Episode 1 – Discord: Your Face, or Your Access

Please note: Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain inaccuracies or differ from the spoken content.

Introductions and Podcast Origins

Welcome everyone. Welcome to Squaredcast. Hope you all are well and alive. Welcome. We have a lot of things to talk about today. They’re all sort of related to one big topic. Side note before we even begin here. This is the third time recording this episode. We have had so many issues recording into a program from a company we will not name. It’s been really bad and I really don’t want to cover all the same stuff all over again. So, we’ve decided this one will be a special episode where we just focus on the thing that we keep coming back to. But anyway, my name is Chris and besides my day job, I fiddle around with Unreal. Unreal Engine to be more specific, I kind of create environments in it and just fool around. And I also do music in my own spare time as well. And that’s about it.

Okay, that sounds pretty awesome to me. Yeah, my name is also Chris. I do web stuff. I’m a web guy, so website development, design, things like that. I do a little bit of consulting here and there on the side in the IT sphere. And when I’m not doing any of that, I’m hanging out with or making music with the guy who’s digitally across from me right now. Digital. The other Chris. Yeah, it’s good stuff. That won’t be confusing. Not at all. Won’t be confusing because we’re both named Chris. Yeah, might a little bit, but it’ll be pretty cool. I think so.

Quick check before we even begin. You’re actually recording, right?. Things are showing up. I don’t want to do this the third time. I’m watching it in real time. That’s important. I so don’t want to do this again. Okay. I figured that since it’s the first episode, I just give a little spiel here. I did it the first two times here, but we’ll kind of just maybe summarize. Anybody who’s followed us all the way through here, which I’m sure we’ll have at least one person come around be like, “Hey, wait. Didn’t you guys have a podcast before?”. Yes, actually we did. This is not our first time doing this. We had a podcast a few years ago called the Chris and Chris podcast. It was a weekly show, at least aimed to be tech news, gaming, whatever else was on our minds and it was fun. And then we just stopped. Like life happened. Editing became a nightmare. I was doing all of it by hand every single week. We had to be in the same room to record which meant that scheduling could get difficult and eventually the whole thing just became unsustainable. So we dropped off. And for the people who actually tuned in every week, we owe you an apology for that. We’re sorry. Sorry about that. But we’re here. We’re back. We never stopped building during that time, though.

Over the years, we’ve been working on projects from applications to game worlds and music, learning from what worked and what didn’t. And somewhere along the way, the technology caught up. I think we can actually do this again without burning out. And so, here we are. We’re going to give it another shot. This is Squaredcast, the reincarnation of the Chris and Chris podcast. Like the phoenix from the ashes. Exactly. The editing problem that killed the last show. Think we solved that. We’re not forced to be in the same room anymore. That’s also solved. But more than that, we have things to show people now. It’s not a show necessarily about just news and commentary, though there is plenty of that. But it’s also a window into what we’re building, the stuff we’re working on, and the stuff in general that we think is worth talking about because there is no shortage of things to talk about. The world’s in a very strange transition state right now. There’s a lot of change in the air in general in our lives, and we think that’s the right lens to be looking through. Feels like a good opportunity to.

I haven’t put my contact lenses in. You haven’t done that yet, Dad. I don’t even use them. Going to try and steer clear from politics. It’s not the goal of this. Wide berth. Yes. Prices are going up and it’s always framed as some inevitable consequence of forces beyond anyone’s control. Companies are laying off massive numbers of people, calling it progress. Trust in government, media, institutions, historic lows. And the gap between who’s thriving and who’s barely keeping up gets wider every year. While the people at the top keep telling everyone else to just be patient. Just hold on. We’re going to tell you what we actually think is happening without betrayal. Make it impossible to get through this thing. We’re going to tell you what we think is actually happening without a corporate agenda attached or any sort of financial influences. The final note I have here is we’re both builders, both care about making things that matter and getting that right. It just works. Hopefully that is the case this time around. And I guess may as well get into it.

The Discord Age Verification Saga

Just to set the stage here, what we’re going to be talking about today is Discord. And there’s some broader context that I think we’ll talk about as well. Discord apocalypse has been in the news. Basically, it’s about Discord age verification. And ultimately, I think the fight for internet anonymity. Discord’s age verification saga is just the visible tip of a much larger shift. Governments, platforms, and identity verification companies are all converging on the same goal, tying your real identity to everything you do online. The framing is child safety. The result is the slow death of anonymous internet use. And the timing of it all, from Discord’s IPO to California’s new OS level age verification law, I think tells you everything you need to know about who this actually serves. So, there we go. That’s the stage there. I guess we could start with the announcement. That’s I mean us included lost our minds after that. I think for a short period of time I’ve already lost it. Here we are again. Three times the charm.

So this kind of started with the UK when they introduced their child online safety act. It forced multiple platforms mainly social media platforms into introducing some sort of age verification. Either that was through a face scan or that was submitting an ID or driver’s license, whatever the case might be. And for some reason, Discord has decided to just do this globally without being required to. Why is that?. Well, there could be a lot of reasons. So many reasons. Specifically, it was on February 9th, Discord announced that all 200 plus million monthly active users would default to a restricted teen appropriate experience starting in March, which is literally tomorrow as of recording this. That means adults would need to verify their age to regain full access to all of Discord either through a facial age estimation selfie or a government ID submission. The backlash to the announcement of course was immediate. Discord related traffic to data deletion platform Redact surged 350% within 48 hours. Searches for Discord alternatives, I think we are included in this statistic, spiked 10,000% within 48 hours. Stoat, which was formerly called Revolt, hit 1 million registered users. TeamSpeak reported maxing out hosting capacity across multiple regions. Discord’s own head of product policy admitted that they expected some sort of hit to user numbers, but I don’t know if they were expecting the kind of blowback they ended up receiving here.

Yeah. So, amid the outcry, there was a bunch of Reddit posts telling people, you know, cancel your Nitro, leave the platform that it became quite large. The movement became quite big and I think Discord finally started noticing it. Certainly couldn’t be ignored. As of recording now, after two weeks of really intense backlash, the CTO and co-founder of Discord published a blog post titled Getting Global Age Assurance, right?. What we got wrong and what’s changing. And in that post, he acknowledged, “We’ve made mistakes. I won’t pretend we haven’t”. I think they realize that they messed up a little bit here. Well, they know their wallet’s been hurt, so now it’s an apology tool, right?. Really powerful when people start canceling subscriptions there. That is the one tool I think consumers still have left. Well, money still matters. So, you vote with your wallet.

Privacy Breaches and “The Watchers” Report

This whole thing is kind of interesting because Discord hasn’t been very careful, let’s say, with people’s private information, specifically their identification. No, not when they started doing it in the UK. They actually had a breach late last year, October 2025. Attackers compromised Discord’s third party customer support vendor 5CA. Ultimately, Discord disclosed the breach in October. And in that breach, approximately 70,000 government IDs and verification selfies, usernames, emails, IP addresses, and partial billing information was exposed. These hackers who did that claimed that there was much more information that they were able to get their hands on, but Discord refused to pay the ransom that they were demanding. That’s funny because Discord’s own policy said identifications would be deleted directly after your age group was confirmed. But the fact that we had those 70,000 IDs sitting on a third party vendor system proves that that was just a straight up lie. We don’t seem to really have a solid number and how much was leaked because the hackers said it’s a lot more than 70,000 but Discord is saying 70,000. So there’s a discrepancy there. I have the official numbers from the hackers themselves. They claim they have 1.5 terabytes of data from 5.5 million users which is a very different number from 70,000. Yeah, we don’t know actually the real numbers or who’s telling the truth at this point. There was also another breach actually a 2023 breach exposed email addresses and support ticket contents through a compromised agent. Yeah. In 2024 actually there was a scraping site called spy.pet which harvested over 4 billion public messages from 14,000 Discord servers and sold access to that data for as little as $5 in crypto.

I mean jeez. Discord’s already got these issues with privacy and not taking care or appropriate precautions. I would say they like to blame the vendors they use because they get to use that as an excuse to be like, “Well, we don’t directly handle it. It’s these people that we do business with”. So, it’s not really our fault. They like to shift it because someone else is in trouble, not them. Even if that is the case, the fact that this has happened so many times in the past 5 years in some form or fashion means that they need to pick better partners at some point there. That series of events becomes a pattern and it just seems like negligence to me. Well, yeah, I just don’t know if they care enough. That’s that could be very true. Ever since this age verification roll out first started in UK and Australia, they’ve already had privacy issues. They’ve already had breaches. Things have already been leaked and now they want to do it globally for everyone. So now the risks are way higher. Definitely. I think probably one of the most concerning things is who their partners are or at least who they were working with at one point. Of course that’s Persona. Discord partnered for it was a brief stint there. It wasn’t like a full-on thing. They’re running a test in the UK, right?. Yes. That’s what they call it, an experiment. Uh-huh. So that was a platform that handled their age verification stuff for Discord. Yeah. After they left 5CA, right?.

And so actually 12 days ago, three security researchers published a report on Persona titled the Watchers. They weren’t trying to break into anything. They were simply looking for a way to bypass Discord’s age verification, like I think most of us are looking to do if it’s forced on us. What they found instead was their entire front-end codebase on an authorized government endpoint just sitting on the open internet. The researchers initially discovered the trail through an open AI linked subdomain that certificate logs show has been active since November 2023. The code itself was incredibly revealing. Persona is far more invasive than just an age check tool. A single verification through their system triggers 269 distinct checks. The system compares selfies against watch list photos using facial recognition. It screens users against 14 categories of adverse media from terrorism to espionage and whatnot. It screens against global sanctions and watch lists. It retains IP addresses, browser fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and selfie backgrounds for up to three years. In their words, the software flags you as a suspicious entity based on your face alone. That’s terrifying. That’s so terrifying to me. On top of the facial recognition though, they also contain a full financial intelligence stack with the ability to screen cryptocurrency activity, run sanctions checks, and file SARs or suspicious activity reports directly with government agencies. Holy cow. You can I mean the in the code there the filing interface has drop-down menus for tagging these reports with intelligence program code names like project shadow, project legion, project Anton, all sorts of stuff. That is crazy.

Persona’s CEO did respond to that and confirm that that code was being fixed and the exposed cluster was a new dev environment. He did not directly address the watch list database findings, but there you go. That’s what happened to Persona there. I think his general explanation was that Persona has like a new contract with the government. That’s why that stuff was there. But that didn’t really give any reassurance to anyone. It’s like, well, it’s open. Why is it unprotected?. It’s a great question. Why is it especially if it’s for the government?. Are you kidding me?. That should be one of the most protected things. Oops, I left the dev environment out. Oopsies. And then, you know, no accountability or fines or anything. You know, it’s just the same old stuff. I mean, they’re just trying to play it off like, “Oh, well, this is like something new. It’s not necessarily for age verification specifically”. Uh-huh. It was basically the vibe they were trying to put out there. But it’s bad either way. It’s not great.

Follow the Money: Surveillance Architecture and the IPO

And Persona as a company itself is not like some startup. All right. There’s a connection here that I think everybody needs to be aware of. Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel’s VC firm. If you don’t know who that guy is, go look him up. He led Persona’s $150 million series C in 2021 and co-led its $200 million series D in April of last year, which valued the company at $2 billion. Thiel co-founded Palantir, which provides data analytics to the CIA, FBI, ICE, and the US Army. His broader investment pattern spans Palantir, Clearview AI, Persona, Boldend, which deals with cyber warfare stuff, and Anduril, which is in defense technology and broader surveillance stuff. Now technically just because Founders Fund is an investor, it does provide some plausibility of the link between Persona and Thiel that Thiel’s not actually involved with its operations, but I mean come on, man. It’s the same money. His money is everywhere. In either case, it tells you where Founders Fund thinks the growth in the market is. They are dumping money into Persona. So, I mean, just that alone is scary enough. Like, oh yeah, no, we’re going to support these massive companies with these incredibly powerful and invasive tools. Oh, yeah. And they leave things unprotected. Yeah. Tell me how that makes sense. It doesn’t. I don’t think it does.

After all that broke out, Discord did finally say that they are not going to use Persona for age verification on their platform, but they’re still going to do it. Anyways, quick note here. Roblox, OpenAI/ChatGPT, Reddit, and Character.ai still use Persona as of recording, so your data is probably already stored on their server somewhere. The formal public announcement came on February 24th that said, “In January, we ran a limited test with Persona in the UK only and then decided not to move forward with them”. Yeah. Right after the exposed web front end on Persona was reported on. They’re like, “Actually, you know what? We’re going to find someone else”. That was so how nice of them to think of their users privacy. Is that the real reason?. I mean, that’s they’re not actually saying that, so probably not. People thought that that would be like, “Oh, it means they’re not going to do it now.” That’s not the case. They’re still doing age verification. They’re just trying to find different ways to go about it. It is, as far as we can tell, just a delay. In countries where laws require this age verification, including the UK and Australia, spatial estimation and ID checks will still happen. What also did not change is the behavioral profiling age inference model that they talked about, which means according to Discord using this model that allows 90% of users to never see a verification prompt because of that. Meaning they’re already profiling you based on the information they’re collecting from you. I mean, come on.

So, what did change though in the announcement is that they postponed it to the second half of 2026. They dropped Persona entirely. They are apparently also adding credit card verification and other non-biometric options. They also, this is according to Discord, they say any facial age estimation partner must perform processing entirely on device. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t know if Discord can enforce that. I don’t think they can either. If they’re using third parties to do this, which they are, how are they going to enforce that on a different company?. That’s an excellent question. I don’t know. Somebody is going to have to dive in and reverse engineer how this works cuz I don’t trust them anymore. And I think they’ve shown repeatedly that we can’t trust what they say. It sucks because we’ve been using it for a long time and we’ve gotten so used to it. Yeah. And I would re it just really sucked to have to leave because of some stupid decision that they don’t even have to legally do. They’re not being forced to do this. The other portion of this whole thing, which is crazy, is that yeah, they’re not required to do this. There is no US law that requires Discord to do this. No, not even in the EU. It’s specifically UK, Australia. Although Australia is like not really necessary for Discord either because the Australian one really kind of outlies social networking platforms and Discord’s not technically social media. So they’re not really required to do this in Australia, but they are anyways. How nice. So instead of, you know, maybe pushing back a little bit against what I would consider an invasion of privacy, no, we’re just going to we’re just going to go ahead do this anyway. No, this is fine. No, now we’re here with the just do it worldwide. Yeah. No, that’s screw it, you know. Screw it, everybody. Give us all the information. Yeah. No, it’s a great idea. Yeah, they just signed themselves up for this. They didn’t need to do it.

They didn’t need to do it. But that’s where the timing comes into play. I think this is the actual reason why they’re doing it. In January, Discord filed confidentially for an IPO. That’s an initial public offering when a company gets listed on the stock exchange. People who underwrote that, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, February 9th, so one month after filing for the IPO, then they announced the global age verification stuff and they were targeting a March 2026 debut. As of recording, I can’t find anything that’s supposed to be public for this, but reporting by multiple outlets, they’re all saying Discord is targeting a March 2026 debut. So that’s probably the goal at least. I would imagine they want age verification before they go public. Definitely. The company has never been profitable. And so I think that’s probably a concern for them before they want to list. I mean, age verification’s the child safety story that Discord will need, I think, for institutional investors to see them as a company worth investing in. That’s a concrete safety measure. You know, makes the IPO pitch a lot cleaner regardless of whether the measure actually works because then they can point to it and be like, “Hey, no, actually our platform is really safe for kids. We check everyone.”. Super safe. Super safe. Online safety act compatible, right?. So, you know, I think the timing here within the span of 3 months and then they’re going to supposedly IPO within the next few weeks. Yeah, that has to be the reason. Cleanse your platform, attract more investors, go big. Awesome. Great. Sounds like a plan. Except for we’re gonna invade everyone’s privacy.

Age-Gating and Platform Overreach

So, I guess some people might be wondering, well, why would you see age verification on something like Discord?. Well, that’s because Discord allows not safe for content and agegating servers. So, whoever creates a server, they have the option to agegate it for an 18 plus community. Not necessarily meaning that it’s all porn. You know, it’s an easy association. When you see 18 plus, you’re like, “Oh, it’s porn.”. That’s not always the case. And it’s not the case in Discord. I mean, what counts as adult content?. I mean, in this case, anything that’s already age gated will require ID on Discord. And then they have their own system to determine from there what is adult and what is not. So they will automatically determine stuff for you. Even messages that are being sent to you, servers you’re already in, people you’re already friends with, you know, things like that. I don’t want anybody to read my messages to people. I mean, that’s when you send a message to someone, you expect it just inherently to be private. And clearly that’s not the case. Like I think I’m in a couple of Discord servers that require me to click yes, I’m 18 to enter. And one of them is a modding community and the other one is a couple of like Unreal Engine related communities. And they were age gated for various reasons. But I feel like unfortunately if one of those requires me to have an ID or something to regain access to it, I’ll just not do that. I think I’ll just leave cuz it’s not worth it. It’s a hassle. It’s a huge hassle. Yeah.

And people have already found ways around it. Like I remember seeing a video of someone holding up a character from Half-Life to verify in the selfie there and it passed perfectly. I mean it’s so obviously a video of a screen. Yeah, Discord has said they’ve fixed that since then. Did they?. Okay. Yeah, they have said that that won’t work anymore, but who knows?. Who knows?. We’ll have to try it. You know, I want to. We have our own personal server on Discord which isn’t agegated, but it’s private, so it doesn’t need to be age gated, right?. And so that’s another concern I have. It might be flagged. They’re going to be scanning the content of our private Discord server and then heaven forbid I say a naughty word. Does that automatically mean the whole thing is now 18 plus and I have to upload my ID to get into it?. I don’t know. That’s insane. I know that it affects servers that you’ve already joined. Like if they’re already flagged as 18 plus, then you have to submit to the age verification even though you’re already joined. It doesn’t matter. You have to rejoin with age verification to then regain access to whatever server is deemed adult. I actually have three Discord accounts. One of them is specifically used for development stuff as a limited role. Actually, I have a second Discord server that is strictly it’s just me in it plus the bot. Is that going to be agegated?. Like where’s the line going to go?. Am I going to have to submit multiple selfies?. Yeah, maybe. Come on.

The scary thing I’ve been seeing is this kind of sweeping ban wave that’s been going on through Discord. And you see a lot of it on Reddit, people reporting they’re getting banned for various things. And that could be something as simple as being in a server that has a bot that for some reason was flagged by Discord’s AI tool as violating to in some way, then everyone in that server is banned. They get in trouble by just by association to either the server or a bot that was used on the server. Everyone gets in trouble. Collective punishment here. I mean, that’s it’s insane. I can’t like verify all of that because this is just people reporting on Reddit, but there’s people that are reporting that they’re getting soft bans or permanent bans from messages they sent 5 years ago or a server they joined 10 years ago. Discord’s AI thing is just flagging stuff everywhere. It’s just handing out bans. You have a ban. Everyone gets a ban. And you’re just getting in trouble by association basically. Yeah. It’s not even your fault. Somebody curses 2 miles away and you get banned for that. It could be for any reason. But the messages they get is because it violates this, this, and this or violates our child safety thing or whatever. It’s just all these the different excuses. They’re already sending those out. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Huge wave of it. I’m seeing a lot of people talk about on Reddit. Okay. So, somebody gets banned. They get a DM or something and saying, “Hey, you messed up on the child safety stuff.”. Yeah. You get a personal message in Discord client and then your account standing is changed like suspended. And that either could mean like you’re suspended for x amount of time or maybe it’s a permanent ban or you lose access to certain features on Discord until a certain time. It’s all over the place. Depending on what the violation is, whatever the AI decided the violation was, that is going to be either a soft ban or just like someone has their account permanently banned.

Nice. That’s real nice. It could be for a message they sent like 6 years ago, which means that Discord’s holding on to all these messages and actively digging through them. Isn’t that like computationally expensive to do that?. That seems like a little over the top from 6 years ago. Well, if you think about it, every message we’ve sent each other is still on here. That’s true. That’s the ground rule of the internet right there. You send something out over the internet, just consider it permanent record. Like it never goes away, basically. Yeah. I don’t know. There’s some heavy bandwave going on with the new AI stuff they’re doing. It sounds like it. I think what’s concerning to me besides the obvious privacy implication stuff is like what counts as adult content. I think we use the example of like a support group. Is a support group for maybe survivors of some sort. I mean the subject matter in and of itself you would probably consider adult, right?. So, does that mean that somebody who’s maybe 16 but has also had this horrible stuff happen to them, does that mean that they lose access to that resource now?. Probably. What the hell. Yeah. Anything that’s flagged or agegated as adult means to submit to the age verification. There’s no way around that. There’s multiple reasons you would want an agegate a Discord server beyond just it being porn, right?. Sure. A survivor group of something or maybe it’s just a community that wants people in their age group and they don’t want teens or kids. That’s true. There’s multiple reasons to age gate a Discord server, but the general assumption is that, oh, it’s age gated because it’s porn. It’s like, no, that’s not always the case. It’s really not. Everyone suffers.

The Broader Landscape: Global Laws and Normalizing Verification

I think this is a good time to zoom out here and look at the broader landscape. I think you noticed it before I did. Discord is just one company making one arguably bad decision, but the pattern behind that is like everywhere now. Like age verification happening really fast is like a structural feature of the internet or at least it will be very soon. Yeah. I mean, Twitch just announced not too long ago they’re using Persona for age verification, which is right. I mean, already the push back on that is pretty severe, as you could imagine. But they’re not the only ones that are going to be using it. You have Reddit, you have Facebook, Instagram, Roblox. No, I’m just kidding. Roblox. Yeah, if only. Actually, they would benefit from that. They have a real problem. Roblox would be better with that. That’s like the only platform where age verification would actually help. Oh god, such a problem. Oh god, it’s real bad. But yeah, Discord’s not the only one who’s trying to push this, right?. I think the newest development in this landscape of age gating and identity checking is California’s new bill that takes effect January 1st of next year. That law requires all operating system providers, including, get this, Linux distributions, to collect a birth date or age at account setup. The law breaks users into four age brackets between under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, and 18 plus, and requires those OS providers to send realtime age signals to app developers via an API. The penalties for this run up to $7,500 per affected child per intentional violation. Are you kidding me?. What does that even mean?. Colorado introduced a similar bill as well. Like me being a regular user of Linux, that’s open source. Development on those projects is decentralized by design. How is a volunteer-maintained project supposed to comply with a standard like that?. How can you apply and enforce these restrictions to opensource projects when somebody can download the code and yank that part out?. How is that ever going to stop anyone?. That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t understand this.

I mean, that would work for Mac OS and Windows close source, no problem. Yeah, it’s easy to do that. And in fact, they already do that in some way because Microsoft requires you to have Microsoft account now to use Windows, which then runs you through the age stuff anyways. And I’m sure Apple has a similar setup as well. Basically, to use an iPhone in general, like you have to use the app store in some form or fashion. That’s the only way to get apps in at least wise. And that requires a card in your Apple ID profile. So, in a way, that’s kind of an age verification. I mean, if Discord’s already saying that they’re going to allow that as a method for verifying age, well, then that’s an age verification thing. Yeah, you already have to effectively verify your age with Apple. It doesn’t solve the problems they think it’s going to solve because again, it’s easy to get around that. Like, oh, I’ll just get some random card and put it in. You could buy a prepaid off the store shelves as like a 10-year-old and like get around it however you wanted. It doesn’t solve anything. It just adds an extra layer that everyone can get around. Anyways, it’s really just a waste of time and pointless. Huge waste of time. Maybe we’ll just cover this very briefly here. The UK’s online safety act is one of the variables in play here. They’re doing a lot to accelerate enforcement alongside also the state laws that are coming into effect already. They’ve handed out multiple fines over there. Offcom opened cases against X over the Grock chatbot of course and an AI service as well in January, which means that they are now definitely agegating AI platforms as well. Reddit was fined $14.5 million, which is almost 20 million US for unlawfully processing children’s data and tells me that things are really speeding up here and they’re getting way more serious about enforcing this.

Then you have Australia, right, which banned social media for anyone under the age of 16. That ban took effect December of last year and it’s been almost 3 months now. Supposedly, Australia’s communications minister cited 4.7 million accounts that have been deactivated or restricted in the first month of enforcement. There’s no actual figures available of how many of those accounts actually belonged to children versus like dormant or abandoned accounts, but if you ask any teenager down there, they’ll tell you they’re getting around that social media ban with like really simple workarounds. Supposedly normies won’t be able to bypass the age verification stuff, but less benevolent people who may have more time on their hands, may be more technically inclined will always find ways to exploit your system. And that is true in all of cyber security in general. No platform, no standard, no protocol is ever 100% secure given time. Over enough time, whatever standard protocol encryption, whatever you’re using will be exploited or worked around in some form or fashion. It is always just a matter of time. It this is the same thing, the same concept. And kids are already getting around the social media ban in Australia. I remember when I had parental controls on my computer when I was younger, I just popped in a live CD with rainbow tables and cracked the out of that password. Boom. Done. I mean, it was easy. It was stupid easy. Really, all you had to do is Google search, read for about 5 minutes, burn a CD, and you were good to go. No more parental controls. It makes me wonder the more savvy ones will probably do what we did when we were in middle school. We just use proxies to get around Sonic Wall. It’s the same sort of thing. Somebody will find a way to get around it and then it’ll be great. And then that’ll get banned in the whack-a-ole fashion. And then another avenue will pop up, then that’ll get banned, then another one, and the whole cycle continues over and over and over again. Game of whack-a-ole. Yeah, I don’t even think that these methods are going to be really that enforcable. There’s almost certainly going to be a way around it. And I feel like it’s a waste of resources to try and do this. Really, it it just seems wasteful. You have to look at the bigger picture, though, like why go through so much effort?. Well, it’s easy to introduce mass centralization for the internet when they bring up children. True. Like, oh, we’re doing this for the children. But that’s always the first stepping stone. That’s not usually like the larger goal. This is just an easy way for them to slowly indoctrinate people into accepting a more restricted internet and a more centralized internet, more government controlled internet. And from there, it’s just a complete hellscape. I mean, that really is the biggest concern. It is another step toward a far more draconian and invasive future where you have no privacy ultimately.

Surveillance and Real-World Impact

We can already see that with actually Discord’s own transparency report in just the first half of 2024. They fulfilled 85% of all legal requests they received. 85% of those requests for user data were fulfilled from governments. They want to know the users behind the online name. They want to have a real name tied to the username. And it is so convenient to just say, “But for the kids.”. Yeah, that’s the way in. Clean. It’s how you propose it. Oh, it’s for protecting our children. But it’s not just for that. It goes a step further every single time. That’s the easy way in cuz no one’s going to argue against that. Really?. It’s hard to argue against that and they know that it paints you. Yeah. Exactly. As somebody who doesn’t care about kids and it’s like all right well that is totally missing the point entirely but now that you’ve labeled me like I don’t care about kids how can you fight that like people get way too intertwined in the emotions and can’t look objectively like what the actual core issue is going to wake up one day and oh I want to use the internet oh wait I have to submit my ID to log on like it’s going to be like that this insane centralized internet that only shows you what the government wants you to see or what they allow to have available. It’s very 1984. God, dude, we’ve been warning about this for decades and we still built the goddamn thing anyway. Come on. Come on. And AI is spearheading it. They’re making it real easy. DHS is already subpoenaing user data from these same platforms. So, Reddit, Google, Meta, Discord, they’re already demanding the names, emails, phone numbers behind the accounts of people who are criticizing ICE, and they’re also using something called an administrative subpoena to skip the judiciary entirely. So, they don’t actually need a warrant. Like, what?. What the hell. This is all in the name supposedly of child safety, right?. But then the government demands access to that identity data for purposes that probably have nothing to do with child safety. It makes me a little uncomfortable, you know, it makes me feel watched, right?. And so once you know you’re being watched, just the fact alone that you know you’re being watched will cause you to change your behavior and self-censor in some form or fashion. Maybe say something or don’t say something that you truly believe but are now steering clear of it because you know that you’re going to be under examination in some form or fashion. That’s already a form of censorship, self censorship. Where does it end?. I think the reason people are speaking up about this now is enough of us are realizing, hey, this is a big step in the wrong direction. And over time, just incrementally, like that’s not how democracies die. Not all at once. Generally, it’s a very methodical series of steps over many years that people don’t bat an eye at because the process is so slow. This is one of those tipping points in my opinion. Starts with Discord and then everyone else will follow suit.

We’ve already got the laws. California coming into play here. You’ve already got more companies jumping on the age verification bandwagon right after Discord. So, it’s getting there. It’s starting to escalate. We’re seeing more and more platforms consider age verification or just flat out implement it in some way in the future, either globally or where it’s required. But that’s the thing, like a lot of them already do it where it’s required, like in the UK and Australia, but they’re talking about doing it just across the board, like Discord. So, it’s the same problem. It’s like you got Twitch now partnering with Persona to do age verification. And then Reddit uses Persona, but they don’t enforce it here in the US or the EU. But they could if they decided just, okay, let’s do it globally like Discord’s doing it. They’ve already partnered with Persona and many other platforms already have Persona as a partner and do age verification in the UK, Australia. It’s easy for them to then just simply roll it out everywhere else even if it’s not required. Scary to think about.

The other thing is, and I’m sure you’ve probably heard at least at some point in the past the inaccuracies around facial verification and facial recognition stuff. I just want to list some statistics here that in and of themselves are concerning. 15 million US adults lack driver’s licenses. 2.6 million have no government photo ID. And populations that skew black, Hispanic, low income, or disabled, that’s majority of those folks. According to a NIST study in 2019 of 189 facial recognition algorithms, they found false positive rates 10 to 100 times higher for black and East Asian faces compared to white faces. So, this will disproportionately impact people of color and people with disabilities, probably transgender and non-binary people as well. That’s the other thing. According to a 2024 Williams Institute study found that 43% of voting eligible transgender Americans in states with in-person voting don’t have ID that correctly reflects their name or gender. So, we’re not even talking about just adults here. We already know the statistics show these are flawed in the first place. The chances that you might be locked out are even higher because those algorithms are much more inaccurate. Like that’s what we should be talking about, right?. Like right, god damn it. It’s it’s getting so dystopian so fast. You have to have an ID to use the internet. And heaven forbid you don’t have an ID. Like this isn’t necessarily directly related to the internet per se, but something that’s recently happened in Kansas is overnight they invalidated the driver’s licenses of anyone that’s transgender. Oh, that’s right. Yeah, you told me. It’s a huge like just wild. Absolutely wild. So basically what happened is Kansas has now made it to where transgender people, anyone that identifies as transgender, don’t have a valid license anymore and they have to get a new one that identifies them as transgender specifically. It’s like another bill that’s being passed to put a label on a group, put people in the box so like, oh, we know who’s who. It’s like putting everything in categories so they can keep track of it, right?. It’s absolutely insane. My heart goes out to those guys. Like I don’t think people realize how difficult life is without valid ID just in your day to day, but now you’re potentially going to lose access to a whole ass community that you’re a part of online through Discord. Yeah. Not only do you have the state laws that are happening that are affecting groups, you have everything that’s happening on the internet with platforms deciding to age verify things and that requires ID. Well, what if you don’t have a valid ID anymore because of what just happened in Kansas?. I mean, it’s just insane. I find this whole issue deeply troubling for multiple reasons. One of which is the statistics show that these algorithms already discriminate even if the developers of the algorithms don’t intend to. The invasion of privacy is the obvious one there. And then the upstream link to governments and perhaps leadership in modern day America who is controversial. We know how heavy-handed they can be. They’ve been extremely heavy-handed with a lot of their enforcement and actions, and this is so messed up because it it’s like the new normal, but it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be at all. Like, what the hell are we doing?. Like, this is so crazy to me how fast this is ramping up. How centralized this stuff’s becoming. I mean, Persona already, one company, five popular platforms are already working with. So, right there, maybe you mess up and you don’t get along well with Persona or they flag you somehow. Then you can’t use those. You can’t use five of the most popular platforms on the internet cuz one company is servicing all of that and you don’t have a choice. Especially if you’re in the US, then you’re subject to the cloud act.

Data Sovereignty and Exploring Alternatives

Makes me think of the data sovereignty part of all of this, right?. If it’s not your platform, then the data you put on it isn’t actually going to be yours anymore. Like the person who runs the platform has control over the data you upload to it. So there’s nothing you can do. If you store data on there, you can’t get it back. And then they can do whatever they want with it. Most of the terms of service for some of these things are wild, man. They can copyright your works. I don’t want to name any specific. Most people don’t read it. That is a huge problem. I read the terms of service of everything. Actually, that’s not true. I do read the privacy policy, but not always the terms of service. Well, most people don’t want to read it because they make it super long to the point where and they over complicate it, too. Like they put it in words that they don’t need to use, but they use those words to intimidate you and and it makes it like, okay, actually, I don’t want to read this. I’ll just hit accept and move on. Can’t accept the iTunes terms of service every time you update. You know, it and it could be like literal pages. Oh, they’re long. Thousands and thousands of words, just pages and pages. And it’s like most people don’t want to spend time for that. 30 minutes reading this thing. Yeah. No, come on. And they know that even if you don’t agree with it, you still have to agree to it to use the platform. So, you may as well you still have to. So, yeah, you just blindly hit accept, accept, confirm, whatever, hit the check box and continue on. And that’s what they expect you to do. They know that most people aren’t going to sit there for an hour reading through everything that they’ve put on there. It’s so much. Yeah, some of those are stupid long. I remember I want to say it was probably Apple. They came out with an update to some document that I was like, “Okay, I better see what they changed. There’s no way I’m going to remember the specific changes, but I’m curious like what it says now.”. And it was like 40, 50 pages. I’m like, “What the hell. No, I don’t have time for this.”. Exactly. That’s why they do that. That’s why they do that cuz they know you won’t want to read it. So, they put things in there and hide it in the back because they know that you’re not going to want to read it. It’s so easy to sneak things into there. Yeah. That’s kind of like what they do with legislation these days. Seems like you make it like three book lengths long and then it’s like, “Okay, well, not many people are going to want to read all this, so we’re just going to sneak something here and here and here.”. Yeah, right. You’re doing some like budget reconciliation thing and you sneak in there. Every day is now Christmas. Yeah, exactly. But that’s the whole point. You make it overly complicated. You make it overly long and you’re going to pretty much ensure that most people won’t spend the time to read every sentence in there, right?.

So, I do a lot of self-hosting of services. I spin up my own applications, networks, things like that. I not only just find the hobby enjoyable, but I learn a lot when I’m doing it. Governments basically are catching up to what us self-hosters have known for years, which is if you don’t control your infrastructure or your platform, then somebody else controls you. In light of all of this, we’ve actually seen some movement on the global stage, specifically EU countries moving away and off of platforms that are hosted in the US. For example, France, they are moving 2.5 million civil servants off of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx. I think that’s Cisco. By 2027, Austria’s military dropped Microsoft Office for Libre Office. Germany migrated 44,000 employees off of email to open-source platforms. Denmark is replacing Office 365 with Libra Office and exploring reduced Microsoft dependency as a whole. And the precipitating event for all that, the Trump administration sanctioned the ICC’s top prosecutor and then Microsoft cut off his email. Under the US Cloud Act, any US-based company can be compelled to hand over any user’s data regardless of where it’s stored. In and of itself, I think scary as a US citizen, but heaven forbid you’re living abroad and may not be a US citizen. Well, you’re now relying on a US company that is controlled by the US government. And whatever you may say, do decide, whatever you use the platform for, well, that can be directly piped to our very controversial federal government. So, you know, concerning. Uh, you’re in trouble. You’re so in trouble now. So, you know, like that’s the political stage. I also wanted to briefly mention a phenomenal lecture by my favorite author, Corey Doctoro. Uh it’s a 39C3 talk from December of last year called a post American inshitification resistant internet. I personally think that’s essential viewing if you are at all curious about the broader geopolitical implications of all this. He is also the inventor of the term inshitification. He’s the one who coined it and popularized it. Great books, great material, great talk. I’ll link that.

That kind of leads into alternatives, right?. Jumping back to Discord, there aren’t really a whole lot of compelling, easy to migrate to alternatives, not really. I mean, yes and no. But as far as wanting to keep everything you already have on your Discord server and take it over to somewhere else, that is not so easy. It’s easy to get on a different platform, sure, but rebuilding everything or trying to migrate everything you have to the new platform, that is where the problem kind of is. Then everyone’s scattered, right?. Cuz people are choosing different alternatives. Now people are like even further split apart, right?. At least on Discord, things were somewhat unified. But now people are choosing different alternatives and communities are definitely split now for sure. That’s what they do. That’s every big company from Adobe to Microsoft now Discord. They make it super easy to sign up and give them money and then once you’re unhappy with the service, they make it impossible to switch away from it. Oh yeah. That is the playbook. If only things were built on open standards, which is what I do. I self-host using open standards making the interoperability keyword there between services and platforms trivial easy. Anybody can write a tool to migrate data from one to the other and nobody loses sleep over losing any data because it’s super easy to migrate because the platform is built on an open standard. So that was another point that he made that really important I think an open standard. Yeah, the Discord unfortunately people are so used to it and it’s so feature rich and we’re so used to having these features and it’s so hard to find something that also provides the same level of service that Discord does as far as the features it offers and that’s been the real struggle. I mean Discord really took off during COVID when it really became almost essential for a lot of people. Everything was in lockdown and Discord made it easy to have video calls, voice chatting, and they introduced a lot of new features because of the fact that everyone had to be remote and it’s hard to find something that offers that same level of functionality and they know that. They know that it’s not something that’s easy to replace and they’re pretty much betting on the fact that you’re not going to leave because the alternatives don’t offer the same features. But there are some that are definitely very Discord like maybe not all the features of Discord but most of them at least for now would be a good enough replacement until these things get further developed. Yeah. And a lot of these are self-hostable which is great. I feel like we got a pretty solid list here of various applications.

Yeah. So first up Stoat. It used to be called Revolt but they changed the name for legal reasons. It is open source very Discordesque as well. The UI is pretty Discord-like. It does have some of the features, but not all of it. I don’t think they do video. Obviously, voice and texting and all that, and they have emoji stuff and the general things you would expect, but there’s a few things that are missing. There’s screen sharing. It’s been implemented, but it’s not actually ready yet because Stoat is in progress, and it has been for a long time because it’s open-source and it’s volunteer basis. So, kind of a slow progression, but it is getting there. One thing I can say in favor of Stoat, the documentation’s not bad. Certainly better than quite a few of the others. Yeah, it’s there. They’ve had time to actually provide information how to set it up and how to use it. Fully open source and self-hostable potentially a great option. Yeah, we’ll spin up an instance of that in the near future and test it out ourselves. Fluxer is also another one that people are migrating to or at least talking about. Again, UI wise, it is very Discord-like, almost one for one. Fluxer’s got a great UI. If you’re looking for ex like exactly what Discord is, that is the choice. Yeah, UI-wise, it’s almost one for one. And feature-wise, it’s not bad either. They have a road map of things they want to get done. We’ll see if that happens. There’s a 2026 road map on Fluxer’s website. It’s kind of ambitious because it’s being built by one person. You’re right. Yeah. And they’re Swedish. Shout out Sweden. Thanks, guys. I think he has said that he’s at least hiring or looking into hiring more people. I hope he does. But anyways, this is a newer thing. It’s still in public beta. It’s made by one person, but despite that, it’s actually made quite a lot progress for being developed by one person. It has a lot of the Discord features already, quite shockingly. So, that is a very viable alternative. And if that road map holds true, then it would be a very strong competitor to Discord. Definitely strongly recommend that. Also open source and self-hostable. Those are the two key things that we look for at least. Both them open source, you can self-host it. They do obviously have the option where you could just use their servers. Oh, that’s true. Yeah, Stoat does as well, right?. Yeah, Stoat has a backend you can use and Fluxer does as well. If you don’t want to self-host. But again, you have to keep in mind if something changes, if they change a policy or something happens like a log gets enacted or something and you’re not self-hosting, well, that could screw up your day. I mean, something bad could go down. Words out of my brain. That was exactly what I was going to mention next because again, it ties all the way back around to that first point. Not your platform, not your rules, not your choice. You’re putting that trust into someone else who’s controlling that and you’re just making the assumption that nothing will ever change, but you just never can actually be 100% sure that it won’t change and it very well could, which is where self-hosting comes into play. You’re not as connected to everything they do. You’re not shackled to them. Shackled. Great word. You know, it’s easy to like server that tie and then retain all the data because you have it locally. Yeah. Most of the time works out. Not always. Most of the time you get pretty far. You can go quite a while. But there’s always one thing. If it’s not the company itself, it’s the country they’re in.

The next one is Matrix/Element. And Matrix is a protocol though. Yeah, the Matrix Element that decentralized protocol option there. Protocol is open. I also believe it’s federated as well. So you can hop around between different servers and have your data move around. Right. That’s something that’s on Fluxer’s road map as well. Federation. Nice. I don’t know if Stoat has anything like that. That’s a good question. I don’t remember seeing anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Doesn’t mean they’re not going to. It just these platforms are open source or volunteer-based, and we have to wait and see how they grow with what’s been happening with Discord. And that growth could happen fast because people are actively looking for alternatives. There is a US-based nonprofit called Unredacted, who made a good note here. If you’re trying to ditch Discord for an alternative, don’t register on matrix.org because it’s UK based and subject to the online safety act. Specifically, Matrix is the protocol and Element is just an example of one client application built on that protocol. To use an analogy here, Matrix, the protocol is like SMTP or IMAP for email. And then Element would be like Outlook or Thunderbird which is the app that you would actually use to interface with the underlying protocol to get and send those emails. Your information stays but you can choose a different client if you wanted something else. Maybe you don’t like Element. Maybe you want to use something else. Well, you could and you could keep everything you’ve already built and move it over. Yeah. Maybe a small caveat here to the Matrix option. There are many options for both servers and clients. Uh, so take your time to like maybe read through, figure out how all those work if you’re looking into self-hosting or using those. It’s definitely like not the most casual friendly option. There’s a lot of information out there about that, which in and of itself not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes it overwhelming for new users. So yeah, if you’re not into that, then Fluxer, Stoat make it pretty simple. Although I will say that Fluxer does not have actual documentation right now for self-hosting. You could do it still, but you have to get information from the community, from the people that have already actually set up a self-hosted instance on Fluxer cuz they’re not ready with documentation because again, the app is very much still in development. So, they’re actively making major changes behind the scenes and it’s not really worth putting out a bunch of documentation if something’s going to change anyways, right?. I remember looking through that documentation and seeing that it was like, “Oh, actually, it’s TBD.”. What?. What do you mean TBD?. Oh, right. Okay, they’re undergoing some massive refactor. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes because of the influx of users and the growth they’re seeing. They have to migrate stuff and a lot of things have to change. So, right now there isn’t any official documentation for Fluxer, right?.

We got two more, but they’re not really super related to Discord and the fact that maybe it’s that’s more chat and multimedia oriented. These are more like voice based primarily at least. Yeah, I mean TeamSpeak does do messaging and you can send images and whatnot, but it is very much more focused on the voice aspect of it. I don’t know if they do any sort of video or group video stuff or screen sharing. I don’t think they do screen sharing. Teamspeak is great. Although it’s not open source, right?. So you are subject to the policies that TeamSpeak is under, but they are independent. They’re not owned, as far as I know, they’re not actually owned by another company. I’m looking this up right now. The TeamSpeak 6 beta released in January of last year added screen and camera sharing, but it’s the beta, so you might have to switch to that. Well, there you go. It’s they’ve got some of it now and you can self host it. The one downside is it’s not open source, so it could be a dealbreaker, but still that’s pretty good. Definitely. My vote is definitely Mumble when it comes to voice, specifically low latency voice. If you wanted something as simple as possible, especially UI wise and just functionality wise, Mumble is pretty much geared only for voice. There is like text messaging in there, but it’s really basic. It’s really basic. There’s no emojis or anything like that. There’s no gifts you can upload through the keyboard. It’s very simple, but it’s very lightweight because of that. Yes. As far as like an open-source lightweight self-hostable solution, Mumble might be the goat. It is really good. The audio quality is good. The latency is really good. It’s better than Discord as a whole, I would say. Specifically, the latency issues that we’ve had with some of the Discord voice channel servers just randomly spazzing out. Packet loss shoots up to 100% randomly on both ends. It then we have to disconnect and reroll the servers to get a new instance that works. And I really don’t like that reliability issue that we have with Discord sometimes. It makes me a little concerned as to how their infrastructure actually operates. Curious why that happens, but I would rather have something that I knew I had full control over. It is honestly really simple to set up and it’s quite powerful though. My vote would be Mumble. It’s great. There’s also a global directory as well, so you can probably find a server that’s free to use there. Granted, you are putting your faith in whoever is operating that server when you do that, but it does do voice pretty well overall. There are public servers, but yeah, it’s not your server. So, whatever happens happens. The whole point of this self-host, do it. You’ll own your own data. You’ll have sovereignty over that data. You have full control. Mumble is a great choice if you only need voice. If that is the only thing you need, Mumble should be a simple no-brainer option. Yes. Honestly, if you only use Discord because it has voice and you don’t want to use Discord anymore because of everything that’s happening right now. Mumble does voice beautifully and if that’s all you need, it’s free. It’s open source. It’s ready to go.

Final Thoughts and Sign Off

That’s pretty much all we got for Discord. Again, not your platform, not your data or control over it. I think everyone needs to start thinking about that. What company am I signing up with?. What company am I giving my data to?. Am I granting a license to potentially do whatever they want with my data?. You don’t have to worry about any of that if you self-host. Policies change, terms of service change, privacy policies change. You never know. You just simply never know. That is the antidote, I think, to this problem is self-hosting. And Discord is another stepping stone in the wrong direction. That’s really concerning for so many reasons. And I’m just glad that I have a server and the know-how to stand up my own instances of alternate free open-source platforms to potentially replace it if we need to. Be careful of what you say online. Consider whatever you upload anywhere online as part of the permanent public record by default. Assume that. Look into some of these solutions. I really do think that the more people who switch away or find better alternatives, well, the less money that’s going to come into those platforms and then maybe maybe they’ll rethink some of their partnerships or terms of service or actions that they take to affect negatively user privacy and all the centralization that we see. Just only going to get easier to control the masses using the internet as a tool as we go. Say something. This can’t go on because it doesn’t end well. We know how this ends. It’s 1984 in motion. As cliche as that is, that is where we’re headed. 10, 20 years. That hell, maybe even by the end of this year. Who knows?. It’s really scary out there. And Discord is only going to be the first in, I’m sure, a series of companies and states who are going to come down hard on the anonymity angle in one way, shape, or form, whether that’s through age verification laws or not. That’s just a really convenient vessel for identifying users. So, that’s what I think. Really bummer. Big bummer. Yeah, it’s a pretty big bum. It’s pretty bummer. I’m not really looking forward to any of that. If something else happens, obviously, we’ll bring it up next time. If it’s significant, who knows?. Discord’s shifting a lot. We’ve recorded this like three times and already so many things already. So many things have changed as far as Discord and their age verification system. So, we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll see. Keep tabs on it. Make your opinion heard. Don’t fall victim to self-censorship if you don’t have to. And yeah, that’s how freedoms erode slowly and surely. So, just call that out when you see it. I think that about does it. I feel like we did a pretty good job covering all the angles there.

As far as the talk from Cory Doctoro, I’ll link that. I think that’s great. I think everybody should watch that. That’s that’s my plug. I think we’ve got here No Rest for the Wicked. Whoa. That’s a game that just for the visual art style, like you don’t even have to be a fan of like the gameplay because it’s a Soulslike game. So, it’s kind of hard. It is multiplayer though, so you could play it with friends. You don’t have to be solo and suffer by yourself. You could suffer with a group of people. Misery loves company. The misery. Everyone can share in misery. But no, hey, I’m not recommending it just for the gameplay, but I’m recommending it simply because the visual art style they have chosen is absolutely amazing looking. It’s really unique and you could just watch a video of it on YouTube. I mean, even the cinematics, everything, it’s really well done. Like, it’s got a really nice art style and it’s from the same developers that made Ori and the Blind Forest, I believe. So, it kind of shares that kind of like handpainted art style feel and it just it looks so good in this game. The art style is super unique. No rest for the wicked. We’ll link that up too. Guess that about does it. If you made it all the way this far, thank you. We’re not trying to do this specific format every single week. This is kind of special because we’ve had so many issues recording this. Next week, we’ll be back though. We’ll try to keep it under an hour ideally. This one was kind of one big topic, Discord. It was just too much to talk about. Real quick on No Rest for the Wicked. Looks like it’s a heavily customized Unity engine actually. Absolutely amazing art style. Great art style. Go check that out.

Next week we’ll be back. We’ll have news and potentially some stuff about what we’re actually working on, things that we’re doing. We also have a Patreon. That’s what I need to mention, of course. Go check that out. Patreon’s a way to help support us and get bonus content. You don’t have to do that, but if you like what you’re hearing and want us to make more of it, by all means, please feel free to check that out. You can also check us out on squaredcast.com. That is a new site that I just finished building. I’m very proud of that. It’s very cool. I think you should check that out. It’s very sick. Well, that does it. That’s Squaredcast. Show notes, links to everything we talked about be up on our website. Again, squaredcast.com. If you want to support what we’re doing, check out our Patreon. You can get bonus episodes, project builds, music from the archive, and a whole lot more starting from just $2 a month. We appreciate you being here. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah, I know. Sick. Totally optional, not required, but we appreciate you regardless. We appreciate you being here.