Discord is amping up its restrictions on adult content, with new age gates on NSFW servers and a ban on accessing these servers from iOS devices.
Entire servers can now be marked as NSFW if their community “is organized around NSFW themes or if the majority of the server’s content is 18+.” This label will be a requirement going forward, and Discord will proactively mark servers as NSFW if they fail to self-identify. Discord previously allowed individual channels to be marked as NSFW and age-gated.
But now all users have been locked out of those servers completely on the iPhone and iPad app.
You can still access NSFW servers on iOS through your device’s web browser, though the features are more limited. As Apple Insider notes, an updated community notice that announced the change didn’t mention the reason for the move, including whether Apple asked Discord to block NSFW communities. However, it appears that users of the Android app can still access those servers.
Discord has reportedly been in talks with potential buyers, with Microsoft said to be discussing a deal worth over $10 billion. Cutting out adult content might make the chat service more palatable for potential suitors, but that doesn’t appear to be quite what Discord is doing here, given that NSFW servers are still accessible on other platforms.
