jonaharagon

Cloning Discord is evidently not easy because nobody (besides perhaps Fluxer) has actually done it.

A feature comparison between Discord and all these other clones is always laughable, which is exactly the reason why convincing everyone to move is an impossible challenge. I was checking out Fluxer this weekend and it's the first one to inspire hope in me that maybe that won't always be the case. But Matrix, Stoat, etc. are all simply sub-par user experiences.

That is what Fluxer is, to my knowledge it is the only Discord alternative tackling that problem (also happens to be the most feature-complete by a country mile).

I think they are working on federated identity between different servers, but multiple servers with individual auth is available today.

Reading the actual text of the bill, it seems like a first-boot date of birth prompt and everything else you’ve described is exactly what the bill is asking for actually.

True, and this is also the case in many other countries. Even if it is revocable by future legislation though, having pro-privacy laws on the books to prevent the current executive powers-that-be from abusing them would still be helpful.

I mean that'd certainly be nice, and it is also their only job, but even if they wanted to do it in regular legislation that'd be better than nothing.

Make a law that says companies have to protect the data of their citizens without the possibility of any intentional backdoor, perhaps. Make a law that says companies can't require people to dox themselves with ID scans simply to use a publicly available internet platform that provides no services in the physical world. Make a law that says OS developers can't create client-side scanning services that upload results off-device without revocable user consent.

Realistically the EU only cares about protecting their citizens from private companies, and especially American ones. When it comes to government overreach they know virtually no bounds.

Then the US on the other hand does decently protect its citizens from the government itself (well, this recent year/administration notwithstanding), only because the US government knows full well they can just turn around and grab all the data they want from the private American companies they don't regulate at all.

Two approaches with the same outcome, absolutely.

I shared your comment with the author and we're going to reorder some of the sentences in a little bit to highlight the fact it's a backdoor earlier. We've talked about Chat Control so much over so many years (because it keeps reappearing) that it's easy to forget many haven't heard of it lol

> They start outlawing encryption altogether?

This is the direction places like the UK have gone in, yes. Can't decrypt something? Then we assume it is illegal content.

> Do they think they're above it?

Yes, the lawmakers literally exempt themselves from this law in this law.

Totally. This is exactly the problem with things like Chat Control in the EU and KOSA in the US. They will just introduce the same bill over and over and over again until they get the desired result.

What we need is for legislatures to pass "NO Chat Control" and "NO KOSA" bills that specifically block this behavior, but unsurprisingly governments don't seem to be too keen about limiting their own rights, only those of their citizens.

You can disable purchase sharing and still do subscription sharing, which completely solves this problem.