I want to leave Discord, because I want to avoid the ever approaching tide of online age verification. But if I'm being honest with myself, I know I'm not going to.

All the people I care about are on Discord. For a long time, it's been my "compromise platform," the one I can use to talk to people who aren't on the nerd messaging apps that don't require I sign up for a service owned by Meta (WhatsApp is, to this day, the only platform I will hard-refuse to talk to people on, even if I really need to. If it's really that dire they can send me an email).

I can hope and pray that next month, there'll be enough people to jump ship to make "I'm not on Discord on principle" a viable social argument but I've been through this before, so I'm not really holding out hope.

Way back when I was in high school, I was trying to do the same for Instagram for the first time. The motivating incident, I think, was an addiction that was seriously starting to impact the rest of my life. Social media addiction is no joke. I'd often go back and forth on it because it's hard not to be on Instagram in a millieu as social as high school, and Instagram is the only viable way to keep in touch with your friends. But at some point, it became too much, and I resolved that if people cared to talk to me, then they'd find some other way to get in touch.

Thing is, that's not really what a relationship is, is it? A relationship is a relatively stable pattern of interaction over space and time. Cut out the space, and all of a sudden, the relationships are gone. And so they went.¹

That's the compromise you need to be willing to make if you want to fight the network effect single-handedly

At the very least, I hope that by the end of the month, I'll be using Discord considerably less. The corporate web is rapidly becoming a less safe place to be, even begrudgingly, even a little, and I really want nothing to do with it.

Footnotes

¹ In my life, there's been one exception. When I was in my first year of university, my friends and I all used Instagram to talk to one another. One day, kind of on a whim, I told them flat out that I was leaving effective immediately and that if they wanted to reach me, they could send me an email. Luckily, one of my other friends was also interested in leaving Instagram and just needed the push. And so with the two of us, the rest followed to Signal.

It's pretty hard to say how reproducible this is because it's only happened once. But all this is to say that it doesn't necessarily take all that much to get people off the corporate web. In any case, I'm pretty confident you can't do it alone.

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