Given how often I've had to pick up shop and move to another social media site, you'd think I'd be used to online spaces sunsetting or changing so completely that they're unrecognizable. But here I am, anxiously waiting to see how Discord's upcoming worldwide implementation of age-verification might affect the platform and whether or not that means having to move again. It's entirely possible that nothing changes. But even if it doesn't, the loss (or at least the splintering) of Discord would be terrible, as it's the primary means by which I and so many others in the tabletop space stay glued to one another. If anything, the situation has been a stark reminder that you shouldn't be entirely relying on Discord for your main hobby.
If you haven't been keeping up with it, Discord's decision to roll out new age-verification policies worldwide was not well-received. Discord attempted to downplay concerns, but a disclaimer on the FAQ about Discord's age-verification policies pointed to the app testing a relationship with Persona--that disclaimer was quickly and quietly deleted, though an archived version still exists. Persona's shady associations with ICE and other deportation efforts in the United States further raised people's eyebrows.
In a statement to Kotaku, Discord said that its work with Persona was part of a "limited test" that is no longer happening. But for some users, even a brief association with Persona was enough for them to start looking elsewhere. Discord's delay of its age-verification policy, detailed in a blog post on February 24, doesn't seem to have slowed down people wanting to find a Discord alternative.
From what I've seen in the tabletop roleplaying game servers that I'm a part of, there are two main concerns. The first is that Discord's new policy--despite the company's assurances--will create risks for users within the TTRPG space, as a not-insignificant number of those users have a marginalized identity or are privacy-conscious and could be put into danger if their data was leaked. Even the most secure systems can fail eventually after all. The other concern is that Discord implementing mandatory age-verification in any form will drive some users from the platform entirely (either from discomfort with the policy, or from solidarity with friends or peers who don't like the policy), which could splinter existing communities.
As users have been canceling their Nitro subscriptions or asking around for Discord alternatives, it's highlighted a key flaw: As much as Discord has brought some of the furthest corners of the TTRPG community together (especially when COVID-19 moved so much of the hobby to virtual spaces), that total reliance means that if Discord were to ever go away or be deemed too terrible to use, there isn't an obvious backup choice for people to flock to.
So whether it happens this year or even further down the line--Discord's recent IPO increases the likelihood that the platform will face enshittification--Discord falling apart and fracturing would be devastating for the tabletop roleplaying game community. Discord is typically the go-to option for the virtual adventures played by casual hobbyists, the communal spaces that third-party creators and professional writers use to interact with fans, the watch-party spaces for certain actual plays, and the hubs by which professional Game Masters both track and run their games that make up their business. If lots of folks leave Discord and spread out to different apps, it's going to be really hard to find each other and reconnect. It wouldn't be all dissimilar to how when Twitter fell apart, splintering so many once-unified hubs of information, community, and conversation across Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon.
"To my understanding, [Discord is] nearly universal for all the D&D groups and communities that I'm familiar with," TTRPG creator, panelist, and performer Diana Fay told me. "I don't think I know of a single alternative that people use consistently for their groups, except for maybe one that used Mighty Networks in the past. But yes, all of my D&D groups use Discord, and I have a Discord for my community that I use for basically everything that's not microblogging."
While they're not great for casual conversation or remaining glued into a community, there are some well-known alternatives to playing TTRPGs virtually. Virtual tabletop Roll20 has its own built-in, browser-based support for camera and microphone--and so by extension, Demiplane does as well following the two of them merging. The same is true for virtual tabletop Alchemy RPG, which focuses on using pretty maps and music to make a more cinematic (but more expensive) experience for tabletop roleplaying games.
You have to make accounts on Roll20 or Alchemy RPG to use them, however. Is that hard? No. But convincing anyone to adopt a new app is a battle in itself, and so many have admitted it's just easier to use Discord. Roll20 added Discord integration back in July 2024, for example, and D&D has an official Discord bot, Avrae, that makes it easier to play the game through Discord. Discord is clearly where the audience is, and an important consideration to several TTRPG businesses.
Mage Hand Press editor-in-chief Mike Holik concurred with the sentiment of Discord's importance to his business. Mage Hand Press creates a huge assortment of third-party player-facing content for D&D, like new spells, character species, and classes and subclasses. The publisher has had a few releases on D&D's official virtual portal, DnDBeyond, which lots of players use alongside Discord to play the game online. And anecdotally, I've played at a few tables that use classes created by Mage Hand Press--they make good stuff!
"We use [Discord] really heavily," Holik told me. "We use [Discord] for play testing. So it's our earliest chance to show off content before it goes out to a wider audience, so it gives us early readers and feedback, and it allows us to refine our work. We use it for marketing. We have a Kickstarter running right now, and one of the cool things about Kickstarter is that you can track where all of the sources of traffic are coming from, and a lot of those are just folks who are very invested on Discord, our most hardcore people are clicking the link on Discord because that's where they see it first."
Mage Hand Press isn't the only one to use Discord as a means of gathering feedback on future products either. "All of our playtest feedback for our digital magazine, The Broadsheets, as well as specific Adept PDFs or other products our [Patreon] patrons get access to is organized through Discord's forums and threads features," writer and director Daði told me. Alongside his girlfriend AB, Daði runs the YouTube channel Mystic Arts, which pulls from Daði's decade of experience running D&D campaigns to offer incredible advice for Game Masters looking to up their game's settings, characters, and stories.
"We use [Discord] to adjust the products after publication to feedback received. So I'd say as of right now, Discord is integral to the way we communicate with our fans and with our team of creatives."
Gaining access to Mystic Arts' exclusive Discord requires paying for a membership to the Mystic Arts Patreon. Getting access to a private Discord is a common perk for TTRPG creators--TTRPG YouTubers Ginny Di, XP to Level 3, DnD Shorts, Bob World Builder, and Dungeon Dudes; TTRPG mapmakers Czepeku, Stained Karbon Maps, Domille's Wondrous Works, and Forgotten Adventures; and actual play shows tabletopnotch, Venture Forth, Transplanar RPG, and Natural Six (among so, so, so many others) all have private Discord servers that can usually only be joined by purchasing at least the lowest tier of their respective Patreons. It's a way of both showing your favorite creator some additional appreciation while also finding a space online filled with people who also enjoy that particular creator.
Not every creator does this. Some creators in the TTRPG space don't publicly advertise a private Discord server that fans can join at all--Pointy Hat, Dingo Doodles, Vibe Check D&D, and Willowares are a few examples. Others, like Mage Hand Press and Fay, have free-to-join Discord servers. That's also the case for Ghostfire Gaming, a major third-party publisher in the D&D space best known for Grim Hollow, a fantastic and delightfully dreadful grimdark horror setting that my friends are too chicken to play with me.
"While I wouldn't necessarily categorize our Discord community as the 'hardcore' fans, I do think having a Discord server provides an opportunity for the most engaged fans of our content to find like-minded people and engage with us directly," Ghostfire Gaming chief operations officer Nick Ingamells told me.
"We'll generally take note of community discussions in Discord, especially when it comes to talk about balance or what is/isn’t being enjoyed from new material. However, as our community is well aware, whenever we run playtests, we also provide a form, and 'make sure you add that feedback to the form' is a very common response during playtests. Discord conversations move too quickly to be particularly useful sources of feedback [for us]."
Discord is also used as an avenue for creators to converse with each other and establish partnerships or pursue opportunities. "I recently was talking about [how] Bluesky bars off certain things if you don't age-verify," YouTuber, storyteller, and podcaster Dael Kingsmill said on Episode 229 of the Eldritch Lorecast, a TTRPG podcast connected to Ghostfire Gaming that Kingsmill is a co-host of. "I can't access messages on Bluesky because I haven't age-verified myself because it's out to a third party where you have to do a biometric face scan or give them your government ID--neither of which particularly appeals to me. I know I should probably just suck it up because my biometrics are all over YouTube anyway, but it's the principle of the thing, you know what I mean?"
"And that's a real problem for me because I get my business offers largely from social media. I used to get them via Twitter, now I often get them via Bluesky--it was, by the way, a business message I was referring to when I said, 'I can't access my messages on Bluesky.' The place we fell back to to have that conversation was Discord. So I think at least in my branch of this industry, a lot of business gets done in an informal context on social media. And I think what really troubles me about it, is that a lot of these things feel very much, I would say, like, 'Oh, won't somebody please think of the children,' as a potential smokescreen in order for business to get a lot of this really sensitive data. It's very valuable--they can do a lot with it. I'm not a fan."
"I know a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in the RPG community relies on [Discord] too," Daði said. "Creators frequently organize collaborations and conventions in servers, private messages, and curated spaces. The entire creator ecosystem is run out of small Discords at the moment, from events like Ginny Di's and Pointy Hat's Monster Week to our own Dungeon Jam. I personally use Discord to communicate with our sponsors, actual play players, and industry veterans. I have no idea how those networks will rebuild themselves if and when Discord falls."
Were Discord to fall apart after implementing this worldwide age-verification policy, it would supposedly at least be for good intentions--the company has repeatedly claimed that this change is solely about protecting children. And no one I spoke to was against children's safety. For them (and me), it is a question of whether handing adults' information over to a third-party age-verification app is the correct answer for Discord, or simply the best answer that the company has at this time. Electronic Frontier Foundation points out just 10 of the dangers in a policy like that, some of which are harmful to the very kids that it's trying to protect.
"When it comes to discussion of online spaces--and it is drastically different from what the internet was like when I was a kid--I think that it is valiant to want to make a safer space online for children," Kingsmill said on the Eldritch Lorecast. "But I don't think we're going toward the correct answer. I think people are rushing toward the fastest answer. And that fast answer seems to be, 'Well, we'll just stop them from doing it,' as if that works, and, 'We're going to give all the information that the adults use to these corporations that we have barely any control over.' It feels like a race toward any solution because the right solutions are harder to implement, and the right solutions being full-on education in how the internet is your second life."
Most of the TTRPG spaces that I'm a part of aren't solely adult-oriented, so age verification shouldn't kick me from most of the Discord servers that I'm a part of. But I am a part of a few servers that are designed for adult audiences, as are several of my peers. And while some seem content to simply curate their Discord experience, removing themselves from the 18+ spaces to avoid needing to verify their identity anywhere, some would rather not put in the effort and stop using Discord altogether in favor of something else. And for those who do have a Discord server tied to a business or large community, they have to decide whether to keep their already adult-oriented server marked as 18+ and potentially push out people who just don't want to verify their age.
"This is where my stance might have a bit of nuance to it, only because I am pretty publicly adamant about the fact that my content is not meant for children--especially not people under the age of 13," Fay said. "Ignoring the fact that I just swear a lot, I try to make it clear that I have no desire to have content that's aimed at children, because in my opinion, that's just... weird. I have zero qualifications to address kids with my content and would never want to give that impression. Although the main underlying mission of my content is educational and can even express the benefits of tabletop role-playing games for development/to help people of all ages discover themselves through gaming--touting the psychological benefits--even that is me speaking to adults and educators and trying to give them tools they need to have these conversations with the kids in their life as appropriate."
"I've never attempted to make my content or Discord server teen-friendly, and in fact have done the opposite in the past and briefly turned on the 18+ feature on the server prior to this impending March age-verification rollout. But again, the way that Discord aims to go about this change is a very, very bad idea, and thus we reverted the 18+ designation in the server settings after a few days so as not to use their native system for forced ID/facial scan verification. Instead, I'll be amending the server's 'Rules' channel to simply state in text that in order to access the server, you confirm you are at least 18 years old. Obviously, people can still get around that if they really wanted to, but it's far better than what Discord has planned."
"Discord is the main way I talk to our members and patrons, and even though we don't use any NSFW features on our servers it's disheartening to see companies requiring data like they're requested especially in this day and age where big tech companies are regularly breached and hacked, and inevitably this data ends up on marketplaces where they're sold for a pittance to foul outside actors," Daði said when I asked if he felt he needed to make any changes to keep his Discord aligned with something okay for all-ages. "While we haven't given any serious thought to changing platforms yet, we might if forced to hand over data despite not participating in the spaces they're policing."
The communities of the people I spoke with aren't thrilled about Discord's age-verification policy either, which feels like it furthers the point that Discord's mishandling of this could result in an exodus (at least for folks in the TTRPG space)
"There have definitely been discussions, and I think reception is universally negative," Ingamells said. "The Discord changes do seem to follow the trend of the widespread 'enshittification' of the internet. Ultimately, I don't think anyone is surprised."
"We've seen lots of folks worried about the change, and we're likely to take a good long look at our communities following the change to see how affected we are and if there's a need for change to a less data-hungry platform. But since our spaces are already 'teen-appropriate experiences,' we assume that we won't be affected, but it's incredibly disheartening to leave that up to chance," Daði said.
"I believe [people in my Discord] were the ones who alerted me to the upcoming changes, alongside my amazing mod team," Fay said. "The reception is almost entirely negative so far, and we had a whole discussion about the situation in a very measured way over on a livestream I did after the announcement came out. The consensus is that, between Discord's history of data leaking, the general sense of distrust my largely American audience has with corporations, and the obvious holes in the rollout plan that Discord has outlined under the guise of protecting children (i.e. if that were actually the case, why would unverified adults be tossed into the same user permission pool as under-13 accounts?), this is just a terrible idea."
As for where so many of us would go, I don't think there's a consensus. A few people in my social circles (as well as my own Discord server that I use to track my own D&D and Nimble games) have thrown around TeamSpeak, but that carries with it its own problems at the moment--as seen on Twitter, TeamSpeak is currently experiencing an "incredible surge of new users" that has caused "current hosting capacity [to have been] reached in many regions, especially in the United States."
Element and Commet, both Matrix-based messenger apps, have been put forward as options (and I do like the simplicity of the latter), as has Stoat. A few of my peers and friends are even thinking about using Slack, which amuses me, given how I solely think of that app as a professional virtual workplace, not a fun space to hang out with other people. And even if something like Slack works for someone like me, who tends to only be the Game Master for the same close-knit group of 10-15 players, I imagine it would be expensive to maintain for third-party TTRPG writers and creators that have followings numbering in the tens of thousands (and sometimes more).
"Who knows, perhaps this endless barrage of additional verification is the first step in returning to a more decentralized internet, like the one I grew up with," Daði said at the end of our email interview, quickly adding, "But, I can't tell right now." Neither can I, sadly. And that's the problem.
Whenever Discord inevitably falls apart, it's going to suck. The TTRPG community will bounce back and find a home somewhere else, but I just know that so many spaces and friends are going to get lost in the shuffle when that occurs (unless something changes) because we are not ready for it.
Source
If you haven't been keeping up with it, Discord's decision to roll out new age-verification policies worldwide was not well-received. Discord attempted to downplay concerns, but a disclaimer on the FAQ about Discord's age-verification policies pointed to the app testing a relationship with Persona--that disclaimer was quickly and quietly deleted, though an archived version still exists. Persona's shady associations with ICE and other deportation efforts in the United States further raised people's eyebrows.
In a statement to Kotaku, Discord said that its work with Persona was part of a "limited test" that is no longer happening. But for some users, even a brief association with Persona was enough for them to start looking elsewhere. Discord's delay of its age-verification policy, detailed in a blog post on February 24, doesn't seem to have slowed down people wanting to find a Discord alternative.
But there's nowhere to go...
From what I've seen in the tabletop roleplaying game servers that I'm a part of, there are two main concerns. The first is that Discord's new policy--despite the company's assurances--will create risks for users within the TTRPG space, as a not-insignificant number of those users have a marginalized identity or are privacy-conscious and could be put into danger if their data was leaked. Even the most secure systems can fail eventually after all. The other concern is that Discord implementing mandatory age-verification in any form will drive some users from the platform entirely (either from discomfort with the policy, or from solidarity with friends or peers who don't like the policy), which could splinter existing communities.
As users have been canceling their Nitro subscriptions or asking around for Discord alternatives, it's highlighted a key flaw: As much as Discord has brought some of the furthest corners of the TTRPG community together (especially when COVID-19 moved so much of the hobby to virtual spaces), that total reliance means that if Discord were to ever go away or be deemed too terrible to use, there isn't an obvious backup choice for people to flock to.
So whether it happens this year or even further down the line--Discord's recent IPO increases the likelihood that the platform will face enshittification--Discord falling apart and fracturing would be devastating for the tabletop roleplaying game community. Discord is typically the go-to option for the virtual adventures played by casual hobbyists, the communal spaces that third-party creators and professional writers use to interact with fans, the watch-party spaces for certain actual plays, and the hubs by which professional Game Masters both track and run their games that make up their business. If lots of folks leave Discord and spread out to different apps, it's going to be really hard to find each other and reconnect. It wouldn't be all dissimilar to how when Twitter fell apart, splintering so many once-unified hubs of information, community, and conversation across Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon.
"To my understanding, [Discord is] nearly universal for all the D&D groups and communities that I'm familiar with," TTRPG creator, panelist, and performer Diana Fay told me. "I don't think I know of a single alternative that people use consistently for their groups, except for maybe one that used Mighty Networks in the past. But yes, all of my D&D groups use Discord, and I have a Discord for my community that I use for basically everything that's not microblogging."
While they're not great for casual conversation or remaining glued into a community, there are some well-known alternatives to playing TTRPGs virtually. Virtual tabletop Roll20 has its own built-in, browser-based support for camera and microphone--and so by extension, Demiplane does as well following the two of them merging. The same is true for virtual tabletop Alchemy RPG, which focuses on using pretty maps and music to make a more cinematic (but more expensive) experience for tabletop roleplaying games.
You have to make accounts on Roll20 or Alchemy RPG to use them, however. Is that hard? No. But convincing anyone to adopt a new app is a battle in itself, and so many have admitted it's just easier to use Discord. Roll20 added Discord integration back in July 2024, for example, and D&D has an official Discord bot, Avrae, that makes it easier to play the game through Discord. Discord is clearly where the audience is, and an important consideration to several TTRPG businesses.
Mage Hand Press editor-in-chief Mike Holik concurred with the sentiment of Discord's importance to his business. Mage Hand Press creates a huge assortment of third-party player-facing content for D&D, like new spells, character species, and classes and subclasses. The publisher has had a few releases on D&D's official virtual portal, DnDBeyond, which lots of players use alongside Discord to play the game online. And anecdotally, I've played at a few tables that use classes created by Mage Hand Press--they make good stuff!
"We use [Discord] really heavily," Holik told me. "We use [Discord] for play testing. So it's our earliest chance to show off content before it goes out to a wider audience, so it gives us early readers and feedback, and it allows us to refine our work. We use it for marketing. We have a Kickstarter running right now, and one of the cool things about Kickstarter is that you can track where all of the sources of traffic are coming from, and a lot of those are just folks who are very invested on Discord, our most hardcore people are clicking the link on Discord because that's where they see it first."
Mage Hand Press isn't the only one to use Discord as a means of gathering feedback on future products either. "All of our playtest feedback for our digital magazine, The Broadsheets, as well as specific Adept PDFs or other products our [Patreon] patrons get access to is organized through Discord's forums and threads features," writer and director Daði told me. Alongside his girlfriend AB, Daði runs the YouTube channel Mystic Arts, which pulls from Daði's decade of experience running D&D campaigns to offer incredible advice for Game Masters looking to up their game's settings, characters, and stories.
"We use [Discord] to adjust the products after publication to feedback received. So I'd say as of right now, Discord is integral to the way we communicate with our fans and with our team of creatives."
A part of the tabletop community
Gaining access to Mystic Arts' exclusive Discord requires paying for a membership to the Mystic Arts Patreon. Getting access to a private Discord is a common perk for TTRPG creators--TTRPG YouTubers Ginny Di, XP to Level 3, DnD Shorts, Bob World Builder, and Dungeon Dudes; TTRPG mapmakers Czepeku, Stained Karbon Maps, Domille's Wondrous Works, and Forgotten Adventures; and actual play shows tabletopnotch, Venture Forth, Transplanar RPG, and Natural Six (among so, so, so many others) all have private Discord servers that can usually only be joined by purchasing at least the lowest tier of their respective Patreons. It's a way of both showing your favorite creator some additional appreciation while also finding a space online filled with people who also enjoy that particular creator.
Not every creator does this. Some creators in the TTRPG space don't publicly advertise a private Discord server that fans can join at all--Pointy Hat, Dingo Doodles, Vibe Check D&D, and Willowares are a few examples. Others, like Mage Hand Press and Fay, have free-to-join Discord servers. That's also the case for Ghostfire Gaming, a major third-party publisher in the D&D space best known for Grim Hollow, a fantastic and delightfully dreadful grimdark horror setting that my friends are too chicken to play with me.
"While I wouldn't necessarily categorize our Discord community as the 'hardcore' fans, I do think having a Discord server provides an opportunity for the most engaged fans of our content to find like-minded people and engage with us directly," Ghostfire Gaming chief operations officer Nick Ingamells told me.
"We'll generally take note of community discussions in Discord, especially when it comes to talk about balance or what is/isn’t being enjoyed from new material. However, as our community is well aware, whenever we run playtests, we also provide a form, and 'make sure you add that feedback to the form' is a very common response during playtests. Discord conversations move too quickly to be particularly useful sources of feedback [for us]."
Discord is also used as an avenue for creators to converse with each other and establish partnerships or pursue opportunities. "I recently was talking about [how] Bluesky bars off certain things if you don't age-verify," YouTuber, storyteller, and podcaster Dael Kingsmill said on Episode 229 of the Eldritch Lorecast, a TTRPG podcast connected to Ghostfire Gaming that Kingsmill is a co-host of. "I can't access messages on Bluesky because I haven't age-verified myself because it's out to a third party where you have to do a biometric face scan or give them your government ID--neither of which particularly appeals to me. I know I should probably just suck it up because my biometrics are all over YouTube anyway, but it's the principle of the thing, you know what I mean?"
"And that's a real problem for me because I get my business offers largely from social media. I used to get them via Twitter, now I often get them via Bluesky--it was, by the way, a business message I was referring to when I said, 'I can't access my messages on Bluesky.' The place we fell back to to have that conversation was Discord. So I think at least in my branch of this industry, a lot of business gets done in an informal context on social media. And I think what really troubles me about it, is that a lot of these things feel very much, I would say, like, 'Oh, won't somebody please think of the children,' as a potential smokescreen in order for business to get a lot of this really sensitive data. It's very valuable--they can do a lot with it. I'm not a fan."
"I know a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in the RPG community relies on [Discord] too," Daði said. "Creators frequently organize collaborations and conventions in servers, private messages, and curated spaces. The entire creator ecosystem is run out of small Discords at the moment, from events like Ginny Di's and Pointy Hat's Monster Week to our own Dungeon Jam. I personally use Discord to communicate with our sponsors, actual play players, and industry veterans. I have no idea how those networks will rebuild themselves if and when Discord falls."
But won't you think of the children?
Were Discord to fall apart after implementing this worldwide age-verification policy, it would supposedly at least be for good intentions--the company has repeatedly claimed that this change is solely about protecting children. And no one I spoke to was against children's safety. For them (and me), it is a question of whether handing adults' information over to a third-party age-verification app is the correct answer for Discord, or simply the best answer that the company has at this time. Electronic Frontier Foundation points out just 10 of the dangers in a policy like that, some of which are harmful to the very kids that it's trying to protect.
"When it comes to discussion of online spaces--and it is drastically different from what the internet was like when I was a kid--I think that it is valiant to want to make a safer space online for children," Kingsmill said on the Eldritch Lorecast. "But I don't think we're going toward the correct answer. I think people are rushing toward the fastest answer. And that fast answer seems to be, 'Well, we'll just stop them from doing it,' as if that works, and, 'We're going to give all the information that the adults use to these corporations that we have barely any control over.' It feels like a race toward any solution because the right solutions are harder to implement, and the right solutions being full-on education in how the internet is your second life."
Most of the TTRPG spaces that I'm a part of aren't solely adult-oriented, so age verification shouldn't kick me from most of the Discord servers that I'm a part of. But I am a part of a few servers that are designed for adult audiences, as are several of my peers. And while some seem content to simply curate their Discord experience, removing themselves from the 18+ spaces to avoid needing to verify their identity anywhere, some would rather not put in the effort and stop using Discord altogether in favor of something else. And for those who do have a Discord server tied to a business or large community, they have to decide whether to keep their already adult-oriented server marked as 18+ and potentially push out people who just don't want to verify their age.
"This is where my stance might have a bit of nuance to it, only because I am pretty publicly adamant about the fact that my content is not meant for children--especially not people under the age of 13," Fay said. "Ignoring the fact that I just swear a lot, I try to make it clear that I have no desire to have content that's aimed at children, because in my opinion, that's just... weird. I have zero qualifications to address kids with my content and would never want to give that impression. Although the main underlying mission of my content is educational and can even express the benefits of tabletop role-playing games for development/to help people of all ages discover themselves through gaming--touting the psychological benefits--even that is me speaking to adults and educators and trying to give them tools they need to have these conversations with the kids in their life as appropriate."
"I've never attempted to make my content or Discord server teen-friendly, and in fact have done the opposite in the past and briefly turned on the 18+ feature on the server prior to this impending March age-verification rollout. But again, the way that Discord aims to go about this change is a very, very bad idea, and thus we reverted the 18+ designation in the server settings after a few days so as not to use their native system for forced ID/facial scan verification. Instead, I'll be amending the server's 'Rules' channel to simply state in text that in order to access the server, you confirm you are at least 18 years old. Obviously, people can still get around that if they really wanted to, but it's far better than what Discord has planned."
"Discord is the main way I talk to our members and patrons, and even though we don't use any NSFW features on our servers it's disheartening to see companies requiring data like they're requested especially in this day and age where big tech companies are regularly breached and hacked, and inevitably this data ends up on marketplaces where they're sold for a pittance to foul outside actors," Daði said when I asked if he felt he needed to make any changes to keep his Discord aligned with something okay for all-ages. "While we haven't given any serious thought to changing platforms yet, we might if forced to hand over data despite not participating in the spaces they're policing."
Growing disdain for Discord
The communities of the people I spoke with aren't thrilled about Discord's age-verification policy either, which feels like it furthers the point that Discord's mishandling of this could result in an exodus (at least for folks in the TTRPG space)
"There have definitely been discussions, and I think reception is universally negative," Ingamells said. "The Discord changes do seem to follow the trend of the widespread 'enshittification' of the internet. Ultimately, I don't think anyone is surprised."
"We've seen lots of folks worried about the change, and we're likely to take a good long look at our communities following the change to see how affected we are and if there's a need for change to a less data-hungry platform. But since our spaces are already 'teen-appropriate experiences,' we assume that we won't be affected, but it's incredibly disheartening to leave that up to chance," Daði said.
"I believe [people in my Discord] were the ones who alerted me to the upcoming changes, alongside my amazing mod team," Fay said. "The reception is almost entirely negative so far, and we had a whole discussion about the situation in a very measured way over on a livestream I did after the announcement came out. The consensus is that, between Discord's history of data leaking, the general sense of distrust my largely American audience has with corporations, and the obvious holes in the rollout plan that Discord has outlined under the guise of protecting children (i.e. if that were actually the case, why would unverified adults be tossed into the same user permission pool as under-13 accounts?), this is just a terrible idea."
As for where so many of us would go, I don't think there's a consensus. A few people in my social circles (as well as my own Discord server that I use to track my own D&D and Nimble games) have thrown around TeamSpeak, but that carries with it its own problems at the moment--as seen on Twitter, TeamSpeak is currently experiencing an "incredible surge of new users" that has caused "current hosting capacity [to have been] reached in many regions, especially in the United States."
Element and Commet, both Matrix-based messenger apps, have been put forward as options (and I do like the simplicity of the latter), as has Stoat. A few of my peers and friends are even thinking about using Slack, which amuses me, given how I solely think of that app as a professional virtual workplace, not a fun space to hang out with other people. And even if something like Slack works for someone like me, who tends to only be the Game Master for the same close-knit group of 10-15 players, I imagine it would be expensive to maintain for third-party TTRPG writers and creators that have followings numbering in the tens of thousands (and sometimes more).
"Who knows, perhaps this endless barrage of additional verification is the first step in returning to a more decentralized internet, like the one I grew up with," Daði said at the end of our email interview, quickly adding, "But, I can't tell right now." Neither can I, sadly. And that's the problem.
Whenever Discord inevitably falls apart, it's going to suck. The TTRPG community will bounce back and find a home somewhere else, but I just know that so many spaces and friends are going to get lost in the shuffle when that occurs (unless something changes) because we are not ready for it.
Source