has not fully reckoned with yet.

Also, this is just the beginning, more social networks will require the same soon.

I used to be like that. It was unsustainable and ultimately mentally unhealthy.

I cancelled my account in protest, but their financials say they made money on the change (and thus all the execs are happy with it).

The thing is, what other option do I have?

Also, I'm not sure you would need to give discord your ID unless you're sending porn in your work chat or something.

(here's part of it: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-rel... )

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/discords-ipo-could-happen-...

As startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product. These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company.

Which is why we end up with decisions like OnlyFans hitting $1B / yr in revenue (with extreme profitability) off of porn and then deciding to ban porn, https://www.ft.com/content/5468f11b-cb98-4f72-8fb2-63b9623b7...

Or, Digg deciding to kill its "bury" button and doing a radical "redesign" that made Reddit worth billions.

Unity's decision to update its pricing. Sonos' app "redesign" etc etc.

Corporate vampires will cheerfully slaughter your golden goose. Or, in the best case, severely cripple it.

That is prioritizing internal politics over the realities of their product. The Discord userbase is young. And it serves a variety of use cases / the same account can be used to access open source communities, coordinate video game time with friends, interact professionally, and have a supercharged group chat for close IRL friends.

In other words, Discord is the app where maladjusted early 20-something leaked classified data to impress his teenage friends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/discord-leaks/

Any decision that isn't along the Apple's hard privacy stance lines, "we'll protect user privacy" is prioritizing the discomfort of that decision over the user base / use case.

Perhaps collecting everyone's messages, social links, scanning their faces, and then adding ID data in for "ground truth" is the real interest here?

There still is push back, so I won't say this is a losing battle. I'll keep fighting regardless.

>Keep some alternate contacts for friends at least

They know where to reach me. Whether they care enough to go outside their gardens to talk is another matter.

The thing is, most of discords users are in countries which haven't yet passed laws that ban children from using apps like discord. If they were privacy focused they could do this only where the law requires it, like Australia.

Also, I don’t think your OnlyFans analogy holds up. My understanding is that their threat to ban porn was a stunt. A pretty effective one.

If they view you as unstable, unreliable, or adversely motivated, they will look for alternatives to at minimum diversify. It’s their livelihood.

Compare Digg and slash. One completely died, the other has stuck with its formula and hasn't disappeared, but has just faded into irrelevance.

* SCREEN Act age verification with huge implications for all online privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g&list=PLu4srHCWJr...

* Abolishing Section 230, the law that protects platforms like this from being sued for user content (just published today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eqt8vrtP-U&list=PLu4srHCWJr...

* UK online safety act (it's not just the U.S.) - interview with the lawyer defending 4chan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3PGp9RhTw&list=PLu4srHCWJr...

The problem is privacy activists and free speech activists (though there's some overlap between the two they aren't the same) oppose age verification by any means since it has the potential to infringe on both ever so slightly. Meanwhile age verification gates are being demanded and thrown up all over the Internet at a frightening pace. So we get only the maximal data collection solutions implemented by people who don't give a shit about privacy or free speech. And the mass surveillance cheerleaders egg them on.

If privacy and free speech activists understood that a proactive, privacy-preserving approach to age verification is the best outcome we'd be better off.

We should not accept the Overton window shifting here, and say "well, if we do it to ourselves, in a privacy-preserving way, that's less bad".

I think I already said that in my original post.

> We should not accept the Overton window shifting here

Great! Let's say you and I refuse to accept it. How do we keep Discord from demanding passports or selfies? How can we get France[1] or Finland[2] to roll back age restrictions on social media?

You'll never convince a majority of voters in democracies that nothing online should be age-restricted. These are the people that the enemies of anonymity and free speech are counting on to advance their agenda.

At the same time a majority of voters is currently quite content with the state of age verification for access to tobacco and alcohol. Both its strictness (or lack thereof) and privacy preservation (almost perfect).

I'm not saying my proposal is the one that should be adopted. I honestly don't care which idea gets picked and I don't want anything from it. But it's a virtual guarantee that in the absence of a competing good-enough, privacy-preserving implementation, only the most privacy-invasive idea will be implemented.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776272

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838417

This can of course be done government by government, but that isn't scalable for a global company.

I wish I could edit my post because a lot of people had the same misconception when I first wrote it.

It’s not “slightly”. They’ll start with claiming to protect people under 18 from obviously problematic content — porn, grooming, etc.

It won’t stop there. The scope creep will extend to expressing or reading “incorrect” or “dangerous” views.

They’ll probably call some of it “hate speech”, but hate speech is whatever the people in power say it is; on X, “cisgender” is designated as a slur and gets your post censored.

The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy if the slope isn’t slippery — “think of the children” is a wedge bad actors are once again trying to use to open the floodgates of censorship.

They don’t even need to target adults; if you control what children can see and express, you have enormous control over all future generations of voters.

What are your thoughts on Apple's approach? You still have to provide your birthdate to apple. But after that, it only only ever shares your age range with other companies that request it, not your birthdate.

There is a stark difference between enabling choice or compelling it.

Somehow in the last 15 years, we have completely lost sight of agency-based ethics as a founding and fundamental principle of western liberalism.

This has been replaced with harm-based ethics. Harm has no fixed definition. There is no stopping rule — when will we have eradicated enough harm? It’s declared by fiat by whoever has the means to compel and coerce — and harm inherent in that enforcement are ignored.

Is it?

I don't think it is.

I truly don't believe that there's any possible way to verify someone's age without collecting ID from them.

But assuming it has to be a private solution, you could do the same thing but make it a non-profit. Then at least _new_ services you wish to use don't need to collect your ID.

Occasionally in my free time I have been tinkering with a certificate-based solution that could fulfill this sort of need for age verification. It’s not the most robust idea but it’s simple enough using most of what we already have. Creating a minimal protocol which doesn’t share actual identifying information nor metadata of the site you’re accessing is trivial. If I can make an 80% solution in less than 100 hours of my free time then some groups with more money and intelligence could propose a dead-simple and easy-to-adopt solution just as easily.

(not affiliated with the project, just really want to see it succeed)

[1] https://stoat.chat/ [2] https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios

Why isn’t this delivered via some sort of notification, menu, pop-up, etc? DMs seem prime for phishing

I didn't even realise discord scans all the images that i send and recieve.

A lot of the internet broke the day they flipped that switch off.

Weren't external Tumblr hotlinks also a thing back in the day?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/16uy0an/not_sur...

The thing is it's a mix of both.

You have the fervent that love recording everything "for the good of the people". But then you'll just have piles of people with separation of duties that do things with very little understanding of where they fit in the process and very little care to.

As people who want to talk about words like "megabytes" or "megapixels" or "megaphones" or "Megaman" or "Megan" on Facebook are finding out.

It seems to me that the "logical" solution to this is some sort of local key like "sudo" that the user enters/has access to. This key is on a cookie or request or something that says "This request is being done by a verified adult" and then the website goes "cool here's your data". If the request does not have it, then the website says "Sorry you need one of these keys/permissions to access".

I see this as elegant because like modern IDs, YES THEY COULD GET AROUND IT, but at least it gives parents and users who want to abide and try the ability. Kids get fake id's, they get stuff they shouldn't. So long as audits show that the businesses are trying to catch this and punishing those who ignore procedures properly, things are "fine".

How infeasible is this from a coding perspective? I get that we're fucking with standards here, but I figured it would make most sane users and companies happy. Companies don't have to keep PII, just a log of "yes this access from this IP was approved, but we discovered is was used falsely and banned that key", and users have a tool that's setup once locally (or refreshed when you want a new key).

I guess you'd need some way to authenticate these as if it's too easy to spoof whats the point, but it strikes me as leagues better of "store everyone's colonic map"

How off base am I here? Is the theory somewhat sound or is this just dead from the ground up?

This clearly doesn't work and they're surely aware of it. Perhaps it's even intentional as a choice to give kids a way out, just trying to cover their own asses in regards to regulation.

Previously that was a checkbox or a line in their ToS saying "I'm over 18". Now that lawmakers are pushing to make that no longer sufficient, "AI face scanning" is the next step up.

Too much fascism. They've used these relinquishes to build a database of people to go after based om race or political affiliation.

Maybe they still will get me. But I'm not making it that easy for them.

Nah I'm used to being lonely. Leaving these platforms shows how few truly deep friendships you have.

You get used to it.

>I had the same reaction when platforms started asking for my cellphone number... after some years I just started giving it to them.

Even when I gave Facebook my number, that wasn't enough. I drew a line at some point. If everyone else wants to sacrifice privacy for the sake of pseudo-community, so be it.

I have a rich social network, I have a family, and now more than any time in my life do I think it's important to resist.

Stop saying you'll get less radical as you age, it's just not the axiom you think it is.

You're free to make your own choices on life, but I don't like you chastising others' lived experiences as if everyone has a cushy safe life with a government working for them.

I personally don't find ease-of-use to be worth the price of my privacy but most people are more than happy to sell themselves out piecemeal in the form of data until there's nothing left but a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet to attest to their ever having existed.

For example, if we are in a server for coding, maybe we will have to use zoom or google meet as a stopgap. Curious if others have better alternatives.

I really just don't know what isn't "safe" for teens, so hopefully this will be pretty clear somewhere.

EDIT: seems like I'm not the only one [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1q0ewh1/do_you...

On one hand, I'm not surprised.

But on the other hand-- I would be terrified to be in charge of a company who needed to make this ask. It's just such a big deal, such an important bit of information to protect from hacks.

I hope they lose most of their customer base. But I'm terrified they won't.

The gradual erosion of privacy is no longer gradual.

I use Discord for chat and voice calls since that is what I expect from a chat app, but the amount of companies that have built their community / knowledge base / support system around Discord is worrying. You know they can just delete that, right?

I'll continue to use Discord for chat until prompted to put my face in the hole :)

Yay to further fragmentation:D

The company that Discord uses lists the methods they accept above. Notably, they do not accept any privacy-protecting digital identity standards from US or EU citizens; they only implement national ID verifications where they receive a full birthdate, with the sole exception of AU where they allow banks to attest to age-majority.

Leveraging this press to highlight their clear desire-for / dependency-on being provided an explicit birthdate, rather than simply a bool backed by the government, would be an effective lever to pull through e.g. New York and California governmental privacy efforts — especially if one somehow got them classified as a data broker in California and therefore bound to a much more expensive set of laws, due to their insistence on being provided PII when more privacy-protecting alternatives are available there.

Yes, this isn’t a scorched earth response. Every other thread of discussion here has that covered already and I have nothing new to add there. But for anyone looking to force privacy into the budding age checks verification market at an early stage rather than trying to shut it down, here’s your roadmap to effecting real change on the matter. Good luck.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.

I just want pagination and to use my stock browser features...

Jokes aside, I've played around with Campfire and it's very, very simple, but pretty nice to use and easy to set up: https://once.com/campfire

There's an actively developed open source server that allows the clients to connect!

https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server

I wish Smarter Child was still around so we could see how LLMs interact with it.

And to be clear, Teamspeak from version 5 on is not teamspeak. It's matrix with a skin. Not that that's terrible, but it's not great for running it on low power/cost VPS like actual teamspeak was.

I don't know it well yet.

.......yet.

They’re not gonna use Slack or phpBB.

More seriously, it will become a problem on there is a significant user migration to there and a repeat of the mass hysteria. Due to being more niche, these smaller platforms are probably not in danger right now.

- ID verification to see porn on Discord.

- Also, some warnings to not befriend stangers.

Not very heavy handed, you can google porn anytime. I am not sure who this serves.

Discord is only the next biggest canary in the coal mine. These regulations are going to force a lot more websites and apps to do this, too.

I wish these sorts of regulations had been written hand-in-hand with a more directly technically-minded approach. The world needs a better technical way to try to verify a person's estimated age cohort without a full ID check and/or AI-analyzed video face scan before we start regulating "every" website that may post "adult content" (however you choose to define that) starts to require such checks.

phpBB never made me scan my face.

It's just a small step ahead of "phone number required" auth.

Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?

> use facial age estimation

Surely a kid won't be able to ask someone else to pass the check for them. But let's talk about false positives. If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?

> submit a form of identification

If you have a picture of an ID document, can you verify that it's real? You'd have to ask the government for that. And at least in one country there is no process for that.

> On-device processing

Oh, a client-side check. Must be secure.

Yes, it's global

Not until a court case on the topic gives us precedent.

I made a lot of friends on those communities growing up, and it inspired me to go into software because I saw how it brought people together.

And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn’t make any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music which still reverberates through me today.

Even with the reinvigoration of new ideas from LLMs, tech feels like it has been languishing for well over a decade at this point. The playbook is to disrupt traditional industry at a loss, then enshittify when competitors are gone. A lot of tech plays really feel like some form of: bring the yellow pages into the digital realm and overcharge for facilitating that access. Finding a firm that even uses AI outside of a chatbot UX is rare.

Could not relate to this more. Spent my formative years in those forums and they genuinely helped mold many of the tastes and interests that have stuck with me into adulthood. Not to over-romanticize, at the end of the day it was just a forum on a music tracker - but the sense of community and sheer diversity of thread topics made it such an interesting place to peruse.

Discord certainly has its applications. But since it became the defacato community tool, I find it essentially useless. Discussions are ephemeral (from a UX standpoint at least), and much more constrained. Its difficult to lurk and only chime in now and then unless you're regularly online.

https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam

And this will reduce spam from random accounts. Will see if it remains usable without uploading my Id.

There's this interesting arc of growth for apps which are successful. At first users love it, company grows, founders get rich, they hire expensive people to develop the product and increase revenue until eventually the initial culture and mission is replaced by internal politics and processes.

Software starts getting features which users don't want or need, side effects of the company size and their Q4 roadmap to 'optimize' revenue|engagement|profits|growth|...

Users become tools in the hands of the app they initially used as a tool. This model worked well so far and built some of the biggest companies in history.

AI could make this business model less effective. Once a piece of software becomes successful and veers off into crap territory, people will start cloning it, keeping only the features that made that software successful initially. Companies who try to strong arm their users will see users jump ship, or rather, de-board on islands.

At least I hope this will be the case.

I genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access to age-restricted servers and channels...

Feels like it should be just fine not to verify the age.

The only way for the server owner to circumvent the filter is to mark a channel as "NSFW", which doesn't necessarily mean the channel actually contains any NSFW content.

This change will not actually require ID for content confirmed to be NSFW. It will require ID for each and every "NSFW mode" (unfiltered) channel. The end result is that you have three choices:

- Ditch Discord features implemented in recent years (or at least this is currently possible) - this prevents a server from being listed as public;

- Require ID checks from all your users (per channel);

- Have everything scanned from all your users (per channel).

Sounds weird to me. Pretty sure that they legally have to make sure that they don't host illegal content. Or does "NSFW" enable some kind of end-to-end encryption?

You don't have to take my word for it, just check it yourself, although it seems that this week, they renamed the NSFW setting to "Age-Restricted Channel" (in preparation for this change, no doubt). The verification-related portion of the behavior I described was implemented for the UK months ago.

The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."

EDIT: IANAL (or american) but if Discord was policing content for legality rather than age-appropriateness, wouldn't they lose DMCA Safe Harbor protections?

Wait! This does not mean they do not scan it. What I understand from that statement is that they filter explicit content, as in they prevent it from appearing on the user's screen.

When you enable the "NSFW" mode, you tell Discord "it's okay, don't filter out anything". But Discord probably still scans everything.

So that makes sense to me: if you don't validate your age, then Discord will not allow you to join channels that disable the "adult" filtering. I can personally live without adult content on Discord...

They can read everything that you send already, if your problem is that they may filter something that they consider NSFW and you don't... well I am not sure how big of a problem that is.

Way more than you think. There are tons of Discord servers that only exist to share pornography.

of course this has yet to be built.

I feel like age verification will come, there is no way around it (unlike ChatControl and the likes, age verification seems reasonably feasible and has a lot of political traction right now).

But I would rather have a privacy-preserving solution for that, e.g. from the government (which already knows my age).

I do wish that the lawmakers had worked more hand-in-hand with technical exports on more privacy-preserving solutions ahead of enforcing these laws. But Discord is doing this because enforcement has already started.

The Internet is more or less becoming a locked down, controlled and fully observed thing for end users and citizens, so adapting to that world sooner and working within it is just sensible future-proofing.

This also lets them more safely target older users with ads, purchase requests, etc. and new integrations for gambling and other high ROI systems.

No. The whole point of privacy preserving technology is that they don't.

The idea is that the government checks your identity (they know who you are) and give you an anonymous cryptographic proof that you are above, say, 18. They don't know what you do with it.

You give this cryptographic proof to Discord, and they know that if you have access to that proof, then you have access to someone who is above 18. They don't know who you are.

Sure, you could ask an adult to give you a token. But you can also ask an adult to buy you alcohol or to do the age verification scan for you.

If age tokens are truly anonymous, what's the solution for preventing a single person from generating and selling them to whatever child wants one?

Then make it illegal to sell them. Some people will still do it, but children can already order cannabis over the internet.

It's always a trade-off, it will never be perfect. But the status quo is not perfect either. The question is: is it better than the status quo? I think that age verification is not completely unreasonable (as long as it is made in a privacy-preserving manner). As a comparison, I think that ChatControl is completely unreasonable.

I've seen way too many governments / companies use "protect the children" as a way to try and push overreaching garbage policy, however I think this one actually might help.

That said, depends on exact details of how they want to do this. We'll see how it goes.

I’m simply going to scan someone else’s ID to keep my account.

Facial video estimates or submit an id card.

Option 3: if we analyze all of your data we have and see you are not going to bed at 8pm for middle school, you get adult status.

In practice, nothing will stop it, the tooling will gradually get better at detecting prior fakes and banning those users while the newer fakes will go undetected for longer.

Putting up the requirement satisfies their CYA requirements here. The race between AI fraud vs. detection is something they can just ignore and let happen on its own.

But they assured me my biometrics are deleted after uploading!

I would love to hear a testimony from someone who finds their Discord servers to be edifying or uplifting. What worked?

I use Signal but the UI is very different from Discord.

I've had very mixed experiences with Element + Matrix, Element keeps crashing on mobile, and while voice chat kinda exists in Element it's not been great imho.

I looked into hosting Rocket.chat, Zullip, and Mattermost but from what I recall voice + mobile were either missing or paywalled at a per-user price.

Any recommendations?

Until that changes, then the governments around the world are going to keep pushing to get access to all our messages in order to "protect the children" TM and ask you to prove that "you are not a child" TM

That presumably includes selfies?

That means that to exchange racy photos on Discord, each person must first record a facial age estimation video or upload identification documents.

That seems dystopian.

1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

You don't. That's why parents need to be involved in their children's lives.

CSAM is the easy excuse, anyway. That's the one lawmakers use, and most people are against CSAM, myself included, so the excuse goes down easy. But the impetus they don't talk about is monitoring and control.

The answer isn't to destroy privacy for everyone. The government and these corporations don't need to know what you're doing every second of the day.

This is a terrible analogy. Regulations related to driving only apply to drivers, if you're a pedestrian then you're not subject to basically any regulations that licensed drivers have to abide by. On the other hand, internet regulation like this punishes absolutely everyone to safeguard a small group, that being parents. It's like legally forcing pedestrians to wrap themselves in bubble wrap while outside so the careless drivers who couldn't behave don't dent their cars and get hurt when a pedestrian flies in their windshield, when they inevitably collide with one of them. Why is any of this their responsibility?

The fact that there is absolutely zero effort in pursuing any non-punitive options (like forcing ISPs to put networks of clients with kids in child-friendly mode, where the adult has to enter a password to temporarily view the unrestricted internet on their network, which should cover 90%+ of cases; or doing any of the proposed non-identifying proofs of age, like a generic "I'm an adult" card you can buy at the convenience store) should tell you that this has very little to do with actual concern for children. They went out of their way to enact the least private, most invasive, most disruptive option, which will not even work better than any privacy-friendly options, unless you expect literally every website on the internet to be compliant. Teens are smart, they'll be able to find any holes in that system, just like the generations before them.

> For that matter, I'm surprised that HN automatically always accepts the "slippery slope" fallacy while lambasting it everywhere else.

Slippery slope arguments are not automatically a fallacy. They can be if the causative relationship is weak or if the slope is massively exaggerated. But if neither of these things are true, "slippery slopes" is just looking at the trends and expecting them to continue. You can't look at a linear graph and say "well, I think there's no most likely option from now on, it could go any way really" without an argument for why the trend would suddenly deviate. The internet had been tightening up and the walls have been closing in for a long time, why would that change?

I don't know what people need as lesson. We already have so many FLOW options, and yet they are so many running after the last shiny ready for enshitification ready to go platform.

Expect them to sell your whole life to whatever party with enough money to throw at their face.

The alternative is having to give your ID to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and all the other bad actors...

This is transparently about spying on people, not "protecting children". The real world doesn't require you to show your ID to every business you frequent, or every advertiser you walk by. Someone can yell a swear word on the sidewalk, and not everyone within ear shot has to show ID.

Now those same people are complaining they're gonna have to submit their faces to discord. Which will eventually be used to prosecute or commit fraud. I'm left wondering if "tech enthusiasts" are ever actually correct.

They wil learn by brute force. As we had to do.

These companies do not do this under external pressure from the state, they do this because it benefits and consolidates their power as well.

It's bricks for their castle wall.

Corporations should not be considered a separate entity from the state. Corporations form state power. This doesn't mean they are always in-line with the state, but that they lead the state as a block, as a class, defending their common interests.

Policing is one of them.

Discord is also rolling out an age inference model that analyzes metadata like the types of games a user plays, their activity on Discord, and behavioral signals like signs of working hours or the amount of time they spend on Discord.

“If we have a high confidence that they are an adult, they will not have to go through the other age verification flows,”

Seriously though, unless you have positively identified the person who created the account in the first place, you have 0% chance of knowing whether it is the same person using it today.

Gamers sell their high-level accounts all the time. It would be a simple matter of economics that the Discord users with the oldest accounts sell them to 12-year-olds. Likewise, accounts are shared willy-nilly, whether or not that violates the rules. And accounts can be stolen or compromised, if you're really hard up.

If transfer of accounts is a policy violation, then Discord has legal cover to confidently assert that, once ID is verified, the ID'd person is the owner and controller of the account thereafter.

Account selling, stealing, and sharing will certainly still happen, but that's grounds for banning, and not Discord's legal liability anymore.

Of course this won't be 100% effective, maybe 80-90% effective. That's all they need and expect from this system.

>"Requiring a bank account credentials is common and yes, Plaid does it, despite what I said before, when the company buying Plaid services wants even more legal butt covering as is common in the wild."

You can choose to be respectful of people who have valid reasons for not providing ID

But you want that sweet IPO money (as stated elsewhere in this thread). You don't actually care about the internet and how anonymity is a cool thing for certain vulnerable groups

All these tech CEOs should face prison time and I'm not joking. They've displayed a complete laissez faire attitude to all of these concerns

Use Discord with a throw-away account. Create a character in GTA 5 on your laptop and show its face (in "selfie" mode) to the web-camera on another computer with Discord open. All face scan checks so far gladly accept it. Instagram has been requiring occasional face checks for ages already.

All of my use is primarily professional and gaming and has no age concerns

But yeah, leaving discord... they are not getting my ID/Photo

Are you saying they need parents to buy the game, but shouldn't to join chats about the same game?

Maybe they can force everyone's hand like they did for https

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

What's the issue?

If it was only friend groups it would kill them for sure, we've seen that many times, but given the absurd amount many large online communities on Discord, I'd wager they can force it down and be relatively unscathed.

They played the long game - they provided a good service for 10 years, and got REALLY big before they started the enshittification process.

> driven by an international legal push for age checks and stronger child safety measures

given your other bad faith comments in this thread, though, im sure you know that and are just trying to be contrarian for... fun? is it fun?

During the pandemic, I was on a Discord server for folks to socialize and blow off steam about the whole situation. Yes, there were some anti-vaxx wackos, but overall the place was civil and balanced, and I met some interesting people through it. We cracked jokes and it was a little bit of fun in a tough time.

One day I came to discover that Discord had banned the server for allegedly violating... something. I wish I had written down everyone's emails because I permanently lost contact with a bunch of friends in an instant.

I never signed in to Discord again, in spite of times where some other social group wanted to use it. I vowed never to use Discord again. Fuck those guys and the Teslas they rode in on. I hope this ID verification thing is another big step towards their irrelevancy.

They’ll be fine. To them, this is just another internet boycott, with all that entails. Reddit survived a worse one and grew afterward.

Rant: Several years ago, everything I'd ever written for over a decade on Reddit vanished one morning for no discernible reason, including all nested replies from other people. I appealed, my appeal was "granted", and nothing changed, except the appeals page refused to work because it said my account was already in good standing.

I dug up an ancient account I had used for resume feedback, asked around in the help subreddits, and it too was killed the same way.

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So tired of this shit.

This has nothing to do with republicans in particular. This is concerted effort by lobbying groups around the world who want to get more of your data.

Case and point: all the EU countries that are currently banning teens from using messaging services and social media apps which can only be enforced if you force everyone using these services to provide some form of ID to prove that you are allowed to use them.

Not too mention the EU itself trying force a backdoor into every messaging app "to protect the children".

Be mad at the US politicians if you want but just know that the situation is not better in the EU, on the contrary it's going downhill very fast and that has nothing to do with Trump.

If that was the case, they wouldn't need the age-verification for "adult" features, because there would be no "adult" features. Right?

Until someone offers up something better, I take these types of initiatives from social media platforms as huge wins. Ignoring the problem will not make it better. We've been ignoring it for about 20 years now, and it's only gotten worse.

Discord, on the other hand, should be at least somewhat responsible for the interactions of children (which they profit off of) on their platform.

And finally, you, a sentient adult with free will, can use another platform. Not your problem unless you want to make it yours, which is the response of choice on this thread.