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This is a continuation of this rant I made here, so if you are interested for some reason, you can read that first and then read the rest here.
Once every couple of years, we get fed up with the main service we used to use and then we decide to move everything to somewhere else. Once there, we get everything set up again, and we get used to the new platform. Sadly, as the platform we moved to grows, it starts to want to make money, so therefore it starts to get worse and worse. Discord started off as this cool service that you can use to chat with people. It was a neat replacement to the crustiness that was Skype, because when compared to Skype, Discord was nice to use, it felt awesome at times. Then Nitro started to get added. Slowly, Discord went from this neat chat app to a bloated piece of shit with half of the cool features locked behind a paywall. It tried desperately to make itself profitable, from trying to become another game store, to pivoting into a general chatting app during the pandemic to compete against Google Meet and Zoom, to adding more and more ads into the whole mix, becoming the same hunk of shit as the service it was supposed to replace.
I also been thinking if Discord was the best choice to begin with. Like, it has no end to end encryption outside of voice calls (and apparently the EE2E for VCs is not that great). It is a platform that declares that it doesn’t sell user data, however it collects quite a surprising amount of information on you, stuff like what programs you run (to make the “person is playing game name” feature work), who you talk to, the entire message history in servers and with persons, your friend and block list, and since nothing is end to end encrypted, any of that data is a subpoena away from being accessed by law enforcement, or a business deal away from being fed into the AI slop machine or some other thing that helps them sell ads, if it is not already being sold. Or if it is not Discord, it is some third party company using bots to scrap everything you say in public servers1. Governments can purchase this information and use it to build a profile of you, want you do, who you associate, and more. And remember that whole ToS change that Discord made a while back to void the right to sue them? Kinda makes the whole thing look very suspicious. And I really have used Discord for a lot, and for a long while now. And while I do take steps to limit what Discord can get from me (using Vesktop blocks a lot of telemetry, which can help), the thing is that it doesn’t matter since every damn message I send is not encrypted. And I been wanting to switch away from Discord, but in the same way with Whatsapp, I am essentially forced to use Discord because all my friends use Discord, and no one else wants to switch to anything else. Stepping away from me for a moment, Discord has done irreparable harm to communities and fandoms across the internet, by locking them behind the Discord walled garden, making then inaccessible except with their approved Discord client or site. A lot of forums for whatever reason opted for Discord, without realizing how much of a bad idea that would turn out to be in the long run. A lot of tech projects rely on Discord now, forgoing their own forums, and sometimes, even require you to join a Discord server if you want to download any piece of software.
I been reading a lot about what could replace Discord. I’ve seen a lot of blog posts about this, and some people advocate for a multi-service solution, and then say from their high horse that “if we were still following the old internet ways of having your friends split up in 20 different places, we would’ve fine!” and not really realizing why Discord is popular, because it managed to consolidate a lot of the communities in one space, it kinda managed to make voice chats something that wasn’t a massive pain anymore, among other neat features that Discord had2. There are the “federate everything!” crowd that advocates for using more federated options instead of something centralized than Discord, but realistically, how do you explain to the average Discord user what is a federation? Because that “oh it is just like how you can send messages from Outlook to a Gmail account” description that I seen a lot of people use in the past doesn’t really help in my opinion, because like the whole federation and the Fediverse are in my opinion pretty complicated to understand and use, and you often find issues with trying to use it. I remember a post of a friend where she got a DM on Bluesky, letting her know that someone was using a tool called Bridgy Fed to bridge their account from the Fediverse to follow her, and then that message was telling her to read the docs for more fucking information, and like the first thing she said was “what the fuck does any of this mean”. Like, no one that is outside the tech space knows what the fucking Fediverse is, and trying to push it as a solution will probably not work.
It has been actually surprising to see friend servers actually talk about Discord alternatives seriously, like seeing Matrix actually being considered as an actual alternative is nice to see, and a lot of people I know are opting to using Stoat now. Signal is being seen as a real alternative for one on one chats. Discord is no longer seen as the monolith it once was. Now, people realized there are multiple alternatives to go now. It is funny how Discord forgot the only reason why it got popular: it was better than Skype, and now that it is slowly yet surely devolving, I think now would be the time it will start to slowly be replaced by other options.
Anyways, here is a small-ish rundown on some options me and my friends been demo-ing for the last couple of days.
revolt / stoat
Revolt or Stoat or whatever you call it, is probably the closest “Discord-like” we have as of right now. It does a lot right: it is open source, it makes things as comfortable as possible for a Discord user, and it brings numeric enumerators, which are something that Discord got rid like a couple years ago. However, there are a lot of issues with Stoat as of right now. It has no screensharing, the apps for desktop and Android are very undercooked (not to mention that the iOS app just doesn’t work according to a friend), there is no EE2E anywhere (there are plans to implement it, at least, but those are just plans), and I do notice quite a lot of disorganization from the project, if that makes sense. Like it seems that there is little communication from the project’s devs and the users, and the prime example is the name change they had to undergo like recently.
Apparently, using the Revolt name was infringing someone else’s copyright, and thus Revolt decided to change their name. So they went with Stoat, which would be fine, except for the fact that the name change is still very fucking inconsistent. On the desktop client, we do have a lot of elements of the UI that still read out as Revolt, except on the home screen, where it reads out as Stoat. Like, this inconsistency really makes me not trust Stoat at all, because like, if they this disorganized with a simple name change, imagine how their security would be? Like, is it actually safe to use? Who knows!
Stoat to me also feels pretty slow. Like, I joined a server on there, and this server is pretty large, and I do notice a lot of slowdown on trying to load messages. There is also a lot of issues with like new message ticker on the top, and unlike Discord, it does not count missed messages, so if you are someone who suffers from a lot of FOMO like me, you cannot tell easily from a glance how many messages you missed. Maybe it is 20 messages that you missed, or maybe 300 messages.
There is also a lot that is missing from Stoat. It is missing a lot of features, like the polling and screensharing feature, and more important features like end to end encryption, so I worry like if me and my friends decided to go full-in with Stoat, what is stopping them from going the same route as Discord, and selling our data? How would Stoat deal with subpoenas? How would Stoat deal with it being forced to add age verification in some countries? We just don’t know at this point. Yet it seems to be the one that most of my friends would end up using, and well, I guess that’s that.
Anyways, I think if Stoat actually put some work into the client and their backend, and worked on getting its act together, I think it could be a great alternative for the current shitshow that is Discord right now.
addendum: there has been some controversy on Stoat making use of AI for coding, which depending on your stance on it, can be a bad or a really bad thing. Stoat has disclosed every place where AI was used, which you can read it here. From what I can see, there has only been three occasions where AI was used, and all of these changes were reverted. Stoat has reverted all changes where AI was used, however have not promised they would use it again in the future however.
matrix / element
In theory, Matrix has a lot going for it. I like the idea of being able to host my own Matrix instance, and then like invite all my friends to use it or whatever. I also like the idea of having servers where I can have EE2E enabled. In reality, trying to use Matrix is not a fun experience sadly. It feels so fucking slow, and on larger servers, it may take a couple seconds to load up everything. E2EE on Matrix really feels like a pain in the ass, because if you don’t verify every new user on a server that has encryption enabled, that new user will not be able to see recent messages. Which means, for most spaces, they tend to be unencrypted.
As to be expected, the main Matrix client, Element, isn’t that great. Instead of servers, Element uses spaces, which are similar, but different. So you have standalone rooms, and spaces, but accessing the spaces can be pretty confusing. Unlike Discord, Matrix does not have voice chats, however it does have calling, which I guess works in a pinch. I don’t think there is any streaming on Matrix, however. Element also feels pretty slow, even on my main PC on Windows, it struggles with scrolling, and it feels very choppy as fuck when scrolling. Meanwhile, on Linux, Element is only available as a Flatpak package on anything that isn’t Ubuntu or Debian. This would be fine, except that on the Flatpak version, it seems it cannot use the keyring on the OS, and by extension, would save messages in literal plaintext if you don’t do anything about it. So now you need to rummage though Github issue reports to find someone in the comments with the solution, which was allowing Flatpak access to the keyring for Element, which after that, it now works pretty decently.
Matrix is really just a protocol for instant messaging, which means anyone can write their own chat client, and they do, actually. There is Neochat, which is installed by default on KDE Plasma, and I think it is a neat native application for Matrix, which goes away with shit like Electron, instead opting with C++. There is also Fluffy Chat, which makes heavy use of Material Design, and then there was Fractal, an awful GNOME app that makes use of the equally terrible GTK framework, which is written in Rust, just to show there is something for everyone, lmao. These are just a couple of examples of the options we have for Matrix messengers, which is just really awesome actually, and it is something that we never got with Discord, like ever, because Discord decided to place control as more important than user choice.
There are some flaws with the Matrix experience. Trying to find new spaces is like trying to find a diamond in a pile of shit. Go though the spaces in like some space browser, and you will quickly see servers for antivaxxers, or being racist, or worse. Moderation seems to be non existent on Matrix. Lets say you found a neat space, and you decide to join. But you joined a single channel, and not the whole space. This is confusing, and kinda made me demotivated on trying to find more Matrix spaces. And I think in my opinion, it is somewhat funny that Matrix always is like, placed on a pedestal by the Fediverse/FOSS community, seen as the Discord killer, yet I struggled with trying to find any space that I vibed with. And apparently, Matrix’s encryption isn’t that great, and from what I read, emojis aren’t encrypted for whatever reason. Apparently it is still better to anything Whatsapp or Telegram offers.
Of course, this is an opinion from someone who hasn’t really used Matrix in its fullest. I only really just dipped my toes into the whole thing. However, there are other people who regularly used Matrix, and some of them made pretty damning critiques against the whole Matrix project, such as this post made by Terence Eden, which made me weary of actually using Matrix full time. Another post is this one from haru, who discusses the reasons why Matrix is not a good option for some people, and some of them are pretty worrying. There is also the fact that, like in Discord, if you were to delete your account, all your messages will stay saved in whatever spaces you spoke in, which is uhh, not great. I think realistically, the only way I would use Matrix full time, is if I were to self host it myself for me and my friends, however that will have more issues, like I would have to be responsible for any sort of content posted on there, I would need to maintain it, pay for hosting, and a whole lot of shit I don’t have the motivation to deal with sadly. And considering how awful moderation is on Matrix, if a troll would to get into the servers, it would be pretty annoying to revert the changes from before the attack happened.
anything else?
signal
If Signal is safe enough to be used for a group chat discussing military operations, then I guess it is good enough for someone who wants to use it to talk with their friends about video games. Signal seems to be a great option, and there has been some friends that have been using Signal more and more, and the Signal team has been hard at work at getting it up to par with like Whatsapp and Telegram. However, it is not a Discord replacement, it was never intended to. And maybe Signal may add more Discord adjacent features in the future, but for now, it is not a good Discord replacement. It is good for directly messaging people, however. Another downfall with Signal is that it requires your phone number, and a lot of people are not really comfortable with actually giving that away to use a chatting app.
steam chat
Originally started off as a joke, me and two other friends decided to try out Steam Chat, and it surprisingly wasn’t bad. It is very barebones however. But it gets the basic features right at least. Maybe Valve can work on it more, however it has the same issues with Discord: i bet nothing is end to end encrypted, and Valve has all your information that it can sell to the highest bidder. And one must be reminded that Valve is just another company that doesn’t care about you, and while now they are the “good guys”3, that can quickly change in the future.
updates:
- 2026-02-15: page was created.
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From here, also take a look at this video here, it is a good resource on discussing what Discord is doing right now.↩︎
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Of course, this is a double edge sword, since it all takes one service going to shit for all of it to go down. Discord also gave a huge blow to forums and communities, locking them behind the Discord walled garden.↩︎
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pretty debatable, considering how much in a chokehold the PC games market is controlled by them lmao↩︎