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For those looking for alternatives, Stoat and Matrix are really good choices. For Stoat, it has a really good discord feel, but ATM they’re going under a rebrand(for legal reasons that aren’t entirely clear as of now), and this has caused them to take down their iOS app. Though, it should be back up relatively soon. In the mean time, their website does adapt to mobile screens, so it’s a good alternative until they release their new iOS app. It has voice and video calls, screen sharing(on desktop), and pretty generous upload sizes(forget the specific number, but you’re actually able to send clips now, unlike Discord).
Funnily enough, when Discord revealed this awful situation, lots of people flocked to Stoat and not only crippled their servers to the point they had to disabled things like typing indicators, their email provider marked them as spam because they were sending out so many account verification emails. Everything should be relatively fine now, and should be solved by the time Discord actually rolls out age verification, as they’ll have fully scaled up by then if I had to guess.
For Matrix, it is the far more privacy focused of the two. Some people(me included) might even call it a bit too privacy focused. This is because if you lose your encryption key(which, tbf, is hard to do), you lose access to all messages that were sent with that key. But either way, modern apps like Element and FluffyChat support voice calls through VoIP, pretty big file uploads, and read receipts. You’ll likely miss a couple things Discord does like screen sharing, but that should eventually™. It’s also completely decentralised, meaning it can’t implement age verification, even if it wanted to, since someone would just create a new server for people to use, or you could just create your own for your friends to use.
Don’t let Discord take your info. What they’re doing isn’t OK, and is meant to collect personal data, not to protect children. Yes, it’ll be irritating to move to another app, let alone convince your more carefree friends to move over, but this is a huge breach of privacy, and from Discord of all people. They say they won’t save your ID or other government info, but just 4 months ago, they had a data breach of over 70,000 IDs that they had supposedly deleted. That very obviously does not scream trustworthy, at least to me.
For stoat, aren’t they also in the UK and therefore likely to need age verification soon or do they have some means around that?
Not entirely sure. But Stoat, like Matrix, is decentralised. Although they’re decentralised in the same way as Bsky is, where you can run your own instance, but things won’t carry over and discoverability without noteriaty isn’t exactly possible. But I think it works in their favour making it so that they can’t exactly be pinned down and forced to add age verification. Not quite sure so take it with a grain of salt, but I’m semi-confident that they’ll be fine.
I see. I will just keep my eyes open and see what info comes forward as it does. I am mostly trying to be as informed as possible cause there’s a lot of info flying around. Thank you!
Something to make the transition a little less annoying.
That is a possibility, but it doesn’t work for groups or DMs, disables E2EE, and not only will your friends be talking to you through a bot, there’s a chance you could get rate limited, especially if you send lots of images and videos. Small chance, but a chance
Less annoying, not completely painless.
That’s a mood.
What is “wumpus” supposed to be here? I recall an old, old computer game called “Hunt the Wumpus” …
Wumpus is Discord’s mascot and is essentially a pig. Which fits them as a company very well. Their fanboys would say Wumpus isn’t a pig, but uh yeah…
Wumpus is a pig, an anthro cartoony pig with stubby ears, but a pig no less.
It’s their mascot
