The Discord Situation
As many may know: Discord is officially introducing age verification starting in March. Honestly, I had a feeling this would eventually happen, but I was hoping maybe it would happen later within the year?
Anyway, something I've noticed is a lot of people are planning to leave Discord and moving to different alternatives, some of which include TeamSpeak, Stoat, and Fluxer. I don't really do voice chats so I can't use TeamSpeak, but I did download and try out Stoat and Fluxer.
Stoat has a weird UI, and it kind of hurts my eyes when looking at it for too long. However, I really like how it has certain features for free that you had to pay Discord Nitro for, like using GIFs as profile pictures and using banners. It does, however, seem to have connection issues and struggles to update a lot, probably because of the influx of new people.
Fluxer looks almost exactly like Discord, which I like. It's open-source, and part of something called the Fediverse. Sadly, it has a subscription service like Nitro to be able to use certain features like banners and GIFs as profile pictures, but it is significantly cheaper than Nitro.
With all of that being said, I don't know if I can really leave Discord.
Sure, the age verification system sucks, but it's only for accessing 18+ servers and channels... so far. It's not the end of the world, but if you had to use your ID to actually use Discord as a whole, that becomes a problem, and sadly with the way things are going, it can happen.
I was thinking of cancelling my Nitro since so many people are doing it in retaliation against Discord; however, is that really going to do anything? I honestly don't know, but I'll probably stay on Discord for the time being just because I have a friend there I talk with and there's a server I like interacting in.
It's a shame this is happening, and it's worrying that there isn't much time left to make new friends or find a safe space to interact and be myself in. What can you do?