Yeah, you go ahead & do that, & watch how many people will jump ship to other alternatives while you lose a lot of money & subscriptions, especially when you’ve been hacked before.
People have found other alternatives to TikTok, & they’ll do the same with Discord.
i wouldn’t be so optimistic. normies have a tendency to accept quite a lot.
I mean, you’re not wrong, but have you seen what those alternatives were?
I’m not against age restrictions, but letting every site brew their own method is a really bad idea. I’m not going to upload my legal ID to every random site; that’s a recipe for identity theft, and it’s a really bad idea to teach people that that’s normal or acceptable.
And age guessing through facial recognition is incredibly unreliable. My 16 year old son has already been accepted as 18+ somewhere. I had a full moustache at 14. Others are blessed with a babyface well into their 30s.
The only right way to do this, is if governments provide their citizens with an eID that any site can ask “is this person 18+?” and get an accurate answer without any other identifiable info. And if you don’t want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.
But instead everybody’s got to cobble together their own improvised system that we just have to trust blindly is not going to sell our data.
and it’s a really bad idea to teach people that that’s normal or acceptable.
This is a point so few people mention. Normalising having to give up personal information online is such a dangerous thing to do and companies/governments that enforce this shit are setting people up to be scammed
And if you don’t want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.
Actually, no on the fly communication with the issuer is required for selective disclose. You just need a signed document with individually salted hashes of different properties and you can create a zero knowledge proof non-interactively. Zero knowledge meaning that truely nothing but the disclosed property (age > 18, County == DE, or whatever) is communicated to anyone.
Theres a lot of other cool stuff that can be done with zero knowledge digital identity wallets. You could for example hash your pubkey together with the service providers pk and disclose that as a per service ID, but not reveal your pk. This allows linkability within one service (as a login method for example) while preventing cross service linkability.
That prevents the site from knowing your identity, but I’m not convinced it prevents the government from knowing you visit the site. The government could keep track of which document corresponds to which individual whenever they issue / sign it.
So if the government mandated that each signed proof of “age>18” was stored by the service and mapped to each account (to validate their proof), then the government could request the service to provide them copy of the proof and then cross-check from their end which particular individual is linked to it.
know what sites you visit
The reason why it works is a bit complicated, but basically the trick is that the signatures are not immutable. Given a valid signature, it is possible to create a new valid signature over the same content that is not linkable to the original one. This means that it is still possible to derive, what authority signed the document, but the authority cannot know in which transaction it has signed that specific document.
If you have no way to link the signature to the original document, then how do you validate that the signature is coming from a document without repetition / abuse?
How do you ensure there aren’t hundreds of signatures used for different accounts all done by the same stolen eID that might be circulating online without the government realizing it?
Can the government revoke the credentials of a specific individual? …because if they can’t then that looks like a big gap that could create a market of ever-growing stolen eIDs (or reusing eIDs from the deceased) …and if they can revoke, what stops the government from creating a simulation in which they revoke one specific individual and then check what signatures end up being revoked to identify which ones belong to that person? The government can mandate the services to provide them all data they have so it can be analyzed as if they were Issuer, Registry and Verifier, all in one, without separation of powers.
I know there are ways to try and fix this, but those ways have other problems too, which end up forcing the need for a compromise… there’s no algorithm that perfectly provides anonymity and full verifiability with a perfect method of revocation that does not require checks at every user login. For example, with the eIDAS 2.0 system (considered zero-knowledge proof), the government does have knowledge of the “secret serial number” that is used in revocation, so if they collude with the service they can identify people by running some tests on the data.
The anonymous credential signature scheme that is planned to be used is BBS#, I don’t know how it handles revocation.
Additionally, BBS# proposes a solution for device-binding from ECDSA-signatures, relying on re-randomization of ECDSA signatures and public keys. Furthermore, a trust model for BBS# that covers revocation and proof of validity is defined in [BBT2025].
[BBT2025]: Trust Model : Securing digital identity with advanced cryptographic algorithms, available at https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/BBS-SHARP-doc-eudi-wallet , 2025
I haven’t found where in that source the implementation of revocation is discussed.
Seems like no ways of enabling privacy preserving revocation with bbs# are known jet. This means that arithmetic circuit based proofs would be the only way to enable revocation. And as they can prove any statement in NP with ZK, the fact that they can prove that a revocation id is not part of a given list is obvious. https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-standards-and-technical-specifications/blob/main/docs/technical-specifications/ts4-zkp.md#22-proofs-for-arithmetic-circuits-programmable-zkps
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/main-51.pdf As crescent by Microsoft is one of the considered implemations, this paper is probably the most relevant work on revocation of anonymous credentials.
if you don’t want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.
I feel a proxy would not really make much of a difference. If the government keeps a mapping of which eID corresponds to each real person from their end (which they would do if they want to know what sites you visit) then they can simply request the services (and/or intermediaries) to provide account mapping of the eIDs (and they could mandate by law those records are kept, like they often do with ISPs and their IP addresses). The service might not know who that eID belongs to… but the government can know it, if they want.
The government needs to want to protect your privacy. If the government really wants to know what sites you visit, there’s no reason why they would want to provide you with a eID that is truly anonymous at all levels and that isn’t really linked to you, not even in state-owned databases.
Of course, a government has many ways they can legislate your rights, freedom and privacy away. But if you want to do this in a way that preserves privacy, this is how you do it.
Of course the government knows who you are; they have to. They issue your ID, and that makes them the only organisation that can issue your eID. But a government that serves its people would provide this an a service, with the proxy, to ensure privacy is respected.
And of course with a warrant they can and should be able to demand access to the proxy’s or the website’s logs. But only with a warrant. That is the bar that the government should always have to clear before they can get access to any citizen’s privacy.
I agree that a government that wants privacy can actually do it in a way that ensures privacy. That’s also what I was saying.
My point was that this is up to the government, and no amount of “route the request through a proxy” would patch that up, that’s not gonna help this case. Because this is not something that’s tracked in the networking layer, it’s in the application layer.
If the government wants to protect privacy, they can do it without you needing to use proxies, and if the government wants to see what sites you visit using these certificates, they can do it even if you were to use proxies.
If the proxy is independent, I don’t see how the government can know what the requesting site is. They can only see the proxy. I don’t mean a standard network proxy of course, but a proxy for the entire request. That’s probably the source of our misunderstanding.
They don’t need to know the requesting address in order for them to know if it was you the person corresponding to that proof of age, because the information is in the data being exchanged. These kind of verifications don’t depend or rely on IP address or networking, these are credentials that are checked on the application layer.
In fact, they don’t even need to directly communicate with the government for this.
This is equivalent to a registration office for a service asking you provide a paper stamped by the government that certifies your age without the paper actually saying who you are… the service does not need to contact the government if they can trust the stamp in the paper and the government official signature (which in this case is mathematical proof). And even though the service office can’t see your name in the paper, the government knows that the number written in the paper links to you individually, because they can keep record of which particular paper number was issued to which individual, even if your name wasn’t written in the document itself.
So, the government can, at any given time, go to those offices, ask them to hand in the paper corresponding to a particular registration and check the number to see who it belongs to.
The traceability is in the document, not in the manner in which you send it. It does not matter if you send the document to a different country for someone else to send it from a different address, on your behalf (ie. a proxy). If the government can internally cross-reference the registration papers as being the ones linked to your governmental ID, they can know it’s yours regardless of how it reached the offices. So this way they can check if you registered yourself in any particular place they wanna target and what your account is.
Obviously the government knows it’s you. That’s the whole purpose. But they don’t know the site that’s requesting this, if the proxy hides that from them.
They might not know the list of sites you visit right away in the same way they could by contacting your ISP when you are not using a proxy, but that wasn’t my point.
My point is that they can check with a specific site that uses this verification method and see if you have an account on that site, and if you do, which account in particular. And in a way that is much more directly linked to you personally than an IP address (which might be linked to the household/internet access you’re using but that isn’t necessarily under your name).
So in this situation they can indeed know if you use any one particular site that they choose to target, as long as that site is requiring you to provide them with a document, regardless of how many layers of proxies you (or the site) choose to be under.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the site that’s requesting this”, the site does not need to request anything from the government, they just need to have previously agreed on a “secret” mathematical verification method that works for every document. The digital equivalent of a stamp/signature.
Its Joever
Discord is kill
is there a practical way to delete all your messages at once?
personally i’d also backup the messages before deleting, this works well https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
undiscord is good.
We need something like what Lemmy is to Reddir, except for discord. A decentralized application with multiple instances that users can join.
I have a discord server of about ~1K members, and would love to spin up a docker container to host my own instance that users can join. Chat, voice/ video calls, video streaming, etc. I’d love to support a FOSS project like this. Maybe even have E2E while we’re at it!
Closest I can think of is Matrix. Element isn’t bad.
Matrix is the way, and element is the best so far, but it needs more work.
Stoat (formerly called Revolt) is potentially that. I tried it a while back and it was still rough around the edges, but the potential was there. Open source and has potential for self hosting.
Stoat.chat
Clickable link for anyone curious:
Good old Teamspeak. Everyone can host his own server.
Well this is horrid. Must we really all go back to TeamSpeak?
Why did we leave it?
teamspeak 4 felt like it was in the stone age while discord had a bunch of cool ass features for chatting outside of voice. it also was much more appealing to casuals by being free to use and super easy to set up your own server, whereas setting up your own teamspeak server involved portforwarding and whatnot that turns off the vast majority of “normies”
We left it mostly because there were better services out there + the UI was considered outdated and all. But personally, I’d rather take the outdated UI than have my data stolen.
Have not uses this so I can’t speak to their viability, but there’s also @root
On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
Still a no for me for now, but a bit misleading: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally
Best thing you can do with discord? Uninstall it.
Like I mentioned in a similar post, please look at this alternative: https://stoat.chat/
Seams cool, but why not matrix since matrix has different instances you can chose from.
forgot to add that one, my other post did include Matrix as well :)
Does this still require you to ‘call’ people to be in a voice channel? Or is it now similar to discord in that you join a channel and can hear anyone in it?
can somebody screenshot the article i cant read it
Well, time to dump Discord after I finish school.
That’s a no go from here…
What about Fractal? It even have a flatpak https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal
Fractal is not multiplatform (i.e. isn’t available on Android and on iOS) and Matrix can be confusing to people not already familiar with it.
And no, a wall of text explaining what Matrix is won’t help since most of Discord’s users are teenagers with a very short attention span that don’t read much (unless they’re forced to by school).
Potential solution, may be controversial.
Just add a vertical video with Minecraft parkour or with CS surf on the bottom and a half naked woman from a freelance platform explaining what it is.
There are also Element and SchildiChat as alternative clients.
MSN Messenger for the win!
The same as Discord (IRC with a fancy GUI) but with the fact your data is unconsentionally sent to an intelligence agency for analysis.
