Discord (the chat application) recently announced a global age restriction requiring photo ID verification to access content it deems sensitive. This expanded policy is coming several months after Discord photo ID’s were compromised following a security breach.
The Stash project has a “restricted” Discord server which will be affected.
If the community is upset at this, there are open source chat alternatives including Matrix, Stoat, and others. Stash’s Discourse site has a built in chat tool, but I don’t think it’s at the usability level of the other options.
It really sucks that Discord is going down this route, but I don’t really see a great alternative that doesn’t ultimately result in significant community fragmentation. And that’s already with the community somewhat split between the Discord and this Discourse forum.
I already deleted my account, there’s no way I’m giving them the information they’re requesting. I personally never liked discord. I always found it strange and irritating when projects had wikis or other help information locked behind a discord server. It’s only other function is for chat and once this forum was created, the discord seemed unnecessary to me.
I personally think we already have chat-like alternative here which we can point existing users to, and expand if we need to. I’d prefer that over migrating to another official chat server.
I personally would just get rid of Discord. IMO it’s where information goes to die. Searching for things is frankly terrible. I’d just move everything lock stock over here.
The discourse chat seems good. I am also interested in trying Matrix out on my own, and maybe that’s something the stash project could look into as well. With Stoat, it’s not federated (as far as I can tell), which could lead down the same pathway, even though it’s FOSS now.
I remember that I needed Discord to get access to StashDB and JAVDB. I really don’t know how it works, now or before. Maybe there’s already an alternative?