The Great Discord Exodus: When Tech Companies Forget Who They're Serving
There’s something almost poetic about watching a tech platform shoot itself in the foot so spectacularly that users flee en masse to a service most people thought had been relegated to the dustbin of internet history. TeamSpeak, of all things, is experiencing a renaissance. TeamSpeak! The voice chat platform I last used during my Counter-Strike days is now being overwhelmed by refugees from Discord. If that doesn’t tell you something about the state of modern tech platforms, I don’t know what does.
The trigger? Discord’s announcement that they’re rolling out mandatory identity verification across their platform—either through government-issued ID or facial biometrics. Not just for “adult” servers, but potentially for everyone. Let me be clear: this is absolutely bonkers, and not in a good way.
Look, I get it. I’ve spent my entire career in IT and DevOps. I understand the pressures these companies face around moderation, legal compliance, and age verification. But there’s a massive difference between understanding the problem and accepting a solution that fundamentally breaks the social contract between a platform and its users. Discord built its community on the promise of being a safe, relatively anonymous space for communities to gather. Now they’re asking users to hand over biometric data or government IDs to a company that literally just had a security breach five months ago.
The sheer incompetence of the timing is staggering. It’s like announcing you’re making home security systems mandatory after someone just robbed half the neighborhood. Someone pointed out that this is typical tech bro thinking: assume everyone will show up anyway, so why not grab their data while it’s hot? But here’s the thing—they’re wrong. People are leaving, and in droves.
What fascinates me about this whole situation is the nostalgia factor. Suddenly, everyone’s reminiscing about the old guard of internet communication. TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, IRC—even someone mentioned Trillian and ICQ, for crying out loud. There’s this collective longing for a time when online communities weren’t beholden to venture capital-backed platforms that see users as data sources first and community members second.
I’ve watched this pattern repeat itself across the tech landscape for years now. A platform builds trust, grows a community, achieves critical mass, and then—inevitably—decides to “monetise” or “enhance safety” in ways that fundamentally alter what made them appealing in the first place. Twitter became X. Reddit alienated its power users. Now Discord is speedrunning the enshittification playbook.
The really interesting conversations happening right now aren’t just about where people are going (though TeamSpeak’s servers being overwhelmed is genuinely hilarious), but about what comes next. I’ve seen people discussing Matrix, XMPP, and other federated protocols. These open standards mean no single company can pull the rug out from under you. You can self-host, choose your provider, and if one instance goes rogue, you move to another without losing your entire network.
From a DevOps perspective, this makes absolute sense. Decentralisation and redundancy are good engineering principles. Why shouldn’t they apply to our social infrastructure? We’ve become far too comfortable letting massive corporations control our communities, our conversations, and increasingly, our identities.
The environmental angle bothers me too, though it’s been lost in the immediate privacy concerns. Every one of these massive centralised platforms burns through enormous amounts of energy running server farms, training AI models on our data, and implementing increasingly baroque verification systems. Meanwhile, lighter-weight protocols and self-hosted solutions could handle the same communications with a fraction of the resource footprint.
There’s a broader political dimension here that I can’t ignore. We’re watching in real-time as digital spaces become increasingly surveilled and controlled. Whether it’s TikTok bans, mandatory ID verification, or the slow creep of biometric data collection, we’re normalising a level of digital surveillance that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. The fact that this is often framed as “keeping children safe” or “fighting harassment” doesn’t make it less concerning—it just makes it harder to oppose without sounding like you don’t care about those issues.
I do care. But I also know that once infrastructure for mass surveillance is built, it tends to stick around and find new uses. Today it’s age verification. Tomorrow it’s… what, exactly? Political affiliation checks? Social credit scores? I’m not trying to be paranoid here, but the trajectory seems pretty clear.
What gives me hope—and yes, I’m trying to end this on a constructive note—is watching people actually leave. For years, we’ve complained about platform enshittification while staying put because “everyone’s there” and the network effects seemed insurmountable. But Discord overplayed their hand, and users are discovering that alternatives exist. They’re not perfect (TeamSpeak 6 apparently has rubbish text chat functionality), but they’re functional, and more importantly, they’re not demanding your biometric data.
Maybe this is the wake-up call we needed. Maybe we’ll start taking digital sovereignty seriously, supporting open protocols, and remembering that we don’t have to accept whatever terms Silicon Valley decides to impose this week.
Time to dust off those old skills, I suppose. Now, has anyone got a spare IRC server lying around? Asking for a friend.