Discord Begins Testing Facial Scans for Age Verification

That reminds me to start testing alternatives to Discord.
- There is not a single drop in alternative currently unfortunately. I hope Revolt picks up some steam and figures out screen sharing, but more importantly, federation between self hosted instances, which is not even on their roadmap currently.
  I hope to convince my group to use something like mumble + steam groups or something like that eventually especially now that Discord has ads, but for general use (such as public community servers) I think we are all doomed for many years to come.
- I'm enjoying Element/matrix but we just use it for our household group chats.
  I tried all of the matrix clients I could find and agree that Element is the best one so far in terms of functionality on par with Discord, plus it is one of the few that has fully functioning desktop, mobile, and web apps.
  My only gripe is that they don't allow enough user customization yet. I want to change my user color and I don't know why the colors it chooses for you bother me so much. It's a very petty complaint.
  That and the gif support is kinda meh. I assume it will get better over time.
- I can only think of Element/Matrix because Revolt doesn't have screen-sharing, which is a huge factor in my group's get-togethers.

Not just "no" but, fuck no.

Lol, I tried using Discord garbage 2 or 3 times, just can't see why people like it. It was an awful experience every time. Convoluted, unintuitive UI, terrible software from a performance and stability standpoint. Seemed like software designed by committee with no clear objectives, and then coded by one schizophrenic dev who was just learning programming.
It's staggering to me it's as successful as it is.
- Really? You don't see how a gamer centric software that put text and voice chat in a single solution, with the ability to join multiple servers and hot swtich between them on the fly, that let's you start private chats in a single click and keeps your entire history for all the channels and all the private chats that you have ever been part of, that has built in streaming and screen sharing capabilities without any additional configuration, became successful?
  Nobody needs "performance" (whatever that means in this context) from Discord unless you need hundreds of people in a single voice channel. Its also stable AF.
  Don't get me wrong, Discord is on a fast track to enshittification, but when it first came out, it made so many things so simple and accessible. There is still not a single solution that even comes close what you can do with Discord to this day.
  
  I’m sorry but I have to agree with above: it’s trash
  
  Yeah and thanks to it being popular more people are using it, even in remote classes when Covid was. And some idiots think that alternatives (that are actually better) are worse and think that matrix or revolt would become garbage like discord
- It's a terrible platform that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by being the only easy to use VoIP client right as Skype was dying.
  The nice thing is, the lack of defining features and it's general awful qualities will make it easy to supplant when another true competitor emerges.
- I honestly don't think many power users like discord, specially not what it has become. They are stuck in that ecosystem and the alternatives aren't established enough to get average people to try it out/swap over.
- I never got the fact that Discord uses the "server" name for what is effectively a hub.
  I use Discord every week, when me and my friend are gaming.
  Before that we used Steam's built in system, and before that I hosted my own Mumble server.
  Discord is decent, it makes it super easy to stream to stream you monitor to others in your hub, that is a brilliant feature.
  Steam is fine for one on one chat, a bit more complicated than needed with group chats last time I used it.
  Mumble has excellent voice quallity.
  
  I never got the fact that Discord uses the "server" name for what is effectively a hub.
  They use the term "server" because it harps back to the days of IRC where communities lived on a single server (or federation of servers). But your right, they should call it communities, and not servers since they're not individually operated servers.
  
  Internally / in their documentation, they actually refer to servers as "guilds".

Every piece of news I see about discord lately makes me believe it's headed for a mass exodus, that I'll likely join, but I hate how much information and files are stored exclusively on discord.

They are testing this in the Australia and UK in response to laws based by those respective governments. Discord isn’t the one to blame.
- And apparently only if you encounter flagged material or have the "enable sensitive content" option active.
  
  Yeah but who decides what sensitive content is? Is this going to make the entire platform look like shitty tik tok videos where everyone says "fck" and "unalive" like some insane dystopian world

What makes YT educational but not other platforms? Sounds open to abuse.
- Google just changed their policies and started working on weapons and defense systems for the government, immediately buying an Israeli intelligence company and doing a bunch of heinous shit.
  I could see these things being related.
- What makes YT educational but not other platforms?
  the amount of money the lawmakers get

My group of friends on Discord is keeping an eye on alternatives since we all pretty much hate Discord, and can see that it's going to get much worse. I'm sure as hell not letting Discord scan my face, that's for sure.
- Matrix/Element is a nice alternative, got some rough edges in the voice-chat that could be worked out but other than that works as intended.

I use Discord to talk to my parents, since I live on the opposite side of the globe from them, but the second it asks me to scan my face will be the last second I ever use it...
- I believe Matrix has video chat
  
  Does it? Great, thanks! I'll have to install it remotely on their machine next time we talk and see if it's easy enough for them to get a hang of.

You know what? We are beyond fucked. Even if I went with services that are respect all my privacy, I have probably already left (consciously or not) enough info on the internet, for data scrapers/AI tools/whatever to probably know me better than myself, and that's probably true for any person that have ever used internet.
Expect a lot of blackmailing in the near future, especially politicians and people in serious positions. Who knows, maybe it's already happening.
- I have probably already left (consciously or not) enough info on the internet, for data scrapers/AI tools/whatever to probably know me better than myself, and that's probably true for any person that have ever used internet.
  Knowing you? Possibly. The second half of your claim is unsubstantiated.
  Websites might know specific aspects of how you use the internet, for example, what times you use that site. This is just information you yourself haven't cared enough to log and examine. It isn't extraordinary.
  To extrapolate that to "Better than I know myself" is paranoia.

They can scan my DICK!