So this, but Discord.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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This is SO GOOD
This is fantastic news! Not because I actually give a shit about sticking with Discord after getting slapped in the face with this insulting age verification nonsense, but because Discord has basically no competition and 6 months will be plenty of time for a real contender to emerge in time for them to shoot themselves in the foot again.
I don't think Discord actually appreciates how much market share is going to slip away from them in the next 6 months. They were probably better off going through with their clandestine spying plan now while some people might be complacent enough to just comply and provide their ID to get handed over to the fucking Feds.
Delay all you want bitch i'm already gone.
They're delaying it by six months. They're banking on this blowing over by then. Fuck discord.
Same thing happened in 2021-ish when WhatsApp changed their policy that all your information would be shared with Facebook. Outrage pushed it back six months, and then they did it anyway.
Let's hope this gives competitors more time to get things setup well.
Was about to say this, how nice of discord to give people time to migrate to another service
this is the second time they have "delayed" the age verification
I cancelled my nitro when it was announced they were doing this shady crap and it's staying cancelled until there is credible assurances they won't be handing over personal data to the like so palantir and other related goons.
Short of regular 3rd party audits, there's nothing they can do that would assure they're handling your data with privacy and care. And even that's a stretch.
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I hope they never recover. No ill will to the working level who would be impacted, but it needs to be clear to companies that this shit is TOXIC to your brand to even consider in 2026.
As much I agree with the idea of abandoning Discord - honestly, fuck 'em - I just don't know how I or many other people could practically make the full switch... While I might be able to convince a few of my close friends to go with me to whatever new platform comes about, there's just no way any larger communities would be able to uproot and leave without losing 90%+ of their members, and that's only if the owners of those communities are even willing to leave in the first place. Inertia is a powerful thing, and the reality of the situation is that the vast majority of Discord users will not be convinced to leave over this.
I want to defend my privacy, and I want to tell these corporate ghouls to shove it, but at the same time, I don't want to become a digital hermit. Having to decide between protecting my privacy and cutting myself off from so many valued social connections and communities feels like an impossible choice.
I know I'm not saying anything particularly new or actionable here, I'm just... tired. I'm tired of having to flee from platform after platform into increasingly smaller and more insular corners of the internet to escape the endless cycle of enshittification. I'm tired of what the internet has become, where the only places left where you can exist without being manipulated and exploited by corporate interests are a handful of small, decentralized platforms that are becoming increasingly cut off from the internet at large. I'm just tired of this shit, man.
On this note, I lost contact with a huge number of friends when I deleted my facebook ~15 years ago. Similar for livejournal. I handed out my email address and phone number before I walked away, but people have not used those to contact me at all.
I think people don't want to put any effort into socialisation. Getting a "feed" is so easy, it feels like you're connecting with people. You see the comments and likes. But everyone is lonely because they're not actively interacting, just passively consuming.
I feel like this article was written for you, based on your last paragraph (the author definitely relates).
Oh, cool, I definitely trust them again. 🙄
Too late biiiiiiiiiitch we already had our exodus.
Where'd we go though? Which place with the streaming and chatting?
I setup a Haven (Github) self-hosted instance and am slowly dragging friends over as the dev pumps out features. All the important stuff is already available, still more on the way. Also has things like E2E, which I don't care about for my community/server, but it is nice to have.
How the heck have I not heard of this one yet? It already looks promising - I see video, chat, channel organization...
It's one main dev, another doing android, and supporters (I myself have been firing off ideas, suggestions, and issue tickets, and trying to help other users). An electron desktop program is in the works too.
I've been using Matrix for about a decade. Federated, encrypted chats and rooms (optional), supports video, self hostable, fully open source.
I have too. It's... Really not ready for primetime, based on present-day experiences watching rooms lurch into view (and I don't even think it's possible to search for them on Android). Has video at least gotten better?
XMPP with their myriad of gnu-ified clients.
Which client is the multi-platform one with message history and streaming video?
Movim. Though due to how recent it was implemented, you must use a chromium based browser to stream the application's audio too.
Gajim is one. Dino is another (I think). You just need to make sure the client has Jingle compatability (xmpp plugin) for streaming video. A lot let you connect to multiple.xmpp servers
dino all dayyyyyy baybayyyyy
cheogram on Android
Matrix, can easily do the above.
"Too late" isn't even relevant anyway, they're still doing it, so everyone should still be leaving.
It's nice in that it gives the various Discord competitors a longer period to work on getting their software spiffed up.
I'd argue its completely relevant as they are trying to save face here. Anyone who has somehow made it to 2026 without a hostile relationship to corporations (most red and blue team in America) will probably take this as a sign to come back for now.
Agreed; Discord is trying to lull people into a false sense of security as a means of convincing them to stay, in the same manner that Reddit gave limited API access to apps like RedReader to stem the tide of users leaving for platforms like Lemmy.
Beyond age verification, if Discord is scanning a user's messaging history to determine what their age is, one can only imagine all the other data valuable to data brokers that they are extracting from it too.
I just signed up with Fluxer last night and chat with one of my old Discord friends. Fluxer is still very much in beta and under development, but seems to be a pretty promising open source clone of Discord.
Oh man, when they get native mobile apps, I'm looking to switch my Mattermost server to Fluxer. I've had good luck with Mattermost, but its not truly OSS and its been moving features over to paid enterprise accounts so the time is soon.
As much as I like a lot of the discord alternatives out there I fear they will all eventually face the same fate. Decentralised or someone wrapping the signal protocol into a discord like client is probably the only way to avoid this again.
Fluxer plans federation in the future, and its AGPL licensed.
However, it's still in beta, and the backend's ability to scale is currently unproven.
For something that's more proven, we have Movim, which is already federated with the open standard XMPP protocol.
So when all your friends want to screenshare on somewhere else, they install Movim and then sign up on...
And then when they jump into chats, will they be able to search the room history and post memes (images)?
Yep :D
It has full searchable room history, can upload memes (gifs from either links like giphy or directly uploaded), images, video files (playable within the chat), and audio messages.
There's also a built in paint-like thing that lets you draw directly into the chat, or annotate documents, pictures, or memes.
Well I mean Fluxer is open source and have self hosting options on their roadmap. 🤷♂️
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Still never using again
As if I'm supposed to take them at their word?
Not bloody likely.
We still have to leave discord. But another months to to discard Discord will help. Remember don't use anything that you can't self hose, corporations are completely untrustworthy
This gives us all more time to find a good alternative!!!
Has anybody tried fluxer yet?
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