I’m never doing this. I’ll pay someone else to verify my account before I upload my dox with these assholes.
I’m fine switching to an alternative, but I have seen no gaming companies linking anything else for their official “forums”
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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Minecraft.wiki links to Zulip....
Considering the recent "third-party" data breach cases...
More info for those unfamiliar:
Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government-ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age-related appeals.
Goodbye Discord.
Hello Matrix!
Matrix isn't that good from an usability standpoint as it looks a lot like IRC
Usability is good in my opinion. They’ve spent a lot of time on the UI over the past couple years. The mobile Element X apps are excellent now IMO. But the two things that prevent matrix/Element from being a good discord replacement are:
- No Mumble-like voice chat. They have Zoom-like conference calling now, but no voice channels.
- Search is either non-existent (mobile clients) or is awful. It’s somehow worse than Discord’s search! I know it’s because the search needs to work on-device because of E2EE, but unfortunately it’s still a minus point vs Discord.
Honestly, the best solution to 1 may be to simply deploy mumble in addition to matrix (or other chat apps).
Seconding this, just use mumble. It's self-hosted free and open source software, easy on resources, provides very low latency, and it's very stable and reliable.
The client might look a little dated but I still love it. I don't care for stupid electron apps, which every modern application seems to be.
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I hope for once people would get together and drop Discord so that Discord would have to reverse this policy. So often, we the customers really have the power if we get together and act together. All these social networks are nothing without the contributions of the customers.
without the contributions of the ~~customers~~
Without the contributions of the product.
As the adage goes, if you're not paying for it (and often even when you are), you're not the customer.
We should append this, ..." or it is open source"
I don't trust discord with what little I formation I've gave them so far. Definitely not giving them my ID or a scan of my face.
But they pinky promise the face scan is not facial recognition and that it's immediately deleted and never leaves your device.
Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government-ID photos exposed
Finally my chance to quit?
Idk
Yeah, you go ahead & do that, & watch how many people will jump ship to other alternatives while you lose a lot of money & subscriptions, especially when you’ve been hacked before.
People have found other alternatives to TikTok, & they’ll do the same with Discord.
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However, some users may not have to go through either form of age verification. 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.>
Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive.
Shrug
I'm not using discord for porn, so I'm not going to lose sleep. Will simply live with a "teen" account until my groups migrate to a better service.
But you'll get my biometrics from my cold dead hands.
They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.
GOOD
Crazy they didn't implement this years ago. Discord is bloated with fake user spam.
So I get a free spam filter for not verifying? Guess I'm never verifying then, lol.
My initial thought too. Good. At least until they catch on and make some excuse for needing "teens" IDs too.
That last part should just be a feature of any account.
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Revolt! your time has come (though it has been renamed to Stoat; a name I very much dislike.
Limited Linux support (no repo or flatpak pkgs, not even aur) and tbh im not so sure how long they will continue to exist
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Does there exist an alternative that has both a desktop (WIN/Linux) client and a phone (android/iphone) client?
Matrix
I'm not against age restrictions, but letting every site brew their own method is a really bad idea. I'm not going to upload my legal ID to every random site; that's a recipe for identity theft, and it's a really bad idea to teach people that that's normal or acceptable.
And age guessing through facial recognition is incredibly unreliable. My 16 year old son has already been accepted as 18+ somewhere. I had a full moustache at 14. Others are blessed with a babyface well into their 30s.
The only right way to do this, is if governments provide their citizens with an eID that any site can ask "is this person 18+?" and get an accurate answer without any other identifiable info. And if you don't want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.
But instead everybody's got to cobble together their own improvised system that we just have to trust blindly is not going to sell our data.
and it’s a really bad idea to teach people that that’s normal or acceptable.
This is a point so few people mention. Normalising having to give up personal information online is such a dangerous thing to do and companies/governments that enforce this shit are setting people up to be scammed
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Uhhhh no thanks. Bye.
Deleted 👍🏻
We need something like what Lemmy is to Reddir, except for discord. A decentralized application with multiple instances that users can join.
I have a discord server of about ~1K members, and would love to spin up a docker container to host my own instance that users can join. Chat, voice/ video calls, video streaming, etc. I'd love to support a FOSS project like this. Maybe even have E2E while we're at it!
Closest I can think of is Matrix. Element isn't bad.
Matrix is the way, and element is the best so far, but it needs more work.
Stoat (formerly called Revolt) is potentially that. I tried it a while back and it was still rough around the edges, but the potential was there. Open source and has potential for self hosting.
Stoat.chat
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matrix and zulip are interesting alternatives
RIP Discord
New to the whole privacy space, what should I start moving my social group to that's like discord but not doing this?
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On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
Still a no for me for now, but a bit misleading: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally
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