Comment by rustcleaner
3 hours ago
IRC plus GNU Jami are still freedom respecting zones! I sincerely hope all this age verification crap causes cypherpunk FOSS solutions to grow in popularity.
3 hours ago
IRC plus GNU Jami are still freedom respecting zones! I sincerely hope all this age verification crap causes cypherpunk FOSS solutions to grow in popularity.
Just remember that systemd added age verification in Linux without anyone asking.
There are freedom respecting Linux projects, but those lead by redhat\ibm employees (past and present) don't.
The age verification API in operating systems is a really good idea for privacy and parental control, so long as it doesn’t require literally collecting your ID (it doesn’t).
Look at it from the perspective of a parent giving a device to a kid. Before, you’d have to deal with a maze of blocking content. You’d have to allow/blocklist a huge number of apps and services manually. If your kid discovers some new one you or your blocking service has never heard of, they’ve gotten around your parental control wishes.
With the age verification API, you just set the age in the OS (and lock it down with MDM or whatever) and now all the apps and websites have to respect it and act accordingly.
Your kid can’t just make a new account or download another browser or do some other crazy workaround to get around your restrictions. That setting is there at the OS level.
It’s systemd. They seem to be making it their mission to windows-ify Linux anyways.
Its just a system that optionally exposes a birthday read from a json db. You don't have to use it, and you don't have to use applications that rely on it. And if you are going to use applications that have an age verification, this is a pretty serviceable standard.
I don't understand the uproar. Systemd isn't perfect but it gets so much hate for the value it provides
Why doesn't it do the same for sex, gender, religion, race, sexuality, felon etc.?
Those are also just fields, and there's incoming laws in countries that target them. No internet for unsupervised women for example. You wouldn't want to break usability for the fine government servants of Afghanistan would you?
It can be extricated, or bypassed. The benefits of FOSS are myriad.
It won't. Most people don't care about privacy or FOSS. I've been trying to get my friends to switch to something else for years, and they couldn't care less.
ID verification is the least of my worries, to be honest. I've been on the internet long enough to acknowledge a need for something like that. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that data is a valuable commodity now. Discord is storing my online habits and conversations somewhere on their servers. Deleting that information is deleting money.
If people weren't worried about that before, then they certainly won't care now.
You're quite wrong in your assumptions. Most Discord users are moving away from the platform. Fluxer is gaining traction very quickly.
I would put money down that 50% of discord users are not moving away from the platform and won't before the end of the year. And if I'm wrong I happily get to move to a new platform so it's a win win bet :v
> Most Discord users are moving away from the platform
I dread the day I'll make claims like this, even figuratively.
Even at a most surface level reading, this would suggest something like their MAU (monthly active users) at least halving soon/already.
I'd be very surprised if it was trending down even, let alone at this! Forget hyperbole, this is an outright überbole.
By all means though, got any data?
Matrix has become invaluable for dozens of my hacker friends. We ditched Discord almost a year ago and we have no desire to go back. Besides having high quality e2ee voice/video/screensharing (thanks LiveKit), we collectively spend 10x less for the functionality and keep our data in Switzerland. No ads, no one getting their accounts hacked with QR codes, ultra-granular space/channel settings, multiple choices for client implementations, and end to end encryption enables sensitive discussions that would have previously been curtailed. The identity verification is greatly appreciated although our new users do have some issues getting set up with multiple devices, but it's no more complicated than multi-device WhatsApp. Matrix is ready for prime time.
Nice! Last time I used Matrix there was really no voice/video calling. I'll have to check it out again! :D