Discord Rival Maxes Out Hosting Capacity As Players Flee Age-Verification Crackdown

Following backlash over Discord's global rollout of strict age-verification checks, users are flocking to rival platform TeamSpeak and overwhelming its servers. According to PC Gamer, the Discord alternative said its hosting capacity has been maxed out in a number of regions including the U.S. From the report: [A]s I saw for myself while testing out free Discord alternatives, it's hard to deny the appeal of TeamSpeak. It's quick and easy to make an account, join or start a group chat, or join a massive, game-based community voice server, and at no point does TeamSpeak cheekily ask if it can scan your wizened visage.

During my testing, I was able to dive into 18+ group chats without tripping over an age gate. However, there's no guarantee TeamSpeak won't have to deploy its own age verification mechanism in the future. In the UK at least, the Online Safety Act makes those sorts of checks a legal obligation, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently stating "No social media platform should get a free pass when it comes to protecting our kids."

Besides all of that, if you'd rather not chat to randoms who also happen to have an unhealthy obsession with Arc Raiders, you'll likely need to pay an admittedly small subscription fee to rent your own ten-person community voice server. By that point, you're handing over card details and essentially fulfilling an age assurance check anyway. If you'd rather limit how much info your chat platform of choice has about you, there are arguably better options out there.

Identification laws is attack on privacy

[sinij]

It is strange to watch these corporate suicides repeatedly happen until you realize that it isn't about money, but about control. Age verification laws have one and only one true purpose - to make it impossible for dissidents to have anonymous online speech with any reach. Age verification is identity verification and just like happening in UK and Australia, if you disagree there will be a knock on your door.

Re:

[sinij]

It also happens a lot in EU and UK, which are hardly conservative.

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[Calydor]

Can you point to where the UK and Australia are on an unlabelled map of the United States?

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[sabbede]

No, it does not appear to correlate to a State's dominant party. Wikipedia has a handy little map here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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[The-Ixian]

Look, if you get carded to buy alcohol or porn, it shouldn't matter if you are doing those things online or in person.

Being on a computer should not be a bypass of age verification.

There are real harms associated with certain activities in developing brains.

Yes, the parents should be involved, even with age verification. Yes, there will be cases where people work around restrictions.

This just seems like common sense to me.

Difference between in person and online

[davidwr]

Being carded in person can be and until recently* was done with the identity being revealed to only one person who was likely to forget it shortly after purchase.

Being "carded" online all but requires that the ID be stored at least for a short time and typically indefinitely, with no guarantees that it isn't being copied by malicious actors or used for privacy-hostile purposes.

If we can adopt a standard way to verify our ages without presenting our identities or at a minimum have our identities stored relat

Re:

[s0nicfreak]

I mean, if we want to do it like it's done in person... in person there is no age verification for having conversations, and you don't get carded before talking to others. It's up to parents to monitor/control who a kid talks to and what they talk about. And while you get carded to buy alcohol or porn, in person it's up to parents to make sure kids don't access it for free - or on the case of alcohol, to control/supervise kids' access to it (in most places). And for alcohol at least (I've never paid for por

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[sabbede]

Well, yeah, I guess you could look at laws as a form of control. But I don't think the legislative motives are anything other than what they claim to be - a way to keep perverts away from kids.

And I don't think there can be a right to anonymity. Society couldn't function like that.

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[tlhIngan]

What did you expect? Project 2025 aims to eliminate pornography in all forms and one of the methods is to get age verification in everything.

Discord reportedly even did it using technology from Palantir, so you can figure out why it was added.

Age verification or surveillance?

[radaos]

The age verification will be carried out by Persona, a company linked to Peter Thiel.

For how long?

[DrMrLordX]

Eventually alternative platforms will be pressured to provide the same age verification as Discord. What then?

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[Randseed]

Eventually alternative platforms will be pressured to provide the same age verification as Discord. What then?

We go back to IRC.

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[EvilSS]

Did I miss some exception in all of these laws for IRC protocol? You still rely on servers. Yes you can run your own (same with TeamSpeak, at least the last time I played with it) server on your own host, but most of IRC still relies on a few backbone networks run by other people.

IRC is easy to make immune

[Anonymous Cward]

The IRC network operators need only claim that NSFW chats are against the rules, which means no age checks needed, as it is not social media. As users do not have profiles and nobody is inherently identifiable, this means it only falls under the purview of OSA, and even then, assessments are only against what facilities the server can provide, not what clients can do on top of it.

This means people can use GPG to prove their own pseudonyms combined with OTR plugins to send encrypted comms which IRCOPs can

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[EvilSS]

" as it is not social media." You realize operators don't control that definition. If they can't find a way under current law, they will just change the law to cover it if it became a large enough issue in their eyes.

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[davidwr]

Sites hosted on ".onion" sites that use good "operational security" are pretty anonymous. Sure, their aggregate network traffic load and patterns can be detected and the fact that the content is using certain ports and is either encrypted or deliberate gibberish/random noise can be detected, but other than that, it's pretty secure.

If a TOR or TOR-like network was configured so all the .onion sites or their equivalents were 'always' sending a steady* stream of traffic to other sites, say, 1MB/sec to interme

I do want kids to be safe

[BrendaEM]

I guess that given the choice to be shortchanged for some gaming entertainment--or need help for lifelong neuroses, that may never get better, the choice is simple.

Re: TeamSpeak is a Discord alternative now?

[RegistrationIsDumb83]

Mumble does now support individual volume adjustment... a feature that a few other conference calling programs still don't, somehow.

Why teamspeak?

[allo]

Teamspeak was what Discord initially copied (think about why they call their room groups "servers"), but the new Discord style clone is Stoat

Re: Why teamspeak?

[dj245]

Teamspeak is attractive because you don't need to log into an official server. It still can function on an IRC-type model where anyone can run a private server and anyone else can log in directly without touching an official Teamspeak login.

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[allo]

Yeah and that's fine. But that's the same for the open source Discord clones, but they provide the Discord experience. I bet teamspeak still does a good job for voice chat in games, but Discord is also used for other things, which are not related to teamspeak's core features.

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[allo]

Good to have choice. I've also read about spacebar. So which of the clones do actually work?