Your Face or Your Features

On the 9th of Feburary 2026 Discord announced that they will roll out their age verification requirement worldwide. This would require every account to basically dox themselves to access every feature as accounts are being set to a teen experience per default as long as they don't verify their age with either a face scan or an photo of their government-issued ID.

This brings criticism from Discord's users and privacy minded people because this policy treats every user like they are a teenager unless they give Discord their personally identifiable data. And that despite the fact that Discord already lost user data and IDs of ~70.000 users of the platform in a massive data breach in October of 2025 as news sources like The Verge reported.

With the rollout happening in early March 2026 users have to prepare to either one of these options: live with a massively reduced feature set, having to give Discord their data to regain access to the full feature set or leave the platform for other alternatives like IRC or the Matrix protocol.

I personally are recommending the Matrix protocol ("[matrix]") because of following reasons:

• Decentralisation: The Matrix protocol is inherently designed to be decentralised and therefor harder to regulate than a centralised platform.
• Open Source: The protocol is completely open source meaning that even if a government tries to ban the protocol or tries to influence it to be worse can people take the source code and make it into another project. This point plus the decentralisation also allows the community to develop different servers so that admins have a choice which one they want to host.
• E2E Encrypted: [matrix] is also inherently designed to have end to end encryption per default. Meaning that your messages are only readable by you and the ones who you send messages to. No admin, government or other people can read your messages.
• Interoperability: You can easily use different clients (like Element, FluffyChat and Cinny) and can even use bridges to chat with people using other services and protocols.
• Self-hostable: If you don't want to trust an server admin or want to provide an server for your friends and family you can do that.

If you want to follow my recommendation and start using Matrix you can do the following steps:

1. Find a server you want to join. This can be whatever homeserver (as they are called by [matrix]) you like. Either the main matrix.org homeserver or other homeservers like tchncs.de or socialnetwork24.com.
2. Create an account. Creating an account on an homeserver can include different requirements. Like providing an e-mail address for account recovery and solving an captcha for bot prevention.
3. Add another devices and start chatting with other people. After creating your account and logging in you can start to chat with other people or join rooms – even those on other homeservers if your server allows federation. You can also add other devices like your smartphone or an desktop client.

The hardest part of leaving Discord isn't the software; it's the network effect – convincing your friends to come with you. Don't force a full switch right now. It doesn't mean that you can't try to convince your friends to switch – you definitely can do that but it shouldn't be a reason to argue about.

Discord has made its choice to prioritize surveillance over user trust. Now, we have to make ours.

If you decide to make the jump, feel free to reach out to me on Matrix – I’ll see you there! 💬

If you want to hear more from me you can find me in the Fediverse at @gelbphoenix@social.gelbphoenix.de (Mastodon) or @gelbphoenix@gram.social (Pixelfed). For more posts like this subscribe to my new newsletter or support me by becoming a member.