Dear fellow Discord users. sigh Guess I'm gonna complain once again, and again and again. But hey, if you learn something, that'd worth it for once.
So, it's Feburary 2026. Discord has been data breached (due to a "third-party" customer, and approximatively 70,000 users that may have had government-ID photos exposed, which they used to review age-related appeals. That's already massive and too bad for the people that got through it, even if you're not, that still concerns you, because it may happen again, knowing Discord, welp, that's not getting things better.
You may or may not know... They're gonna push it further in March 2026 with their so-called "teen-by-default" setting, which sets anyone into a limited functionality setting that will, basically, lack you from doing much stuff. Especially too bad for the gooners.
But yeah maybe it happened once, and it won't happen again... Right? I think it will. But even if really nothing appears to be breached again... that doesn't mean it's safe to proceed to scan your face or your ID.
Oh and, they're lying in front of your face.
Wow okay. Cool. I don't think they would do that anyway because storing a massive AI model locally isn't really the best thing to do, AND as you may have seen with the recent data breach... It was local... How did they end up in a data breach?!... Still not obvious?? It's a lie...
Can you sue them? No. Because they said they were allowed to. Where? In their privacy policy of course!
Nobody reads that, so why not make it super vague so that they won't really bother, and bonus rights innit?
But yeah. Basically, if you wanna goon to your precious Discord AI catgirl, good luck, because you'll have to scan your lil face. And honestly, no, you shouldn't.
Discord recently moved to Persona for their face verification thing. This reddit fella explains it very well :
Discord has assured its users that it is using k-ID for its facial age estimation. This is a bait-and-switch.
k-ID is an on-device zero-knowledge proof. You scan your face, and then k-ID runs its assessment model locally, and estimates your age. Discord only recieves a token that say you are an adult or are not an adult. This is the most privacy-preserving method for age verification. k-ID is not a fully ethical actor though, and runs posthog to spy on your device. A canny user can block posthog at the DNS level, which makes the process actually privacy-preserving.
Persona is a corporate partner of Palantir, a spying and surveillance company that is building a model for law enforcement and governments to track everything that all citizens do online or in real life. Persona is a third party identity processor that behaves extremely unethically. They "delete" your information within minutes (usually), but they retain the embeddings. The embeddings are the machine-readable portion of your face or ID. This is then fed into their model and permanently retained. Your information is never deleted, and because embeddings are not considered personally identifiable information in many jurisdictions (because they can only be read by machines and not humans), there is often no legal route to ever have your personally identifiable information deleted.
Discord has promised k-ID, but is giving us PersonaSource
Basically, Palantir, Persona, these silly goofy names, like hey look Persona is like that game! But those people doesn't look as cool as the game.
In a nutshell, they're government snitches. They get data, and they do WHATEVER they want with it. Before Tencent, now this, how kind of our Discord.
But now, let's get into the, ehm ehm, #general, of what Discord loves to fiddle around while you believe it's just a, innocent, chatting app.
Discord is basically for profit. Discord was made for the fact of profiting by farming the most data they can. It's that simple.
Remember OpenFeint? This thing was here right before Discord and made by our "beloved" Citron. It was a rushed thing that took all your personal infos and was made to be sold out to another company. And it worked, flawlessly. People got trolled. And everyone on Discord doesn't know they are getting trolled right now, which is problematic. Sure they changed CEO, but that's still terrible.
Their moderation is, questionable, it's not really effective and bans people that were the victims. Not gonna link anything, just go on r/discord or ask a discord ex-user, because it's... obvious.
Support, well, if you wanna do a report, an account recovery, or whatever, they'll most likely hit you with a bot and pre-pasted text.
It's easy, it's a bot or they don't respond at all. If you got a genuine response, it'll only happen once or twice.
For their app, it's bad. Their mobile app is clunky and not smooth, for their web application, it's just getting heavier everyday as they're installing really useless cosmetics costing you your entire life savings.
And most of the current Discord activity is like Telegram but worse. I've seen a thousand of servers that illegally sell Nitro over carding, aka stealing the grandma's credit card and buying the most Nitro possible, since the Nitro is free for them, they sell it cheaper and that's what's called money laundering.
And straight up gore, CSAM material, doxes, not deleted for days.
And finally, the last point. Last final point that I hope will wake you up from this shithole.
Discord could ban anyone, for any reason. Whoever you are, you have the same chance as anyone.
You could have been on Discord for such years, many years, even could be a Discord OG. You could have a lot of servers, communities you manage, probably, and even all your friends, including some that only use Discord for some reason.
And Discord could break all of that. They could fuck you over and terminate your account. Everything you had, gone.
Even if you cry, you tear, you mutilate, praying to the Discord support, they will keep hitting you with bot answers, and nothing to help. They will tell you you have violated their imaginary laws.
Let me be clear. Discord holds the keys to your heart. And of course, they won't give a shit about you. You are a single user, you are nothing compared to their finnicky eyes and their massive business generated by their humongous data sharing and their totally useful Nitro subscription.
If you use Discord, I still don't understand you. Why would you use a platform that supports pedophilia, racism, money laundering, hardcore spying, harassing, and yet, does and will ban you at some point... Then alright! Anyone... Can be a psychopath I guess.
And it's not a bother of "But I've been here for years", or "My friends won't move", then they have to move their asses too. You're a victim of the Network effect, you think Discord is better because there are more users, which is not gonna be the case quite soon.
Moving on is beneficial, using the same, janky and terrible thing for so long is far from being advantageous. Seek for better, and then you will see how good it feels to renew.
Yes, there are alternatives, of course, I use Stoat, which is pretty good, highly looking like Discord, and has hit a massive Discord user influx after the ID verification stuff. In overall, it's probably a good one, migration is 1:1, you have to get used to the UI but it's pretty easy. It's also open-source and GDPR compliant, so you know they're doin' it.
There's also Matrix if you care a lot about privacy, it has E2EE built-in. If you wanna use it, I'd recommend you to use another homeserver and not matrix.org.
Anyway, please move on. You're being prosecuted into a platform that is no longer actually decently usable anymore. They're pushing it hard, so you should too.
If you're still not convinced...
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord
https://stallman.org/discord.html
https://cadence.moe/blog/2020-06-06-why-you-shouldnt-trust-discord
https://artemis.sh/2022/01/30/discord-holds-the-keys-to-your-heart.html
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=M5X6iLHzqAI
And there are some videos about the current situation :
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=jAyAg7DBqbg
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=lvv1QTa1on8
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=97j0Xglq_1U
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=l1Xb0RkKCik
More early, more smoother the movement will be.
Peace out.