Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally
discord.com
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.
Discord Alternatives

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.

  • Asidonhopo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Does Matrix have problems I’m not aware of as an alternative? Saw they have 115 million accounts compared to Discord’s 500 million so its already well tested? Not a user of either service.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 hours ago

      Matrix, the central service, might work, but I’m not sure if it could handle the load well. Matrix, the federated service, hosted by many people, have performance issues with the “free” version. I could not test the paid/more optimized version, so I can’t talk about that.

      Anyway, the protocol and clients have their issues. All these stems from usage; I did not do a deep dive in the internal of it. But on the top of my head:

      • joining a room will sometimes not send you keys to see older messages, despite being configured to do so. When it works, it’s ok. When it doesn’t, there’s little to no recourse.
      • sometimes (rarely) rooms have to be upgraded to use new versions/features. So far it happened once (to my knowledge). The issue is that “upgrade” means locking the existing room, creating a new one, inviting everyone in the new room, and putting a link to the old room as read only. Sure, the process is mostly automated… except the best way to start it is using dev commands on a client, and every user will have to accept the invite. Just hope you don’t have too much rooms.
      • Logging into a new device/client sometimes will works perfectly fine. Other times it will obstinately refuse to retrieve your room’s keys from another existing, online, logged-in device. Despite the “confirmation” dialog, it won’t work. You can manually export/import your keys from one device to another, but for large scale adoption? Not good. You can say goodbye to all previous messages if that happens.
      • Interface is relatively barebone, and some features gets pushed quickly (like, throwing confettis), while other (like, proper room management, fine notification controls, etc.) are held back forever.
      • Features are limited. It works very well as a chat, and they recently worked on a built-in video/audio call service, but that’s it. A few “plugins” are supposed to work but are clunky as hell (they’re basically iframes). Some features that people consider important (like stickers) are definitively an afterthought, and searching for a sticker is a pain (dicslaimer: I’m not using the central service/app, so that part might be specific to my instance)

      With that said, nothing’s actually a show stopper for small usage, and the heavily optimized server might handle itself well enough, as long as you’re mainly concerned with having text rooms. But open instances handling hundreds of users might be a stretch… for now. Maybe this will cause more development into the Matrix/Element ecosystem.