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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

#981

The sad thing is that I think many people will en masse pony up their ID or snapshot without a second thought. I'm not sure if enough people will refuse to actually force Discord to back off this decision (unless their idea is to grab as much data as possible at once with the understanding that they are going to back off either way).

I get the draconian side of things, but I am also tired of thousands of russian, indian, domestic-funded etc. bots flooding the zone with divisive propaganda. In theory, this seems like it would at least be a step in the direction of combating disinformation. I'm curious if there are any better ways to suppress these propaganda machines?

In practical terms, it just ensures that the only bots flooding the zone with propaganda will be the ones owned by governments in whose jurisdiction Discord is.

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

#982
post #810

I have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy. It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives. Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find…

I'm not sure how hash chains would resolve the fundamental issue of needing to send your ID or similar to some random third-party company that does god-knows-what with it (probably stores it in a publicly accessible path with big "steal me" signs pointing at it). That they need to attest to your age means that they need to trust what your age is, which has really just moved the problem one layer deeper (as far as I c…

I assume by third party you mean the authority, and yes, the authority would need to know your personal information. At least enough of it to verify your age. So the ideal is that the authority is the entity that already knows your personal information. Like the entity that issued your passport to you, or the one that issued you drivers license.

But even if the authority was a private company, I think it would be an improvement compared to the current situation. In this situation your personal information would be held by this one company, and not whatever provider that needs to verify your age. Also, you would be able to use the commitments, that this private authority gave you, without any coordination afterwards. The authority would not know about your transactions.

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

#983
post #663
post #325

My social group are moving to a private IRC server already. This is probably the best outcome really. I don't think any of us are under 50. But we have relatives who remember when this would have resulted in some of us being killed. I wish I was sensationalising but I'm not.

For the happy-clicky-emoji types one can put TheLounge [1] or Convos [2] or other web front-ends [3] in front of IRC. They don't scale as well but it would allow for those that don't care for the underlying IRC network. If it does not exist yet there is probably a way to write in a voice chat link handler for Mumble. It's a separate app but very low CPU/memory footprint and maybe that could weed out some low quality…

Thanks - will look into these. IRC is a bit jarring after using something a little more convenient!

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

#984

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 spent 7 hours or so yesterday installing Zulip. It was a huge pain; for one, it wants to own an entire server and the only supported installation method is this mega-script that clobbers everything, so I had to try to use the Docker container. Documentation on installation is scarce; other than telling you to use the script, and the fact that a docker container exists (though the GitHub repo it linked me to was no…

I typed "Zulip docker compose" into DuckDuckGo, the first result was https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip which has commits from today, so doesn't seem out-of-date.

> Had to use ChatGPT to help generate me a docker-compose.yml, except it forgot about memcached, set the wrong environment variables and just generally did a sloppy job.

It has a docker-compose file in it, has memcached in it.

> [...] X-Forwarded-Proto [...]

Does https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/en/latest/how-t... help?

> access the databases it needs

The official docker compose has databases set up already, I guess you were missing those from your ChatGPT created compose file.

____

It kind of seems like you were linked to the wrong place for documentation about Zulip with docker in the beginning and then went from that.

A quick click-through seems to suggest you landed on https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht... and then clicked on the prominent "Docker image" link on top which leads to a random location on the page. (at least on Firefox)

That's very understandably annoying. If can you confirm that that is what happens, a bug report either with Zulip or ReadTheDocs (not sure which) might be in order.

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

#985

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.

Discord has been immensely hostile to the public in general since forever, and people love to flock to it and throw money at the company behind it. I don't expect the masses to change their incomprehensible habits just because of this.

Discord used to be better, but then they got popular, got incredibly picked up and now are probably being controlled by some very shady people.

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

#986
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…

Platforms want this, they're happily implementing it because they'll get a mountain of data to train on and sell, and they'll finally get to sell their userbase as real monetizable humans to their partners.

The more precise the profile the more money is fetched for you at market.

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

#987

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.

why in gods name would you ever pay for discord.

Bragging to software developers about freeloading their software?

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

#988
My first reaction is, what a disaster. More of the web becomes gated behind sacrificing your privacy to companies who by and large don't give a damn about it.

Then I remembered when I was a teen, thought about how I'd have reacted to this, and realized over the long term youth will rediscover old-school tools like IRC or migrate to new alternatives outside the claws of big corps and government.

And I felt a little better about the future of human civilization.

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

#989

What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group: - Matrix - Stoat, previously revolt ( https://stoat.chat/ ) - IRC + Mumble - Signal

https://nostrapps.com/flotilla

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

#990

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…

As a former user of Zulip at a previous company, thank you for this software, I enjoyed using it. Maybe I'll setup a private instance for friends and family so I can enjoy it once again.
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