I know Discord is enshittifying and I’m all for switching to open source instead.
But everyone’s reason for leaving seems to be:
“Discord wants my ID for age verification and I don’t like that.”
And the new apps will be subject to the exact same laws.
Are users just not realizing that (and therefore in for a rude awakening), or am I missing something?


Laws are enforced by making some legal entity either comply to them, or be punished (via fines for example).
There’s a limited extent to which laws can still be enforced on a service that’s hosted outside of the countries with those laws, but the point of open source and decentralized alternatives to Discord is that they’re harder for governments to force into enforcing these kinds of laws.