Discord Issues

[ysabetwordsmith]

Discord is planning a radical violation of privacy for all users.  It will require facial recognition or ID in order to escape designation as teen with account restrictions.  This is ineffective and risky.  Many people are upset by the violation of privacy because so many platforms have been hacked to extract that valuable information.

Some Discord users are already abandoning the platform and moving to Dreamwidth or others.  Please pass the word around Dreamwidth to your friends on Discord to see if this platform appeals to them.  This post has many resources for newcomers about how to use Dreamwidth..

Comments

[jonw]

The whole push to age limit stuff is a privacy nightmare, but it is here and rolling out to more and more countries. Organizations like Discord have no choice. Either start collecting age data or get fined/charged out of business. DW won't magically escape that unless the US manages to get rid of their insane government of the day.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> The whole push to age limit stuff is a privacy nightmare, <<

Yes, that's true.

>> Organizations like Discord have no choice. Either start collecting age data or get fined/charged out of business. <<

They certainly have a choice at this stage. There's no law yet requiring them to do that. Some other companies are resisting.

>> DW won't magically escape that unless the US manages to get rid of their insane government of the day.<<

It's not magic, it's ethics.

Re: Thoughts

[soc_puppet]

>>There's no law yet requiring them to do that.

Not necessarily, unfortunately; denise just posted a BlueSky thread about the issue over here.

Discord has done an incredibly bad job at transparency with this, which is making everything a whoooole lot worse, but according to Denise, Discord is also member of NetChoice and "they've shown up for pretty much every lawsuit since they joined". Also, platforms are "having to scramble to implement age verification for the states and countries that pass these laws, often with little to no implementation period (SC just signed one with immediate effect!)"

It's still shitty as hell, and I'm not going to share my info with them, but I'm allowing Discord a bit more grace because of this thread. Again, things would have been so much better if Discord went with Dreamwidth's style of transparency, but here we are.

[sewagelag00n]

I don't really get how Dreamwidth is supposed to replace Discord at all. They're totally different services with different purposes.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Not the same kind of service, but if what someone seeks is community and good privacy controls, it's well worth a look. When a platform enshittifies or closes, people look first for something similar in function, which they may or may not find; and then for platforms with whatever features the other one just cut out. So any time a platform butchers privacy, Dreamwidth is worth recommending for its privacy features.

[soc_puppet]

Dreamwidth is a very different animal from Discord, no question, but at the very least it can be a safe haven to copy-paste old Discord threads to so they don't get eaten. And some people might find they like it here and decide to use Dreamwidth for other reasons. If anyone is interested in even old Discord thread storage, they can probably find some useful stuff in the tutorials!

[sewagelag00n]

Ah, gotcha! I probably should start archiving my Discord threads. I started, but there's just SO MUCH in my backlog that I kinda gave up. Do you have any recommendations for services to download Discord messages? (I guess it's probably worth asking)

[soc_puppet]

Honestly, I don't have a lot I feel the need to save from Discord, so I've mostly been copy-pasting and editing as needed; there probably is a good service out there for that, but I haven't bothered to look yet 😅 Maybe someone will link one here, or in the latest dw_news post!