Discord now requires age verification, and why you should reconsider the age-old forum
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We're not even two months into 2026, and yet another large social media network has done the seemingly unthinkable and instituted a policy that triggers a mass exodus.
I am of course talking about Discord's roll-out of age verification globally, across the entire site.
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
Starting in March, all Discord users will have a “teen” experience by default unless they complete age verification using a video selfie or ID.
The Verge (www.theverge.com)
Not only will they require age verification, Discord is also utilising AI technology to analyze your content and habits to infer your age. While not a direct privacy violation, it is at least to me nearing that sort of behaviour that one ought to be very wary of.
So here's a rehash of our ongoing pitch for you to use a forum instead of Discord
Use a forum instead of Discord!
Now that that's out of the way — why?
The standard reasons aplenty. Searchability and indexability of content. Ownership of content. No more walled gardens.
Imagine a place where you can contribute your content to, not to feed a machine, but because you want to share your knowledge and talk to other people (radical idea, I know.)
Realize too that your content can then kept secure in a place where it can be shared and celebrated, archived for future readers, and indexable by search engines so it can be discovered widely.
That same place also means you're not screaming into a void — that your every contribution adds just that little bit more to the community around it. You're not just talking in a public square, you're build a corpus of content that you can and should be proud of.
We've spent the greater part of a decade pouring our time and energy into walled gardens... for the benefit of some faceless corporation. It's high time to turn the tables around and empower yourself!
So what's the alternative? There are many such alternatives one could jump ship to. Discord has implemented many features that make it stand out in a sea of competitors. Any one of those features could be something that make it special to you. In many cases, those features cannot be easily replicated. The question you need to ask yourself is whether this constitutes a deal-breaker, or whether you are willing to give it up. Do you need custom profiles? Do you need high-definition streaming? Coloured themes?
One of the standout features of Discord is its use of a single login across all of its communities. This is their network effect. The Fediverse has its own complement to this network effect. Simply put, each user can talk to any other user on the fediverse, without impediment, without additional logins, without any barriers. This is not only the dream of the fediverse, it is its reality. We have this now, and it is worth celebrating.
So what is that place? That place is a forum. A bulletin board. That place from back in your childhood where you might've spent far too many hours talking to random people. Forums haven't gone anywhere, and they've been silently chugging along all these years. They've even kept pace with modern web technologies and apps, and NodeBB is one of them.
We offer that fully indexable, super fast forum engine wrapped up in a responsive theme for use on all of your devices. We offer extensibility via a first-class plugin and theme system so you can make your forum your own. We offer federation via ActivityPub, so your forum can talk to other forums, and we offer the simple fact that when you start your own forum, you're doing so because you want to be that community builder for yourself, not for anybody else.
Do it. Ditch Discord, set up a forum. I'll help you do it, too.
Self-host it, or give our plans (as low as $20/mo) a spin. Discounts for non-profits and charities.
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Lemme know when your forum handles screen sharing, else it’s going to be a pretty shite Discord replacement
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Lemme know when your forum handles screen sharing, else it’s going to be a pretty shite Discord replacement
Certainly. It's possible with the screen capture API to do screen sharing via a WebRTC conference call. One of our users created an experimental plugin that did just that (like, ten years ago, even!)
Of course you were being facetious and moving the goalpost by expecting a Discord replacement to do everything Discord can. If you RTFA you'd know I said that wouldn't be possible.
But that's ok too. I'm not here to convince you.
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Certainly. It's possible with the screen capture API to do screen sharing via a WebRTC conference call. One of our users created an experimental plugin that did just that (like, ten years ago, even!)
Of course you were being facetious and moving the goalpost by expecting a Discord replacement to do everything Discord can. If you RTFA you'd know I said that wouldn't be possible.
But that's ok too. I'm not here to convince you.
I don’t think there’s anything facetious in expecting a replacement to do complete the same tasks as what it’s intended to replace?
If you developed a cyborg replacement liver, I’d expect it to complete all of the tasks the original did before I have it implanted in my body
(Maybe it helps if I specify I’m looking for a new tool for my merry band of autistic dorks to communicate with, and not just here to pick a technical fight)
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I don’t think there’s anything facetious in expecting a replacement to do complete the same tasks as what it’s intended to replace?
If you developed a cyborg replacement liver, I’d expect it to complete all of the tasks the original did before I have it implanted in my body
(Maybe it helps if I specify I’m looking for a new tool for my merry band of autistic dorks to communicate with, and not just here to pick a technical fight)
Fair, in that case I apologize for assuming malintent.
Specifically I argue that forums ably take the place of Discord's text communication features (chat and discussions), but do admit it does not do everything Discord can. One may also argue whether it should!
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Fair, in that case I apologize for assuming malintent.
Specifically I argue that forums ably take the place of Discord's text communication features (chat and discussions), but do admit it does not do everything Discord can. One may also argue whether it should!
=b lemme know if you have any more info on that addon
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Lemme know when your forum handles screen sharing, else it’s going to be a pretty shite Discord replacement
@ianhclark510@lemmy.blahaj.zone There are so many communities out there using Discord for something other than game streaming or whatever. Discord's been a right shit replacement for forums, yet people used it.
Maybe we can stop looking for the one-stop swiss-army-knife products. They're always trash, and their business model is always to treat you like garbage.
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@ianhclark510@lemmy.blahaj.zone There are so many communities out there using Discord for something other than game streaming or whatever. Discord's been a right shit replacement for forums, yet people used it.
Maybe we can stop looking for the one-stop swiss-army-knife products. They're always trash, and their business model is always to treat you like garbage.
I agree! If the current model is unsustainable let it die, OP can keep his trap shut about some 20$ subscription being an alternative even worth suggesting
You can look on the other comments someone was hawking some gawdawful WebRTC plugin Hank and it’s just like, god, please stop
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I wholeheartedly support the step back to forums. The only problem I am having with it is providing real-time dedicated (and most importantly private) support to individual users. This is something that was crucial to many communities over at Discord where you were spoiled for choice in terms of solutions to this.
NodeBB doesn't really have a solution to this as far as I can tell. I've been looking for several days but the only option I can see, other than contact forms which do not meet the required specs, is a deprecated plugin that isn't readily available on the ACP.
A real issue that NodeBB is going to face if it wants to step up against Discord is, as has been discussed already, the issue of everything being all in one place. That's what Discord did well and that's what it cornered the market on. No network of platforms is going to replace that. It has to be centralised. A forum obviously can't replace the voice channels of Discord but it can excel for text based communications. However, it needs to be a complete package in that regard and flexible to the needs of people coming over from Discord.
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I wholeheartedly support the step back to forums. The only problem I am having with it is providing real-time dedicated (and most importantly private) support to individual users. This is something that was crucial to many communities over at Discord where you were spoiled for choice in terms of solutions to this.
NodeBB doesn't really have a solution to this as far as I can tell. I've been looking for several days but the only option I can see, other than contact forms which do not meet the required specs, is a deprecated plugin that isn't readily available on the ACP.
A real issue that NodeBB is going to face if it wants to step up against Discord is, as has been discussed already, the issue of everything being all in one place. That's what Discord did well and that's what it cornered the market on. No network of platforms is going to replace that. It has to be centralised. A forum obviously can't replace the voice channels of Discord but it can excel for text based communications. However, it needs to be a complete package in that regard and flexible to the needs of people coming over from Discord.
> @hemiechinuss said:
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> The only problem I am having with it is providing real-time dedicated (and most importantly private) support to individual users. This is something that was crucial to many communities over at Discord where you were spoiled for choice in terms of solutions to this.Thanks for commenting! I'd love to hear more about what kind of individualized support features Discord offered.
I am not a Discord power user, so I think many of the bot enhancements and customizations I am not at all familiar with.
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So really what I'm missing currently is an internal ticket system. A place where someone can press a button and then privately reach out to staff in order to raise an issue. This mostly impacts gaming communities I think as it has been raised in the past here once. We have a contact form on the forum now but it really is no replacement for an instant messaging ticket system. I'd rather avoid third-party options not only for privacy and security but primarily so that it is integrated into our current platform.
But this is just one of many issues that will need to be overcome in the near future. Moving away from discord is incredibly difficult. Not only is it free but it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community. It's meant for this purpose and it does it really well.
As I mentioned there was a deprecated plugin for this. This plugin allowed you to create a category where the posts could only be viewed by the author and authorised groups. This would have been a perfectly viable solution however it is over a decade old now.
(nodebb-plugin-support-forum is the name of the plugin)
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So really what I'm missing currently is an internal ticket system. A place where someone can press a button and then privately reach out to staff in order to raise an issue. This mostly impacts gaming communities I think as it has been raised in the past here once. We have a contact form on the forum now but it really is no replacement for an instant messaging ticket system. I'd rather avoid third-party options not only for privacy and security but primarily so that it is integrated into our current platform.
But this is just one of many issues that will need to be overcome in the near future. Moving away from discord is incredibly difficult. Not only is it free but it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community. It's meant for this purpose and it does it really well.
As I mentioned there was a deprecated plugin for this. This plugin allowed you to create a category where the posts could only be viewed by the author and authorised groups. This would have been a perfectly viable solution however it is over a decade old now.
(nodebb-plugin-support-forum is the name of the plugin)
@hemiechinuss ah! You're talking about nodebb-plugin-support-forum!
If you're interested in that plugin I'm sure I can get it updated for v4. You're right in that that would be helpful from a moderation standpoint.
When you say...
> @hemiechinuss said:
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> it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your communityWhat was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?
I'd want to make some inroads into providing something like this for NodeBB admins as well.
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Yes, that's the one. I would love for that to still be supported. It would meet my needs perfectly.
> @julian said:
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> What was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?The documentation was ok, it was decent enough if you wanted to create your own bots and webhooks. They did onboarding well. Agreeing to rules, prompting new users to visit a spot and post there, etc.
For community admin it doesn't really offer much more than NodeBB other than being more flexible in its capacity to service more types of community. Permissions is definitely a sore spot with NodeBB. They work, but they don't work as well as on Discord where I can lock a channel to a group or even an individual and the sheer amount of permissions I can define per group or individual makes it incredibly flexible.
One-on-one contact points were definitely a plus. Allowing individual users permissions to specific channels and threads was a really useful feature that I used a lot.
While it does lean on bots and webhooks for functionality, it is really easy to set up whatever you need on Discord and there are significantly less plugins on NodeBB that offer the same functionality that the various bots provide over on Discord. What I think is the biggest sore spot here is automation. Discord had a lot of that.
To be fair though I've only been using NodeBB this last week and I am only scratching the surface of what it can do. I'm really new to this specific forum software.
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I'm looking back on Discord though and really there were a few things I can say were easier for me over there knowing what little I do about NodeBB so far.
- Automation - a lot of functions were automated by bots and webhooks
- Permissions - permissions were a lot more flexible over there which allowed for more control
- Support - as we talked about the capacity to provide support to individual users was better
- Events - being able to easily push events to the community was nice I'm not sure if that functionality exists in NodeBB but Discord allows you to put a banner up on your server announcing an event
- Onboarding - onboarding was quite nice to have with presenting users a list of rules, places to visit, and permissions based on answers they provided in a questionnaire
- Announcements - announcements had a dedicated spot and could easily be pushed to either part of or the entire community where it was quite visible
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Yes, that's the one. I would love for that to still be supported. It would meet my needs perfectly.
> @julian said:
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> What was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?The documentation was ok, it was decent enough if you wanted to create your own bots and webhooks. They did onboarding well. Agreeing to rules, prompting new users to visit a spot and post there, etc.
For community admin it doesn't really offer much more than NodeBB other than being more flexible in its capacity to service more types of community. Permissions is definitely a sore spot with NodeBB. They work, but they don't work as well as on Discord where I can lock a channel to a group or even an individual and the sheer amount of permissions I can define per group or individual makes it incredibly flexible.
One-on-one contact points were definitely a plus. Allowing individual users permissions to specific channels and threads was a really useful feature that I used a lot.
While it does lean on bots and webhooks for functionality, it is really easy to set up whatever you need on Discord and there are significantly less plugins on NodeBB that offer the same functionality that the various bots provide over on Discord. What I think is the biggest sore spot here is automation. Discord had a lot of that.
To be fair though I've only been using NodeBB this last week and I am only scratching the surface of what it can do. I'm really new to this specific forum software.
> @hemiechinuss said:
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> Permissions is definitely a sore spot with NodeBB. They work, but they don't work as well as on Discord where I can lock a channel to a group or even an individual and the sheer amount of permissions I can define per group or individual makes it incredibly flexible.Oh actually NodeBB has fine-grained privileges. You're able to restrict categories by posting or viewing privileges. Privileges can be applied to user groups and individual users.
All of this is handled at the admin level in the admin control panel.
