this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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I was talking with a friend about this when they announced age verification. He seemed pretty optimistic that this would hopefully bring back forums/irc/vent servers or anything self hostable, but I'm not to sure. I'm sure all of us here knew what was going on with this, but I'm sure the average person still doesnt care as much and will continue to trade away privacy for convenience. We all have family and friends who come to when something like this happens, but continue to use services afterwards. Seems like we will continue to be a fun club of like minded people here on fedi stuff with most people staying with what they know.
Sorry for the rant
It's not that people won't host them. It's that no one will go there. I've run forums for years and years but people don't care anymore. Hell I don't even care that much. You can host all you want but if no one goes there, you're boned.
I think he was half joking and half thinking of communities hes on that are more tech savvy. I'm also a little bit younger than him and interact with people younger than me, and I think theres a disconnect there.
Yes, I miss vent and irc but most people never used text or voice chat until it was centralized and braindead easy to use. I would like to go back to something like that, but most people never used it in the first place (compared to active users now) and probably have no interest in learning/setting it up.
As an early 30 something guy, I don't see most people my age hopping ship to something like Matrix or older comm software because of the learning curve vs Discord. Younger people even less based on my personal experience.
I just finished setting up a Matrix Synapse server with oidc login and Authelia on my Kubernetes cluster.
Apparently it doesn't support video or voice calls out of the box and I have to spin up some other stack that Synapse uses to do the calls.