Thank you for giving me more time to figure out alternatives

The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago.
The second best time is now.

Chat platforms that cannot be gated behind corporate policies might seem small today, but they will grow if we use them.

My suggestion to discord:

Require age input when making a user

Then if the child wants an account, a parent has to make one and create their profile and choose what they can and cannot do. Sort of like parental controls for video game consoles, smart phones etc

No age verification required. No ID etc

That way i can check a box that disallows my kid to join any server, or he has to request access which i have to confirm etc

Same can be done for friends requests and PMs etc

I just found out about Fluxer today. I might tinker around and see if it’s any good.

I got a simpler one...I stopped using discord 4 years ago and I was right! LOL.

Seriously, stop using it.

A lot of communities only exist on Discord. And no, you can't just find alternatives if they're locally based or similar.

So stop using it? Yes, its hard... 1)Spool up server not using discord. 2) tell people to join.

Move to matrix. It’s very stable, maturing up well, and has almost all of the discord features including streaming/video chat.

To play devil's advocate real quick, that system has no teeth in actually stopping kids from signing up to services. I remember lying about my birthday for Neopets to register an account - and later I couldn't remember what I said it was originally. So if we assume that services should be responsible for keeping kids out of adult spaces, then some form of verification is necessary.

In reality, I don't think I agree with that assumption. I lean toward things being free and open - including potentially letting kids access adult spaces. There are certainly dangers in that but I don't think that segregation and surveillance are the best way to address those dangers. If anything, segregating kids into "for kids" parts of the internet puts them at much more risk of abuse because the abusers can go there to find a target-rich environment with few adult onlookers to expose them.

Some of these groups have dozens or hundreds of people on them, no way I'll get even a fraction of them to. I don't have the time or desire to start a new community from scratch.

As much as I hate it, people join Discord because that's where all the communities are and they stay because all their other communities are there.

We can make alternatives. That's how the Discord communities got started.

Don't forget that Persona, the Peter Theil backed company, was found by whitehats to contain a us government backend for them to run facial recognition against government watchlists and scanned your chat history to determine your age and also reported any "suspicious activity" to the government.

The time to delete this privacy cancer is now.

Alright! Happy doxing!

Yeah, keyword here is "delay".

Nether of them are your friends. Fluxor seems a bit sketchy with their limited time cash grab of lifetime memberships, and GitHub history compression. Stoat is basically discord 8 years ago and is in the UK where age verification is law. It has time to change and their privacy policy doesn't look great (they also collect information from you).

Fluxor could be fine, I am just skeptical of it at the moment.

Stoat is better than discord, but not by much.

It definitely seems like the best competitor popping up. Familiar UI, nearly all essential features already functional, open source and self-hostable. I will say it feels like it came out of nowhere and having paid options out the gate feels a bit sketchy so I'm not completely placing any bets on it, but after trying it out for a bit I've been liking it far more than any other alternative.

Matrix is more mature and established but very clunky, confusing for casual users, and most clients are terrible. Stoat feels extremely dated and buggy, and it feels exactly the same as when I first tried it a year ago before the name change. Alternatives are few and far between and nothing really excels just yet, but Fluxer feels the most promising.

While not perfect, whenever people talk about Discord alternatives I have noticed no one mentions Steam Chat. It pretty much has the same features and drawbacks as many of the other suggested alternatives with the added benefit being most people already have accounts.

Edit: One of the biggest problems I have found with finding alternatives (besides finding an alternative that has screensharing and VC for mobile users) is finding one my friends are receptive of. Matrix, Stoat, whatever else my friends are not interested and seem they would rather just try and trick the Discord verification shit. But Steam Chat they actually considered and seemed fairly interested once they found out what features it had. The fact most of them already had Steam accounts was a major reason why they were willing to consider it.

Movim seems like a much better option, they just need a few weeks to get a couple of extra features out

Tell me more?

The only acceptable option: don't fucking bother.

I’m just gonna not do that regardless. I don’t use it enough to give in to that shit. They’re not the damn government and had a breach like months ago. Fuckin donkey brain shit.

The timing with Fluxer is very fortuitous, it's been in development for years but only just got public which is why it seems to have come out of nowhere. I am with you on the money bit, but it comes down to how it gets used. I haven't looked into how transparent the finances are. I understand the need to rustle up money fast in order to scale up development, as a proper Discord competitor needs to be more than a one-man effort. So I'm hoping that's what the money will go to.

I agree that Fluxer is by far the best alternative yet, so I want to be hopeful.

Do you have a recommendation for which project to host and/or clients to use? There are so many.

Get element desktop or element x, and start by just having an account on matrix.org. If you are reasonably nerdy and have hardware or a VPS, then start a synapse server.

Tuwunel or Contiuwuity for the server and Commet for the client(though presently you'll need to provide another client to register)

https://slrpnk.net/post/34490207

haven't gotten around to trying it myself. But the fact that it's built on XMPP is cool, and I hate that that all these new clients seem to develop their own new standards rather than build off what already exists.

Sounds like movim as a project has been around for a while, but recently moved to be more discord like in intention, so it's picked up interest there.

More options to refuse, nice

https://movim.eu/

It's based on XMPP, which means it's open-source, federated, and has E2EE in private chats. It also supports video calls, including in groups (which most other Discord alternatives have problems with).

Also, there's no phone number or even email requirement to sign up. You can set a recovery email, but you can skip that step during setup. Just pick a server, username, and password

The main thing it's missing right now is "places" aka what Discord calls servers/guilds. But they're currently working to roll that feature out soon

Why do you think that’s a good suggestion for a newcomer?

Isn't fluxer partially LLM-coded according to the dev?

I host two homeserver, one on synapse and one on continuwuity, both pretty small (tens of users), but with users in lots of large rooms. The second one was significantly easier to set up, and uses a lot less resources.

Also, element and element X work, but aren't great. It depends on the user, of course, but I don't think you get people by giving them the 'dumbed down' version.

No, the red flag is being 'self-hostable', but trying to concentrate all your users in a central, non-federated, monetised instance.

Also, we cannot verify how long they where in development because they squashed their git commits. There's usually no good reason to do that.

The servers I suggested are much lighter and simpler to setup than synapse. Commet is very Discord like which lets you on board people much easier than Element. It also supports voice rooms unlike Cinny(waiting for this to merge https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/pull/2680)

Most people won't care for the simple reason that most people don't use Discord for porn and will never need to access a NSFW server. They will never need to verify.

I'm in the UK where the Discord age verification is already live for several months. I was never even prompted to verify.