This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
Last week, Discord announced they were going to be shifting to an invasive age-verification system for all users.
You either submit to a facial scan to verify you age, or get defaulted to a teen-user experience unless their AI infers that you must be an adult based on other unspecified data.
It’s creepy and invasive.
Let’s talk about why it’s problem, alternatives to Discord, and what this means for my own community.
This is gross
Discord made this move to comply with new laws aimed to protect children.
As always, that sounds noble on the surface. The web can be a horrible, terrifying place.
But this will almost certainly be used (by both Discord and governments) to keep young people from accessing important information about reproductive care, LGBTQ+ information, and more.
And as someone who lives in an increasingly authoritarian fascist country, there’s a real danger of governments using it to target political opponents and people in marginalized groups they disagree with.
This is bad in the same way that book bans are bad, and worse in that it’s much more privacy invasive.
The Indie Web
How do you fight against this? The Indie Web.
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.
We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
And to an extent, local-first web development.
Baldur Bjarnason wrote about a need for more local, indie solutions early last year, and he’s been far more right, far sooner than I expected.
Discord alternatives
The site Discordless.com has a list of alternatives, including what they’re calling best bets:
These stand out because they are decentralized by design — no single company or government can fully control or shut them down. They offer public servers/instances, so you can join easily without self-hosting.
Soatok also has a great article on alternatives.
The Go Make Things community
I’m still weighing my options, but I do think Discord has kind of forced my hand with a move off of the platform.
Part of me just want to rock an old-school PHP-based forum, which allows for semi-async conversations that aren’t quite real-time, but are far more searchable.
I do think something like Discord is more akin to a coffee house than a knowledge base, though, and I want to preserve that.
I’m looking at self-hosted options, and even considering rolling my own.
Either way, it’s a chaotic new world we live in.
Like this? A Lean Web Club membership is the best way to support my work and help me create more free content.
This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
Go Make Things | Sciencx (2026-02-16T14:30:00+00:00) Cutting the Discord. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2026/02/16/cutting-the-discord/
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