Discord has had quite an interesting year, let's have a look at the timeline so far:
- 21 July 2025 - Discord announces age verification checks for UK users in line with the Online Safety Act (source)
- 9 October 2025 - Discord says hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 users (source)
- 9 February 2026 - Discord launches teen by default and requires age verification to access all of Discords features. (source)
- 25 February 2026 - Discord backtracks and delays ID verification rollout due to user outrage and their partnership with to Palantir surveillance company. (source)
Even though Discord isn't implementing age verification checks, yet they still plan to and this is causing lots of people to flee Discord looking for alternatives.
Discord is many things to different people, and therefore it is difficult to find an alternative that will satisfy everyone. Given age verification is becoming law in many places the only option to avoid this is to use open source self-hosted alternatives which are preferably federated.
These are the alternatives I have found at the moment:
- Matrix - This is the main federated alternative to Discord. It allows users of one Matrix server to communicate with other users on different servers. Matrix is the protocol specification like HTTP, but you pick your own server and client combination. It also has bridges that can bridge to Discord.
- XMPP - Another communication protocol a lot older than Matrix as it was created in 1999. If you haven't heard of XMPP then you may have heard of Jabber which is its old name. As with Matrix you need a server such as ejabberd if you want to host a community and a client such as Siskin IM. XMPP is mostly for group or one to one chats and doesn't have all the channels that you might want for a community.
- IRC - The oldest of the lot and still going strong. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was created in 1988. Again as an open protocol you need to host or join a server and a client and there are a lot of options as it has been around for a while. InspIRCd is the most popular server software to run if you want to host a community. The Lounge seems to be the most popular client and can be run as a web app or as desktop app.
There is a good list of options ranked here as well: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
If you have to use Discord this is always an option: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
Eventually all commercial platforms seem to succumb to enshittification as we have seen with Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter). The only way to escape it seems to be embrace open source software based on open web standards as ActivityPub, Matrix, IRC and XMPP. Joining another closed sourced walled silo isn't the answer. See also Use protocols, not services.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
I was ill last week hence the lack of an issue so there are quite a few links from the past 3 weeks.
📝 Article - The WiFi only works when it's raining - I always find articles like this fascinating where people solve weird issues they are having.
📝 Article - Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron - I have used blender a few times. I am terrible at 3D work, but I am glad to see this project get some backing.
🪢 Knots - Animated Knots - The boy scout in me thinks this website is great!
📝 Article - The danger of glamourizing one shots - AI is illegally trained on millions of lines of code and media from other peoples projects. In the same way you can get an AI to recite Harry Potter word for word, getting it to 1 shot Minecraft is only possible because others have made an open source version in the past. If you want to make software properly you need to write a proper spec.
💻 Game - Hackers (1995) Animated Experience - I finally got around to watching Hackers the other week. It makes me laugh to think this is what they think coding and hacking looks like.
📝 Article - We mourn our craft - I remember spending a whole day stuck on a coding problem then feeling really proud of myself for finally solving it. This is what made programming rewarding even if frustrating at times. I am pretty sure bosses would appreciate you spending a day on an issue that AI could solve for you in 10 minutes.
📝 Article - I am happier writing code by hand - I still do most of my code at work by hand. The area is too complicated to hand over to AI at the moment, and could see bugs creeping in unnoticed.
📝 Article - My eighth year as a bootstrapped founder - I really like these breakdowns from solo founders. They give a realistic view of what it is like to go it solo on your own dev projects.
📝 Article - AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder - Software engineering has never been about writing code. It is about solving a problem with the right solution. AI doesn't take this away, but it can make maintaining software harder if you didn't write the code yourself.
📝 Article - Using an engineering notebook - I used to use a notebook a lot when I was first starting out. I regret not using one these days. There have been a few cases where an issue has come up twice, and I couldn't remember what the solution was the first time around.
📝 Article - Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun - After spending years working in payments and seeing what a monopoly Visa and Mastercard have I think this is a great thing. It is crazy when you think nearly everything you buy is sending between 0.3 - 2% to a US based company.
📝 Article - Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial - A lot of the practices done by these companies is disgusting all in the name of profits.
📝 Article - I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
I suspect a lot of developers over 40 are feeling something similar and not saying it, because the industry worships youth and adaptability and saying “this doesn’t feel like it used to” sounds like you’re falling behind.
📆 Doomsday - The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday - Tuesday 18th July 2034 to be exact. Whether this is true or not we are already seeing the effects with lay-offs caused by people thinking it is true.
📝 Article - Google handed ICE student journalist's bank and credit card numbers - It really is time to own your own data and get rid of big tech.
📝 Article - Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists - I think we are going to need universal basic income as AI takes over more and more jobs. I am glad Ireland are starting with artists.
📝 Article - Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance - We really need more local only options instead of uploading everything to the cloud so it can be used for AI training and mass surveillance.
📝 Article - How to make a living as an artist - I am OK at art, but I have never been good enough to have my own style. I admire those who can make a living from their art.
📝 Article - AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - I am sure we are going to see a lot more of this as people start using OpenClaw. Eventually open source projects will have to be hidden behind paywalls to avoid being overrun by AI. See An AI agent published a hit piece on me and more things have happened.
Interestingly, ArsTechnica covered this story but included AI hallucinated quotes Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations.
📝 Article - ai;dr - None of this newsletter is AI generated. I just have a standard spell checker than fixes some of my grammar and spelling mistakes but misses some too!
🛠️ Tool - Monosketch - I really like ASCII art so why not ASCII diagrams. See also Monodraw for macOS.
📝 Article - Building a TUI is easy now - I must admit that Claude Code and OpenCode are fun to use. I think terminal apps could learn a lot from them.
📝 Article - OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission oh and Anthropic ditches its core safety promise - What could possibly go wrong!
🛠️ Tool - Ghidra by NSA - I have always been fascinated with reverse engineering. Tools like this might help people jailbreak there devices and software.
📝 Article - AI and moral injury – Pat Allan - I like the plastic/microplastic analogy. I think there are ethical uses for AI and find the technology interesting, but I grapple with the ethical and environmental impacts.
📝 Article - Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you - This has a great list of sites if you are looking for interesting websites to look at.
🛠️ Tool - uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts - I am not a fan of shorts. If you don't like them either than this might help.
👾 Games - Flashpoint Archive – Over 200k web games and animations preserved - This is cool. I am sure there are a lot of games on here I used to play as a teenager.
🛠️ Tool - OpenArchiver: An open-source platform for legally compliant email archiving. - I have started archiving my emails on my home server using this.
📝 Article - Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015 - This is cool. I must admit that I am probably still writing CSS like 2015 because that was only yesterday, right?
🛠️ Tool - Materialious - Watch YouTube privately. - This looks super nice. I am going to set this up with my own invidious instance to watch YouTube without ads or tracking.
💬 Toot - I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? - Remember this when you find yourself not double-checking AI output.
📝 Article - Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD - This is soon going to have knock on effects to everything not just PC builders. Hetzner is increasing prices by up to 38% due to RAM and hard drive shortages. How long until the other cloud hosting services increase prices and all the services we subscribe to pass the cost on.
📝 Article - GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple - a lot more people seem to be interested in GrapheneOS recently. I have not long upgraded my iPhone but when it comes to my next upgrade (in 4 years time or more) I will definitely see what GrapheneOS is doing.
🛠️ Tool - I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D - This is really cool.
📝 Article - I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform - This sentence sums up my feelings as well:
So now I'm paying $20 a month to a company that scraped the collective knowledge of humanity without asking so that I can avoid writing Kubernetes YAML. I know what that makes me. I just haven't figured out a word for it yet that I can live with.
📝 Article - I used Claude Code and GSD to build the accessibility tool I’ve always wanted - Something like this wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for AI, which makes the liking/hating AI so difficult.
📝 Article - I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over - Do not verify your identity unless you have to for opening a bank account for example.
🛠️ Tool - Acme Weather - This looks like a really nice weather app!
📝 Article - How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution - You ultimately can't escape software engineering practises if you want to use AI effectively.
📝 Article - I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard - This looks really nice. I tried a cheap android tablet in the past but it wasn't large enough and the power issues were a pain. Something like this would be perfect.
🛠️ Tool - Voicebox - Open Source Voice Cloning Desktop App Powered by Qwen3-TTS - I found this worked well for short sentences but for more than that the voice noticeably changed.
🛠️ Tool - Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness - This looks cool and probably works better for local models as it won't feel up the context quite so much.
📝 Article - New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes - I have a feeling we are already experiencing the dead internet theory. Most of the comments on HackerNews are now from bots rather than real people.
📝 Article - Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer - As a guitarist, Jimi has always been a big inspiration.
🛠️ Tool - Making MCP cheaper via CLI - See also MCPShim - MCP Tools as CLI Commands - If you are paying for tokens used or running local models this can really help keep token usage down.
📝 Article - What Claude Code Chooses - I can see most tools converging over a small set of technologies as more and more people use AI for coding.
💬 Tweet - Layoffs at Block - I can see this happening a lot more over the next few years.
💬 Quote of the Week #
Material things might cover your wants, but non-material things like spending time with your family, enjoying your free time, and having a nutritious dinner will cover most of your needs.
From the article Material Things Will Never Make You Happy – Here’s Why
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