Discord now requires age verification, and why you should reconsider the age-old forum
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We're not even two months into 2026, and yet another large social media network has done the seemingly unthinkable and instituted a policy that triggers a mass exodus.
I am of course talking about Discord's roll-out of age verification globally, across the entire site.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/875309/discord-age-verification-global-roll-out
Not only will they require age verification, Discord is also utilising AI technology to analyze your content and habits to infer your age. While not a direct privacy violation, it is at least to me nearing that sort of behaviour that one ought to be very wary of.
So here's a rehash of our ongoing pitch for you to use a forum instead of Discord
Use a forum instead of Discord!
Now that that's out of the way — why?
The standard reasons aplenty. Searchability and indexability of content. Ownership of content. No more walled gardens.
Imagine a place where you can contribute your content to, not to feed a machine, but because you want to share your knowledge and talk to other people (radical idea, I know.)
Realize too that your content can then kept secure in a place where it can be shared and celebrated, archived for future readers, and indexable by search engines so it can be discovered widely.
That same place also means you're not screaming into a void — that your every contribution adds just that little bit more to the community around it. You're not just talking in a public square, you're build a corpus of content that you can and should be proud of.
We've spent the greater part of a decade pouring our time and energy into walled gardens... for the benefit of some faceless corporation. It's high time to turn the tables around and empower yourself!
So what's the alternative? There are many such alternatives one could jump ship to. Discord has implemented many features that make it stand out in a sea of competitors. Any one of those features could be something that make it special to you. In many cases, those features cannot be easily replicated. The question you need to ask yourself is whether this constitutes a deal-breaker, or whether you are willing to give it up. Do you need custom profiles? Do you need high-definition streaming? Coloured themes?
One of the standout features of Discord is its use of a single login across all of its communities. This is their network effect. The Fediverse has its own complement to this network effect. Simply put, each user can talk to any other user on the fediverse, without impediment, without additional logins, without any barriers. This is not only the dream of the fediverse, it is its reality. We have this now, and it is worth celebrating.
So what is that place? That place is a forum. A bulletin board. That place from back in your childhood where you might've spent far too many hours talking to random people. Forums haven't gone anywhere, and they've been silently chugging along all these years. They've even kept pace with modern web technologies and apps, and NodeBB is one of them.
We offer that fully indexable, super fast forum engine wrapped up in a responsive theme for use on all of your devices. We offer extensibility via a first-class plugin and theme system so you can make your forum your own. We offer federation via ActivityPub, so your forum can talk to other forums, and we offer the simple fact that when you start your own forum, you're doing so because you want to be that community builder for yourself, not for anybody else.
Do it. Ditch Discord, set up a forum. I'll help you do it, too.
Self-host it, or give our plans (as low as $20/mo) a spin. Discounts for non-profits and charities.
