#forums

This week Discord announced that to continue to have full access to their platform, all users will be required to verify their ages using either a face scan or a photo of their government ID. This massively intrusive policy goes into effect in March, and if you trust Discord with this kind of data... please remember that in October 2025 there was a massive data breach of over 70,000 records from one of their former vendors. This is bad. Very, very bad. Over the last decade, Discord has risen to prominence as a place where people can build niche communities. Both companies and individuals have used the service to build their own "servers" for niche discussions and direct interactions. It's effectively been used to emulate the features of old school forums and chat rooms because people have gotten sick of the toxicity of centralized social media. But for all of its perceived privacy and siloing, Discord is still just another central company controlling the platform. They own every "server," and you're just using their space. So when a policy decision like this happens, it means we're all screwed. To me this is just another example of how we need to decentralize the web again. Because we used to have siloed, independent online communities where people could talk about their niche thing and connect in private. We called them forums. Someone would just pay for a little webhosting, install PHPBB, and then boom — there you go. You might make it so only logged in users can read them, but anyone can get them off the ground. Now can they handle everything Discord does? No. Sadly with the death of Skype there are very few good, free options for voice chat out there. But that's not what 90% of Discord communities are used for. I mentioned this almost a year ago (and touched on it again in November), but modern forum software has come a long way since PHPBB2. We run a Flarum install for Nerd&Tie[dot]Social (the official Nerd & Tie forums), and that works amazingly on mobile. There are other options like Discourse and MyBB too. But you just need one person in the community to get some shared hosting, do the install, and then bob's your uncle. Setting up independent forums is the only way to ensure that our communities are no longer at the whims of corporations that fundamentally do not care about us or our online safety. Use fake names. Hide your personal information. Only share what you want to share. Use the internet like it's 2006. I call it being an internet cockroach, some call it the "Indie Web," but either way the only reason that we're at the whims of these companies is because we let ourselves be. There's a simple solution to that problem, and it's just to go do stuff on our own. Seems like the best option, really. (Also the old forums for my site still exist. No one's used them in years, but they're technically still up as of 2/2026)