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neilv 5 hours ago

Three problems with this:

1. Removes the pain of age verification, encouraging some people to stay in the proprietary walled garden when everyone would be better served by open platforms (and network effects).

2. Provides a pretext for more invasive age verification and identification, because "the privacy-respecting way is too easily circumvented".

3. Encourages people to run arbitrary code from a random Web site in connection with their accounts, which is bad practice, even if this one isn't malware and is fully secure.

rippeltippel 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Proving that something is possible doesn't mean encouraging it. This was a beautiful work of reverse engineering, that shows how hard it can be to verify personal data without invading privacy. I prefer this awareness to blind trust.

The code was released, therefore it is not arbitrary (problem #3). Should companies react with more invasive techniques (problem #2), users can always move to other platforms (problem #1).

jen729w 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> everyone would be better served by open platforms

Oh cool, which ones?!

…aaaand there's the problem.

unethical_ban 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This suggests that the immediate availability of a drop-in replacement today means there is no utility in encouraging that growth.

There are multiple open-source tools that do everything Discord does. There are few-to-none that offer everything Discord does, and certainly none that are centralized, network-effect-capture-ready.

Short term:

* Small group chats with known friends: Signal, whatsapp, IRC, Matrix

* Community chat: Zulip, Rocket.chat

* Community voice: Mumble, Teamspeak

* Video / screen sharing and voice chat: Zoom, BigBlueButton, Jitsi

I've heard about Stoat but haven't read up on it.

Valodim an hour ago | parent [-]

None of those play in the same league as discord for hosting a community, and none of them look in a position to be there in the foreseeable future. It sucks but that's how it is.

einr 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is how it always is, until suddenly one day it isn't. Linux didn't play in the same league as serious and commercial UNIX systems until one fateful day it killed them all dead forever.