Thank god. I was getting worried for a second
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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I was talking with a friend about this when they announced age verification. He seemed pretty optimistic that this would hopefully bring back forums/irc/vent servers or anything self hostable, but I'm not to sure. I'm sure all of us here knew what was going on with this, but I'm sure the average person still doesnt care as much and will continue to trade away privacy for convenience. We all have family and friends who come to when something like this happens, but continue to use services afterwards. Seems like we will continue to be a fun club of like minded people here on fedi stuff with most people staying with what they know.
Sorry for the rant
He seemed pretty optimistic that this would hopefully bring back forums/irc/vent servers or anything self hostable
He's naive as hell, especially if he thinks that the average person is willing to self-host fuck-all.
This'll drive some of the more privacy-conscious users somewhere else, but some might not have an option depending on what they use it for, and many software projects etc. use Discord for support ("I just won't use that software!" is an idiot's answer to that, because again, you might not have a choice). LGBT+ folks will probably be more spooked, but even they might not have a choice.
The average user won't give a flying fuck
I think he was half joking and half thinking of communities hes on that are more tech savvy. I'm also a little bit younger than him and interact with people younger than me, and I think theres a disconnect there.
Yes, I miss vent and irc but most people never used text or voice chat until it was centralized and braindead easy to use. I would like to go back to something like that, but most people never used it in the first place (compared to active users now) and probably have no interest in learning/setting it up.
As an early 30 something guy, I don't see most people my age hopping ship to something like Matrix or older comm software because of the learning curve vs Discord. Younger people even less based on my personal experience.
And listen, I know people harp on this a lot, but it's a company literally named after an orb that lets the most evil force in the world spy on your thoughts.
Minor nitpick from a LotR nerd - that’s not how the Palantíri work. But I suppose that’s not really all that important considering the real topic at hand here.
Created an account on Stoat and Matrix. So far I prefer Stoat as it's easier and more intuitive to use.
Stoat is centralized and has no e2ee
Stoat isn't perfect, but it is the best replacement. It is open source and the developers work on a volunteer basis.
Stoat is missing video calls and screen sharing, both of which Movim has while still being federated and encrypted.
It's easier to use. Besides Matrix e2ee is opt-out, and lots of public room disabled that.
Agree
Download Element.io, create an acount, create your space and rooms, invite your friends.
Leave this fucking mess that's called discord
And everyone please stop using it as a forum for the love of God. I have no use for discord as a platform, but every damn FOSS program asking me to go there for troubleshooting is insanity.
This! It's not a wiki.
And after trying it, if you want to see what alternative client apps have to offer, you can find them here.
fuck discord
Peter Thiel is mentioned over 2000 times in the Epstein files, so now you should wonder if the verification is about acquiring adults data or identifying unattended kids usernames...
Maybe we should start an international boycott and divestment of every person with any ties to Epstein. Any ties, just because the administration blacked out the details and they tell us they only visited the rape island with their family to [insert non rapey reason:] we should boycott everything and everyone involved.
Not just boycott and divest because it's morally abhorrent, but also because they can't be trusted. Someones, multitple parties, are holding information about them that could ruin them. They can weather that they were friends with Epstein, they can't weather the details being released, pictures and video of them raping kids. Israel has the information, the president's own fixers have it now too. Thiel might have it, (both the prez and thiel now have copies of all the information held by federal agencies that they exported with doge now too, you know it,) and russia might have some of it. Other oligarchs could have it, and the rich and connected could buy the information to use it if they wanted to.
Bottom line we can't trust anyone that's compromised. And while a boycott and divestment of people involved might start out small, it would receive instant buy in from the rest of the world. Any company thiel is involved in needs to be boycotted, divested from. Any government hiring his company needs to lose our support.
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Fucking obviously duh, of course it does.
Why does anybody give any kind of benefit of doubt to the class of wealthy rapists that run society and most of its institutions?
They're rapists.
They'll rape your money, your data, your attention, your energy, your time, anything they can either groom you into letting them take, or just take it by force.
And/or, if you're 'lucky', they'll just literally rape you physically.
These people are all violent sociopaths and need to be either euthanized or quarantined from society.
Imagine SexPestiny.
There ya go, thats all of these goddamned people.
Machiavellian, manipulative, beyond amoral into just actually evil, not actually very smart, they just happen to have money.
Power corrupts. Ultimate power corrupts ultimately. Story as old as time. That's something the people should understand that think you can cure authoritarianism with authoritarianism, as long as you follow the one true holy book.
Well a lot of those people are just fundamentally taught that anything Sky Daddy does quite literally is the very concept of good and just, and seem to be genuinely incapable of their own independent moral reasoning.
I know because that is how I was raised, good thing I'm more curious and inquisitive than I am blindly faithful.
We've got something around a third of the US that is ready and eager to install some kind of an overt theocracy, if you haven't heard of the Seven Mountains movement/concept look it up.
These people are fundamentally driven by irrational delusions and falsities and lies and obvious logical paradoxes, all plastered over with 'faith' that simply serves as a justification for hatred and bigotry.
I know not all religious people are like this, many of them are much more reasonable.
But we have ya'll qaeda here at home, and they will destroy everything they do not understand if they are not countered.
Another reason to take down theil
The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.
Currently the best private (encrypted) and federated Discord alternative is Movim, which I highly recommend people switch to as soon as possible (the Dev is currently working on discord-like channels with rooms).
For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://slrpnk.net/post/23012609
Dude I just spent 10 mins trying to get the thing to let me make an account. It kept saying my username didn't fit the format requirements, but then didn't tell me what the format requirements were.
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iirc OMEMO doesn't scale well compared to Megolm for large communities
I've had very consistant issues with messages not decrypting on Matrix with Megolm, and it's known for leaking a lot of metadata. I'm also not a fan of the Matrix foundation heavily courting law enforcement and getting funded by Israel. I know it's open-source, but combined with the problems I've faced using, the fact that the self-hosting side mostly targets enterprise use, and the heavy resource usage of Matrix when self-hosting, I personally think XMPP is the better option currently.
OMEMO is structured similarly to Signal's encryption. It probably doesn't scale up super well to like, 10,000+ users, but OMEMO can be turned off for super large channels where encryption might not be needed, and turned on for smaller groups where privacy is desired or between friends.
the Matrix foundation heavily courting law enforcement and getting funded by Israel
Try taking your head out of your arse for five seconds and bring minimal evidence when you make accusations like that lol
It probably doesn’t scale up super well to like, 10,000+ users
So you're confirming my point, you could have refrained from making a fool of yourself
Not sure why you're responding with that amount of hostility, I don't feel I did anything to warrant it?
Matrix's creation and development for the first 3 years was funded by Amdocs, as evidenced on the Matrix.org website itself:
How is Matrix[.]org funded? For the first three years of Matrix's development (2014-2017), most of the core contributors worked for Amdocs, who paid for them to work fulltime on Matrix. In July 2017, Amdocs considered the project to be sufficiently successful that it could now self-support and so stopped funding. The majority of the core team is now employed by Element, an independent company set up to hire the team and support Matrix's development. Other contributors are funded by their own employers or donate their own time to the project.
Amdocs is a telecom company that was founded in Israel, and later went on to run much of the US's telecom infrastructure. It has long been suspected to be involved in espionage for the Israeli government.
One of their revenue streams is providing their services to law enforcement, as they admit to here, which I'm not particularly comfortable with, personally.
So you’re confirming my point
When I say 10,000+, I mean it may not scale to encrypting that amount of people in a single room, not that the service itself cannot scale beyond that. Due to its distributed nature, it can avoid being bogged down by having many thousands of users, but if 10,000 people all tried to go into a single encrypted room where all those messages would have to be sent all at once, that room would, I assume, bog down. That's an insanely unlikely situation to ever occur, as any public server that could grow to that size would not have encryption turned on anyway (and Discord itself, the thing we're trying to replace, doesn't have any encryption at all).
Because I know exactly who I'm dealing with here, that's gross misinformation.
Congrats you've found where it was founded, now it's an independent non-profit. What's wrong with you?
https://matrix.org/blog/2025/06/dispelling-myths
Then you're mixing out Element with Matrix, alleging they provide services to law enforcement. Not the same thing my friend, if you have a problem with Element, fine, then get another client. What's the problem?
You're just proving my point again on scalability, get off the keyboard lol
You're response amounts to "Okay, so what if it was created and funded by an Israeli company known for espionage? They spun it off into a non-profit, which somehow removes any connection between those two things now."
As to Element, they are, in their own words, made up of ex-Matrix Staff.
They're legally distinct entities if that matters, but they're still from the same likely compromised institution.
If you like Matrix and find absolutely nothing concerning about the connections of the two most influential entities in that space, than by all means, carry on.
For myself, I'll stick with XMPP or Deltachat.
They spun it off into a non-profit, which somehow removes any connection between those two things now
Yes, by definition, but we can keep going.
[BIG PICTURE TO PROVE NOTHING]
You can't reject the Matrix Foundation because it's a non-profit. There is no credible evidence that Israel (government or intelligence agencies) funds or controls Matrix as a protocol.
If you like Matrix and find absolutely nothing concerning about the connections of the two most influential entities in that space, than by all means, carry on.
If you write a client that uses a protocol to communicate over the internet, you better stick to that protocol, no? I mean, think about it for a second? What's wrong with youuuu? lol
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No loss. I got talked into joining a Discord group and hated everything about it.
Peter Theil is also JD Vance's mentor
you mean his puppet master. just like he hides behind his puppets that control LOTR themed companies.
Oh nice, it gets worse!
Watch how many people still keep using this trash.
People still use fucking Twitter. I hope people will choose alternatives but I’m not holding my breath.
For real. I've provided a matrix instance for people to test to see if it suits their needs and to stress test it to make sure it's reliable at the scale we need. So far it's been great for two of us but I'm afraid the rest are all going to join at the same time, the server won't be able to handle the number of people doing voice and video chats and then they'll hate the whole thing. Other thing they might do is join the main Matrix instance and see how slow it is. That's almost worse.
I'm sorry, you didn't ask for all this info. You said a thing and it made me want to get some stuff off my chest. I almost posted more but deleted it. Then I wrote more and deleted that. I'm just gonna stop now but I feel better now that I've typed some things at a stranger on the internet that I agree with. It's almost like a virtual hug. Hope you felt it too :D
Yeah, I've been drinking. It's Friday somewhere.
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The more information gets out about this whole thing, worse it gets.
Abandon ship!
Keep em coming so we know what to delete 🫡
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