Discord Alternatives

Teen-by-default settings to roll out globally for all Discord users, enhancing age-appropriate protections while maintaining privacy, community, and meaningful connection on the platform

Discord is announcing enhanced teen safety features rolling out globally that reinforce its long-standing commitment to creating a safer and more inclusive experience for users over the age of 13. As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience by default, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves the privacy and meaningful connections that define Discord.

Beginning with a phased global rollout to new and existing users in early March, users may be required to engage in an age-verification process to change certain settings or access sensitive content. This includes age-restricted channels, servers, or commands and select message requests.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    176
    ·
    4 hours ago

    I hope that discourages open source projects and similar communities from using discord as forum / user support.

      • P1nkman@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        43
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        4 hours ago

        Need support? Contract us on @SupportThatNeverReplies on Shitter (the nazi-everything app)!

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      31
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      4 hours ago

      I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn’t. We’ve discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn’t stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.

      I’d be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that’s a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I’m still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.

      I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.

      • FunkyCheese@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        8 minutes ago

        Putting valuable help, trouble solving and FAQ stuff into a discord is … annoying. You cant find it again. So it will only help the original poster

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      3 hours ago

      There are layers to this.

      Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.

      As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.

      As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago… Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help…

      Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap. And… you should really try to avoid being dependent on said EOL software. Not always possible but… yeah.

      And that isn’t going to change. So they’ll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable… like Matrix.

      This is bad.