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Discord announced a revamped global age verification system (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [M, B] to c/gaming@lemmy.zip
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[–] 28 points 1 month ago (18 children)

I wish we could use something other then discord, like societally

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    At some point maybe Fluxer will be ready.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    I'm hoping xep-0503 gets implemented in a couple xmpp clients at some point soon. That'll make xmpp have feature parity with discord, except for ease of use, which is a barrier I'm willing to help friends/family work through in order to never have to switch chat clients ever again, since xmpp has been around for nearly thirty years now.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    My group's been using it since March.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    Can you tell me more about your experience with it?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (3 children)

    Sure, any specific questions? We use it for text chat and group video calls.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    I guess like

    How easy it is for non technical people to join and use?

    What pain points or annoyances have you noticed?

    Has it been reliable/what problems have come up using it?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    It's no more difficult than Discord, as it is pretty unashamedly a Discord clone. Its UI and UX is very similar. I find it more user friendly for a complete newbie than a Matrix community.

    We use video calling 2-3 times a week for TTRPGs and sometimes other group hands. It's gotten a lot more stable and better over the 6ish months we've been using it. There are still some weird tech issues on occasion, normally fixed by dropping out of the call and coming back in. I'd say this happens enough that it is noteworthy but not enough that it has made me rethink using the service. I think we had to cancel a session once, very early on, due to the service just being completely down, but not since then. Their mobile support was extremely lacking at first but past month or so they have come a long way and now mobile works great, even though it's still in beta.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Thanks! That's just the kind of fair review I was looking for. The timeline helps too, that kind of active development is a good sign for the project

    It sounds promising, I've got a project in mind that might be a good fit for it

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    My group and I floated around different services for a while, self-hosting what we could. The requirements for us were really just a server with text channels and persistent messages, voice chat, and screen sharing.

    We tried:

    • Stoat (Revolt at the time) but we moved on before voice and video were rolled out.
    • Matrix but voice and video weren't really feasible.
    • Steam chat but messages are deleted after 2 weeks and screen share didn't really work.
    • Teamspeak 6 was amazing for voice and video but chat was really only useful while online as messages aren't really stored anywhere to load what was sent while you were offline, so we kept Steam chat for general conversations.

    We finally landed on GameVox recently which has good voice and video, easy discord server import for channels and permissions, good chat features, and an extremely responsive dev who fixes issues almost immediately. I find that it isn't as pretty as other alternatives out there and unfortunately it isn't open-source, but the additional features compared to the other options will probably make it our new home for quite a while.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    My personal best solution is to use both matrix and teamspeak... but its hard to get others on board. If im ever rewuired to give discord proof of who i am, then thats the final straw and friends can come over or rip i guess

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    Mumble

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  • [–] 13 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    This isn't targeted at you, zen_shinobi, specifically, but you are the latest example of one of my pet peeves, so I'm replying here.

    Mumble doesn't have text channels.

    Everytime time I see a discord alternative proposed it always has at least one major feature missing. Discord isn't just popular because it has almost always works out of the box, but because it has every single feature a communication platform could want. This makes it incredibly easy to use in practically every context.

    Iphones revolutionized the phone space because they combined PDAs and cell phones in a very easy to use package, not because they did something completely new.

    Discord combined video, audio, AND text into an incredibly easy to use package, and became the biggest chat platform in the world because of it.

    Nothing is an entirely valid discord alternative until it has feature parity, including ease of use and compatibility, and I haven't found a single alternative that does that yet. (And isn't vibecoded slop, venture funded, incredibly early alpha, difficult or impossible to set up or even connect to, or some combination of the previous).

    Gamevox is a new option I'm seeing, but it's also for profit, and I'm sick and tired of switching software just to see it get sold to a vc company and enshittified right underneath me.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I am not surprised Fediverse denizens tend to want to recommend IRC and Mumble and xmpp and whatever, but the truth is as you describe it. There is no one size fits all replacement yet that is viable.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    Fluxer almost has feature parity, but yeah it's also still in beta and doesn't have mobile apps yet. That said, the desktop & web app work and are reliable. When it gets ready, I think it's the Discord alternative.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    You're fine.

    I know Mumble does have text but it's not archived like Discord. I can't remember off the top of my head if Channels have seperate chat from the main server. Pretty much Mumble is just like Venttrillo or Teamspeak is.

    I will say, Mumble is very light on old hardware and uses a fraction of data on mobile compared to Discord. It's also open source. It's also nice to be able to self host (even through Tor if encryption is your thing).

    Yes, Discord is great because of voice, image, text, streamimg, and audio. It sucks it's closed source.

    I think the closes clone I have seen is Revolt (i believe it's called that) but it's really janky. It just sucks for us that it's Discord or nothing :/

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    • [–] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (5 children)

    I wonder what they could be doing to determine "server types" that isn't privacy invasive like reading messages

    Edit: it seems discord has published a document that somewhat explains how this works. It's not as detailed as I'd like, but I think it's as detailed as one could expect without them spilling some trade secrets or implying how to bypass it.

    https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-estimates-age-without-collecting-your-identity

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (4 children)
    • You can check your age group status at User Settings > Account Status. We've estimated your age group automatically from account signals like how long your account has existed or the kinds of servers you're a part of. We don’t look at your messages, calls, or other content. We're launching this over the course of this week, so it may take a few days to reach your account.
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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Yeah I noticed this, but the "kinds of servers you're a part of" line is what caught my eye.

    I wonder how they categorize servers and what they use to determine this.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Ah, apologies. I absolutely misunderstood your comment. I definitely need to wake up more before I comment but at least the info is now here for people to see at a glance.

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    • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    And immediately started showing ads for gambling!

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    [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    The "we estimated your age from account signals" bit is the polite version. Australia made the big platforms do this in December, and the regulator's first report found some of them letting under-16s retry the age check until they passed. So the kids get infinite continues and the adults get checked too.

    France tried to ban social media for under-15s this summer and its Constitutional Council struck it down for exactly that reason: to check the kids you have to check everyone, and the law had no privacy guarantees for the adults. Discord just skipped the court part.

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