Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
Self-hosting a matrix instance might be an okay alternative. And because its decentralized its not really possible for it to have top-down age verification imposed on it, if it ever does get popular