Discord Rival Gets Overwhelmed by Exodus of Players Fleeing Age-Verification

I don't think discord is going anywhere. Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown. Look at Reddit after the API switch up.

The reason my friends and I moved to Discord in late 2015 or early 2016 was because it blew the competition out of the water at the time. The audio was so much better. I think screen share and face cams may not have been supported at the time, but it later was and was higher quality and a better experience than Skype or Teamspeak, IMO.

Now though, that might just be table stakes for a new service now that WebRTC is standard and the codecs have gotten better too. I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat (text, video, and audio) to take off. Right now, all of them have notable flaws. I also think many of them try to compete with the community aspect of Discord, which I personally don't use and thus and am a bad judge of quality. Just a way to chat with people I already know.

Wow Teamspeak is still around and looks like they are succeeding again. Teamspeak and Ventrilo used to be such a mainstay of the video game community. I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. It does look like Teamspeak has taken a note out of discord and slacks notebook and have gotten more advanced chat room options now.

It's frustrating how often 'journalism' assumes good faith and uses the language and arguments of corporations.

Rather than "fleeing age-verification" myself, and I largely assume others, are "fleeing surveillance state data harvesting".

I spun up a self hosted teamspeak server last weekend for my friends and I using their docker container.

Its going to take some getting used to. Seems weird that they have a hard cap on 10MB file upload sizes if its self hosted. Also the screen sharing wasn't working quite right

Otherwise, voice and text chat is there

Discord has the momentum but overall I just find the experience awful. It would be nice to use anything else at this point. Joining a server with greater than a handful of people is just a nightmare and practically unusable.

Well teamspeak is voice chat only, so I don't see how it's a rival for gaming communities that do ongoing text chats and voice only for group play...

A well known path....bluesky saw it with twitter. Reddit with digg. /. with digg are the ones that come to mind. Interesting to see if this works out better.

Is there really no open source version of these that people can selfhost?

There are multiple free providers for AI moderation models (openai and xai), you can get a vps with 1tb of storage for pretty cheap, just setup an image optimizer/downscaler with Go or Rust so its fast and you can handle probably 10,000 people pretty easily.

I guess the main reason that discord is good is because of the centralization as it allows all your servers in one place and super easy link sharing and signup.

Decentralized social and chat should be present in this new era, clawbot showed that people are willing to spinup and selfhost useful things even if they are not overly technical. I think we could see a new wave of similar things happening for things like social media and chat.

It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?

> Like so many things from history, this is all Britain’s fault. The farcical UK Online Safety Act is forcing all social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to require age verification checks before its citizens can access them

I guess no other US state or country has demanded age checks, great journalism from kotaku...

turns out convenience loses when you start asking for face scans.

I haven't gamed for years, but decades ago TS was the solution for team play.

Such fond memories of playing in a team of people scattered all over the world.

Matrix is the only solution ready with all the features necessary. My community made the leap months ago and its been worth it.

That same Peter Thiel-tied verification that Discord is using, Persona, is also used by many other services right? Anyone know who else uses them so I can avoid them?

They are not fleeing age verification, but surveillance capitalism of the evil kind.