Do you think the upcoming Discord age verification could spawn new Discourse communites?

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@awesomerobot

I don’t think there are many (any?) cases where chat is being used primarily, so it’s not unusual that we’re still considered a forum first.

We are definitely async-first by design.

But there are certainly sites out there where chat is used heavily, and maybe even primarily.

I’m aware of a number of sites using chat at a rate of more than 10K messages per week – some more than 40K+/week and at least one at 100K+/week.

For comparison, our internal site, which is async-first, but where chat adoption is pretty high, sends about 6-7K messages/week.

So yes, were definitely first and foremost a forum, but there are sites out there who have wholly embraced chat as a part of their community.

[ToddZ]

@Bas

@Ed_S

but the initial admin still has to choose and pay a hosting company, or pay someone for a hosted solution.

This might be changing in the very near future

Oho!
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[asc]

I think it’s actually quite chilling for new self-hosted Discourse sites, because this highlights how the new legal and therefore financial risks of hosting anything that might need age verification anywhere in the world is on individuals that self host, who don’t have the resources of something like Discord to either do age verification securely or risk the chance of a fine or criminal charge. A lot of the new laws aren’t aimed at just nsfw images, but also a range of text content. The Impact of Age Verification Measures Goes Beyond Porn Sites | Electronic Frontier Foundation

I’ve been setting up a self hosted Discourse instance to move my community off of Dreamwidth, which is a member of Netchoice along with Discord in a lot of the recent lawsuits against age verification and we’re seriously reconsidering it because it’s so legally risky. Dreamwidth currently IP blocks users from Tennessee and Mississippi because the laws there impose jail time and ruinous fines for site administrators who don’t impose age verification like what Discord is doing, and it’s technically and financially burdensome for a small company like Dreamwidth to do so. I’ve been trying to find a lawyer to talk to about the legal risks involved in moving my community onto self hosted Discourse, but it’s been hard to find someone who is available and current on all the new legislation, and only following the law in my jurisdiction seems incredibly risky because something like South Carolina’s new law this week extends to any site that may have South Carolina users. My community is for women romance novel writers who are mostly 30+ – things like discussion of erotica, nipple sensitivity after breast cancer reconstruction, sex after menopause, same-sex relationships and romance, and gender affirmation surgery all require age verification in one US jurisdiction or another right now. Ideologically we’re not willing to do the kind of age verification Discord is doing but the legal exposure is way too much right now, so we may just stay with Dreamwidth instead of trying to self host with Discourse. The recent one-line Discourse install was huge for us and it’s so frustrating think that we have the technical and moderation ducks all in a row but the legal landscape is too chilling to risk it.