So, Discord is the latest platform to fall victim to mandatory ID age verification. People are, unsurprisingly, not very happy about the situation, and I can hardly blame them. It’s been less than six months since a massive leak saw more than 70,000 government-issued ID photos exposed, along with a claimed 5.5 million user records.
Reddit is awash with furious posts and commenters planning to cancel their subscriptions to Discord Nitro (the ‘premium’ version of the service) or stop using the app altogether. The new verification rules, which are set to be rolled out globally (meaning no VPN will save you from this clown show), follow an implementation in the UK back in July last year, which drew a more localized outcry, but clearly not enough pushback for Discord’s upper leadership to reconsider their position.
I can hardly blame folks for revolting over this. Demanding that users pony up their ID cards or upload facial scans to a third-party verifier to merely access the full functionality of your app is a completely unhinged proposal, especially in the current era of AI-powered facial recognition and mass surveillance, and especially given that Discord’s own security partner has managed to lose tens of thousands of IDs already.
A spurious motive?
Naturally, Discord claims it has a perfectly reasonable and well-thought-out rationale for these new regulations. It’s all to protect the kids, you see – no, please ignore the fact that this is a talking point frequently spouted by the absolute worst people doing deeply dodgy stuff that they want to distract you from by appealing to your inherently benevolent nature towards vulnerable children.
“Nowhere is our safety work more important than when it comes to teen users,” claimed Savannah Badalich, Discord’s Global Head of Product Policy. The goal is supposedly “giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility.”
Sorry, Savannah, but I’m gonna have to call bullsh*t on that. If Discord cared about protecting kids, it could’ve cracked down on this a long time ago. We’re talking about a decade-old platform heavily used by gamers, but also by numerous (mostly private) communities of artists and other creators operating in the… well, let’s call it the ‘adult media’ space. It’s always been fertile ground for mature content. Let’s not pretend that the ‘child protection’ angle isn’t merely a convenient excuse to recklessly harvest more user data and feed it onward to third-party companies.
Yes, Discord did get raked over the coals by the US Senate, along with Mark Zuckerberg and other social media heads back in 2024, so there’s a nice, convenient precedent for this current policy shift. Sure, it’s been more than two years since that Senate hearing took place and Discord did basically nothing in its immediate aftermath, but don’t pay attention to that! We’re protecting the kids from nasty stuff online over here! Yes, we’re totally fine screwing over our entire adult user base to do that, thanks for asking.
Exploring the alternatives
So Discord is dead (to me), long live… something else? I don’t want to abandon the platform, but if it’s following in the bleak footsteps of Twitter/X, then I’m going to give it the same treatment: delete my account, delete the app, and lodge a data deletion request. The tricky part is figuring out where to go next.
I’ve been a Discord user for more than 8 years. I’ve used virtually every part of the platform: private messaging, text chat rooms, voice and video calls. I even ran a server for a while (if you’re wondering, it was for Overwatch back when the game was actually good). If I’m going to jump ship, I need a viable alternative.
There are lots of options out there, though many don’t offer the full experience needed to replace Discord. Signal and Telegram currently offer encrypted instant messaging services, with the former supporting voice calls for up to 24 participants and the latter allowing group chats with up to 200,000 members (with the option to create and share ‘folders’ containing multiple chats). These apps were built as messaging platforms first, though, so they lack some of the broader functionality Discord offers.
For a more Discord-adjacent experience, Matrix and Revolt – the latter of which recently rebranded to ‘Stoat’ after being hit with a cease and desist over the original name – certainly provide a pretty solid experience.
I’ve dipped my toes into both of these offerings, and found that Revolt/Stoat was a bit more my speed. Matrix offers various disparate clients but feels a little too serious and clinical (literally, since it’s apparently the official chat app of the German healthcare system), while Stoat has some of the whimsical, rebellious flavor that originally helped make Discord so popular. Both platforms are free and open-source, giving users a good degree of control over their servers and chats.
Hell, we could even go back to internet relay chats (IRCs). For our more youthful readers, that was a decentralized, channel-based IM system popularized in the late 80s and 90s, but still used by tech communities to this day. Halloy is a popular current IRC platform, but I think that the fully decentralized and user-driven nature of IRC services will make it difficult for any one of them to rise above the noise and take on the more modern-style social apps.
An uncertain future
Sadly, I don’t think there’s a perfect alternative to Discord right now, partially just because there are so many existing communities already entrenched in its ecosystem, which will require a significant concerted effort to migrate to other platforms.
Personally, I think Stoat is currently the best alternative. It’s the closest to the vibe of Discord we have right now, and if the last few years have been any indication, vibes are actually pretty important when it comes to building and maintaining a user base. I also feel that Stoat’s mission statement resonates right now, championing the end-user experience and keeping everything as accessible and open-source as possible. In the words of its founder, “My vision is chat software that doesn’t suck.”
As for Discord… time will tell, I suppose. The current furor over the new verification rules will eventually die down, but there’s no knowing right now how bad the longer-term impact will be in terms of lost users. Talking to the BBC, the CEO of social media consultancy firm Battenhall described the shift as “fraught with issues,” though he added that it could “attract more new users who will be drawn to its new standards for online safety.” But I’ll be frank: that seems pretty damn unlikely to me right now.
And let’s be honest here: the whole ‘scan your face so AI can decide if you’re a big boy grown-up’ thing is ridiculous. Go to the average high school, and you’ll find a whole swathe of youths who could probably pass for 18. The photo mode in Death Stranding 2 could fool it, for crying out loud.
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