Discord has announced that it's rolling out age verification checks globally from March – and the decision has sparked fury from many privacy-conscious users.
Communities I follow refuse to, and no other service is close to parity. Guilded was the closest until they allowed themselves to golden parachute with their Roblox purchase, so they’re now not longer worth considering
Teamspeak and teamspeak6 is a joke, anyone who prefers it is off their rocker
I’ve been following Revolt/Stout, River on FreeNet since I found it on FUTO, and others but frankly all alternatives I’ve found suck for varius reasons
I tried to move my friend group away from discord to stoat or matrix. But a pig part of why it stands out is that people are used to it and don’t think privacy is a big enough reason to switch
You need to be able to find say a public battlefield, minecraft, dayz, CivilizationVi, whatever community and subcommunities easily, so for minecraft you need to be able to find speedrunner, hardcore, smp, and so on groups
Active People to talk to
Chicken and egg problems. Gotta have signifcant quantities of people to attract more active people
Intuitive and easy joining, clean links.
Have to be able to say “oh we can hop on here and chat/discuss” to onboard new people from YouTube, Twitch, Owncast, whatever
The shared link cant be a string of letters and numbers because uninitiated correlate that with bad actors
This was something Guilded was starting to get right before they were bought out and shut down and it was massive for getting people to join
That’s an absolute failure of all of those products to not provide that environment on their own.
This used to be commonplace
Discord at its best was simply a hangout where you and your friends can talk to each other without needing to be playing the same game.
It became entirely too complicated and bigger than it needed to be. It’s a. Overblown IRC voice chat. And before nitro, it was exactly all it needed to be.
Now it shot itself in the foot like so many others by trying to be something that isn’t what made it great
You are most likely correct that it’s too early to say. I don’t have a problem conceding that point to you.
I think Reddit did shoot itself in the foot though, regardless of if they are still around. I don’t know that they will ever be able to regain what it has lost.
As a Reddit refugee myself I can say that for me they absolutely fucked over the chance to have me return to their platform, and many if not most of other refugees I’m guessing would share a similar opinion
Teamspeak 6 with the teamspeak 6 beta server is a great solution for my small community. I’m hosting a dedicated server on my mini PC that is used just for servers.
Has voice chat, text chat, screen share (whether it is streaming video games, your desktop, or webcam). The streaming is peer 2 peer, meaning there’s no restriction on streaming quality except what your Internet can handle. Audio quality is amazing.
Since you appear to have some experience and technical capacity I have some questions for you
Selfhost is wonderful, but how secure is it when exposed for public access?
Is it a PITA to get into like say Immich if you want to share it to friends and family, where you have to play shenanigans with say OpenVPN having them connect to your home via VPN or Tailscale to share it?
Teamspeak allows for your server to have a nickname, effectively a DNS by TeamSpeak. Open ports on the router and firewall and you’re good to go, no need to share IP addresses.
Honestly I just tried stoat and setting up a server (it’s not hosted by me so maybe just a space) to try to get my friends to migrate to. We have ~20 some odd people and have lots of chats categorized by outdoor/indoor with channels for diy/gaming/cooking/ordering out and so far, stoat has a few limitations I miss from discord (editing category or custom emoji names, for example) and I have yet to try out the voice chat aspect of it but it looks like this is going to be the clear winner for my use case. I’m hoping they get a mobile app working for some of the more casual just want to chat and share interesting pictures of our day without sitting at the pc members but besides that I’m loving it. Maybe at some point I’ll try to look into seeing if I can self host, but for now it’s nice to know there’s something that feels just like discord from an organization of topics perspective that hasn’t gone down their path (yet?)
Ive been trying to migrate off since 2020
Communities I follow refuse to, and no other service is close to parity. Guilded was the closest until they allowed themselves to golden parachute with their Roblox purchase, so they’re now not longer worth considering
Teamspeak and teamspeak6 is a joke, anyone who prefers it is off their rocker
I’ve been following Revolt/Stout, River on FreeNet since I found it on FUTO, and others but frankly all alternatives I’ve found suck for varius reasons
What are the others missing? In other words, what are the main features of discord that make it stand out so far above the rest?
I tried to move my friend group away from discord to stoat or matrix. But a pig part of why it stands out is that people are used to it and don’t think privacy is a big enough reason to switch
Discoverability and moderated official servers
You need to be able to find say a public battlefield, minecraft, dayz, CivilizationVi, whatever community and subcommunities easily, so for minecraft you need to be able to find speedrunner, hardcore, smp, and so on groups
Active People to talk to
Chicken and egg problems. Gotta have signifcant quantities of people to attract more active people
Intuitive and easy joining, clean links.
Have to be able to say “oh we can hop on here and chat/discuss” to onboard new people from YouTube, Twitch, Owncast, whatever
The shared link cant be a string of letters and numbers because uninitiated correlate that with bad actors
This was something Guilded was starting to get right before they were bought out and shut down and it was massive for getting people to join
That’s an absolute failure of all of those products to not provide that environment on their own.
This used to be commonplace
Discord at its best was simply a hangout where you and your friends can talk to each other without needing to be playing the same game.
It became entirely too complicated and bigger than it needed to be. It’s a. Overblown IRC voice chat. And before nitro, it was exactly all it needed to be.
Now it shot itself in the foot like so many others by trying to be something that isn’t what made it great
I think its yet to be seen if they shot themselves in the foot or not
Remember Reddit?
Yeah they were dirt bags and still exist just fine aren’t they
I’d wager its more likely that the same scenario repeats than this being a catastrophic event for discord personally
Unfortunately
You are most likely correct that it’s too early to say. I don’t have a problem conceding that point to you.
I think Reddit did shoot itself in the foot though, regardless of if they are still around. I don’t know that they will ever be able to regain what it has lost.
As a Reddit refugee myself I can say that for me they absolutely fucked over the chance to have me return to their platform, and many if not most of other refugees I’m guessing would share a similar opinion
Teamspeak 6 with the teamspeak 6 beta server is a great solution for my small community. I’m hosting a dedicated server on my mini PC that is used just for servers.
Has voice chat, text chat, screen share (whether it is streaming video games, your desktop, or webcam). The streaming is peer 2 peer, meaning there’s no restriction on streaming quality except what your Internet can handle. Audio quality is amazing.
Beta
No app version
Since you appear to have some experience and technical capacity I have some questions for you
Selfhost is wonderful, but how secure is it when exposed for public access?
Is it a PITA to get into like say Immich if you want to share it to friends and family, where you have to play shenanigans with say OpenVPN having them connect to your home via VPN or Tailscale to share it?
Teamspeak allows for your server to have a nickname, effectively a DNS by TeamSpeak. Open ports on the router and firewall and you’re good to go, no need to share IP addresses.
Honestly I just tried stoat and setting up a server (it’s not hosted by me so maybe just a space) to try to get my friends to migrate to. We have ~20 some odd people and have lots of chats categorized by outdoor/indoor with channels for diy/gaming/cooking/ordering out and so far, stoat has a few limitations I miss from discord (editing category or custom emoji names, for example) and I have yet to try out the voice chat aspect of it but it looks like this is going to be the clear winner for my use case. I’m hoping they get a mobile app working for some of the more casual just want to chat and share interesting pictures of our day without sitting at the pc members but besides that I’m loving it. Maybe at some point I’ll try to look into seeing if I can self host, but for now it’s nice to know there’s something that feels just like discord from an organization of topics perspective that hasn’t gone down their path (yet?)