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Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

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Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#761

Post by EGreg »

tabbott wrote: post #430

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

I've been building a decentralized, open source platform at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform before it was cool.

I don't think it's cool even now.

I mostly got hate on HN every time I posted about it LOL. I think something about "decentralized" gets some people really riled up (maybe it's the association with crypto / blockchain?) but frankly, it's the ONLY solution to extreme centralization.

Someone's got to build a platform with all the features of Discord, but make it decentralized and open source.

I've spent over $1M and 10 years on it. I have to package it so that it's easy to install. But I'm working on something to take care of that, in the next few months, that will also include actually safe AI agents inside.

It will look sort of like this: https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf

I'm happy to welcome anyone aboard who takes the time to learn the platform, but I won't lie, it's huge. As you would expect an open source decentralized clone of Facebook / Discord to be. I just hope it's architected well enough for developers to pick it up quickly. At the very least, I think it's a lot less spaghetti than Wordpress and Joomla :)

PS: In 2018 I launched something that HN hates even more... a Web3 company that released open source smart contracts at https://github.com/Intercoin . Why you ask? Because once a lot of value is at stake (whether it takes the form of money, votes, or even just community roles), it's better to have thousands of computers secure it than "just trust" the central site.

When founders of famous centralized messengers criticized decentralization, I had to write this:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

And history has proven me right... their only move is "withdrawing" from a country like Sweden. Well I guess the DSA would make them withdraw from all of Europe: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ixrv14/signals_ce...

Don't forget, it's not just Discord. As of Jan 1, Texas is now requiring digital ID to download any app at all or visit many internet sites, and forcing Apple/Google to build it in "to protect the children" of course. And Utah is following suit soon too. The Supreme Court last year said that digital ID can be required by states.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#762

Post by dheera »

tabbott wrote: post #430

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

Hi Tim! (We know each other :))

I'm curious whether you feel you're actually in control to actually make policy decisions about data protection or whether you feel you could be hit any day by the "$5 wrench" by the government any time they feel it necessary. I'm starting to feel that in this environment, nothing is safe, even if encrypted and on FOSS platforms.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#763

Post by tabbott »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #725
tabbott wrote: post #430

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

Hi Tim. For pricing, it would seem that large, public-facing, Discord-style organizations would have to go with the free plan to avoid the pricing being prohibitive. Think something like the new Limewire community on Discord which has 2 million members. Or am I missing something about what a 'user' is considered in terms of being billable or not? On a related note, I'm gonna check out Zulip for PortableApps.com. Any…

The advertised pricing is for workplace use where the users are on payroll; if you read the plans page carefully you'll see we have free or highly discounted pricing for other use cases, both in Cloud and self-hosted.

Zulip is not designed to support 2M user accounts in a single organization. But if you enable the public access option (https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option), such that no account is required just to read content, you can end up with 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer "total accounts" that just wanted to see something once and don't actually use the server.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#764

Post by carabiner »

tabbott wrote: post #430

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

Are we the bad guys?

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#765

Post by dmitrygr »

cedws wrote: post #615

I understand the frustration towards Discord, especially because this is a global rollout of a policy they're only required to enforce in specific countries, but it's IMO misdirected. They're likely trying to get ahead of the legislation. The way the winds are blowing indicates the Western governments that haven't already passed legislation mandating ID verification soon will. You can move to $ALT_PLATFORM but unless…

Who implements these idiotic policies? We do! Politicians could not code their way out of a paper bag! Giving up is not the solution. Refuse to do it. Make ID pass for a full-white jpeg.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#766

Post by nubinetwork »

mkaic wrote: post #428
anon_cow1111 wrote: post #239

It should go without saying but, *CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason) This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.

Just cancelled mine after reading this comment, I only really cared about the bigger file uploads and the HD screen-sharing anyways and I can live without those. Now that I think of it, I bet I could host a decent instance of some open-source alternative in a public cloud for around the same cost as what I paid for Nitro ($100 a year)...

WebRTC is ridiculously easy.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#767

Post by raincole »

French lawmakers vote to ban social media use by under-15s ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/france-social-...)

Online age verification in the United Kingdom ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...)

Blaming Discord and switching to another centralized service won't do shit as long as voters keep falling for 'protect the kids.'

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#768

Post by safety1st »

anon_cow1111 wrote: post #239

It should go without saying but, *CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason) This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.

I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I read the announcement and other than the risk of a slippery slope into more invasive ID demands, I'm not sure I have a huge problem with it.

The default experience will be the "teen" experience - they list what that entails - stuff that's flagged as adult/NSFW/etc. is blurred out until your age is verified, which for most(?) people will require ID or face scan. DMs/friend requests from people you don't know take some extra clicks to view. Fine.

It depends on how broad the definition of adult content ends up being I guess, but I'm simply not convinced that requiring ID to view "adult" content is the end of the world. If that means porn, I'm 100% OK with it, put porn behind gates. It has become far too easy to access. It's 2026 and we now have a generation of gooning addicts out there who never have actual sex and it's basically a guarantee that they won't find partners or start families any time soon, exacerbating an already problematic decline in the birth rate. This is not a version of society or anyone's "rights" that I care to defend. You want to goon, show ID. That's how it was before the Internet anyway.

On the other hand if it means any speech that the platform deems to be "controversial" will be blurred out then my response will not be to submit ID, I'll simply limit how I use the platform. Anonymous speech continues to matter and needs protection. But Discord was never the entity that was going to provide that protection.

I mean Discord is a gaming chat room. Expectations should be set by that fact. I don't need a gaming chat room to be NSFW, or even host i.e. political speech really. I get that people have used it for more than gaming, but it was always pretty clear what it was. If people don't like that this gaming chat room no longer supports other uses, they should switch to an alternative.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#769

Post by zeroq »

dyauspitr wrote: post #760
zeroq wrote: post #739

I'm really torn on this one. I remember the internet from '99. Before facebook, before messangers. People were communicating via usenet mailing groups - think online forum but via email - and it was quite common that they were not only signing their mails with full name, but often with a home address so others could send them postcards - think patreon for caveman. IRC users had frequent local meetups and regulars cou…

You didn’t have the hoi polloi on the internet back then.

Well, yes, you could argue the internet was like "harvard", a proper secret society club, where only wealthy and approved were invited, but still, even in '99 the internet was freely available at unis and I remember we had a whole plethora of weirdos.

The other weird artifact of that era were "gaming caffes" - much like internet caffes, but before the internet was widely available and people were often bringing their own PCs to play starcraft or quake on LAN.

I play competitive games online to this day and I really miss these days. Today's online scene is extremely toxic. I still remember my den which was often frequented by local gopniks, outmost disgusting creatures, but when we played the game there was a strong sense of chivalry and sportsmanship that's nowhere to be find in today's online games.

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