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.

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

""If you think Skype and Teamspeak had a baby and it hand all sorts of super powers that is parents didn't have," Citron said. "What was basically a skunkworks project appears to be the most promising product we've built."

For much of this year, the company has been working on Discord. The networking infrastructure is built in Erlang, a technology that Ericsson created in the 1980s for telecommunications. The system is spread across nine data centers around the world. The company has done tests to make sure that the latency is good.

Resmini also noted that esports competitors - or professional gamers who play games for money prizes - were worried about security. With Skype, it's easy to get somebody else's personal internet protocol (IP) address because the communication happens peer-to-peer. Citron said that Discord works through server infrastructure, so it's impossible for anyone to obtain another player's IP address."

Perhaps the peers cannot obtain each others' IP addresses but the person running the Discord server has all the peers' IP addresses in addition to their payment details

There are few if any meaningful limits on how this data can be used, how long it can be retained or where it can be transferred.^1

Apparently this centralised architecture does not matter to Discord users until something like "age verification" comes along

1. The legal compliance exception obviously allows for "age verification"

Example of Discord privacy policy pre-"age verification":

https://web.archive.org/web/20200504172025/https://discordap...

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

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

[0] https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...

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.

Now that they are going public I think every real user will have to identify themselves. The way they do it I think will be a staggered rollout of requests. So they use the guise of this algorithm to state that no everybody will need to verify but when it’s your turn to provide your ID they just wait for the next instance and lock the account to teen level until you do it. Given they say they will do ongoing monitoring to place an age group, this I don’t think is far fetched and increases the value of the profiles for the shareholders.

This would make a mass exodus nearly impossible too as too many people already sit in the side of it’s not a problem if it does not effect me. The result is it will effect just not enough people to cause such a large exodus.

I don’t think this spect is talked about enough. Companies that enshitify don’t do it all at once. It’s bite by bite.

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

It's not "but", it's "and". Complexity in an app is not a good thing.