I was using discord with notifiarr for a notification platform for my jellyfin server/*arr stack. Shut all that down and setup a self-hosted instance of ntfy today. Works perfect, should have done it sooner.
After what happened in Nepal last year, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living. The powers that be saw a small country use it as a tool to affect change. To me, and tell me if I lm jumping to conclusions here, its obvious as to why this policy change is happening at all, to prevent the site from being used in that manner again.
I’m truly surprised that lots of people don’t like it. I expected most will just silently obey the new orders of our overlords.
I found this little article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
Also this https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/ which is much more detailed and focuses on decentralised discord-like apps
At what point are we going to take responsibility and take action collectively to punish these mainstream platforms ?
Keeping it real
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
Good.
Discord is overused for help forums and wikis, which makes them extremely difficult to search and dependent upon third party software to be maintained. I hope this will force people away from that behaviour and back to good old fashioned messageboards that have been working just fine since at least the 80s
Teamspeak 6! Voice + Streaming. Selfhosting is also possible! You can also rent an instance from them for 4-5 bucks.
Americans- If you’re thinking “this isn’t so bad” please consider that all it takes is a teeny tiny, insignificant api added to the back end with absolutely no notice to users and suddenly the DHS has a database of dissenters, with cross-referenced IDs, photos of faces, chat history, link share history, raw uploaded photos, and approximate locations.
Say no to this. If you need a temporary alternative that’s quick to get going, create a signal group chat with your friends.
Forget DHS or other government agencies, these companies have been shown to be untrustworthy stewards of our data from regular hackers.
I get that discord is used to groom kids and there is a very real risk to allowing children to use it unsupervised, but that means kids devices are the ones that need to be locked down, not the rest of the world.
No argument there. Just feels particularly relevant right now if you know what I mean.
☝️🤓 Discord said they’re going to delete the data!
note
The “someone” is referring to Discord, not you.
I dig your Netscape avatar
Discord said they’re going to delete the data!
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining
That joke is NSFW, please present facial verification and ID now or you will be banned and reported to the authorities!
What if they say it’s lemonade instead?
You know what that made me think of?
https://youtu.be/UWQoK506xkQ
Pain fucking ass but deleted my Discord account. Sure wish had a decent alternative. I see a lot of suggestions just don’t which to try? Any that work great with Linux Debian?
Matrix
Do the people you talk with use Signal?
They’re already doing it to access the social security website.
Stop a calling this “age.verification” and start calling it what it is, “identity harvesting”.
Or “pre-planned doxxing”
As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.
Same here, been hating on Discord from day one since you are the product with free services.
I tried it recently, I used a temporary account for it. I think IRC is way more user-friendly: I wasn’t allowed access to anything , for no stated reason. So as far as I’m concerned, Discord is where information goes to die. Too bad some project hide all of theirs there.
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
Is the third one of these a chat app or a verb?
This is a free to use platform, just saying:
Meet Pavel Durov, the tech billionaire who founded Telegram
Pavel Durov was born in St. Petersburg in Soviet Russia.
The tech entrepreneur cofounded the encrypted messaging service Telegram with his brother Nikolai in 2013. The brothers were born into a family of intellectuals, according to a biography on the Digital-Life-Design Conference website. Durov spoke at the conference in January 2012.
Durov is now worth $17.1 billion, according to Forbes. Much of his fortune comes from Telegram, which he said hit 1 billion users in March 2025.
Guilded is dead. Their website redirects to a thank-you page of some sort. I remember trying it out ages ago and I thought it was pretty decent competition for Discord and had a lot of the same features, but ultimately it would have been susceptible to the same kind of fuckery that Discord is giving us right now. These private companies only want to extract value out of their users.
Guilded went to Roblox-only in 2025. I’d never heard of it until someone else mentioned it as an alternative.
Revolt is now called Stoat Chat. Some sort of legal issue apparently.
Anyway, for those who don’t know, it’s basically an open source clone of Discord. Definitely worth a look, probably where I’ll my stuff now.
I looked into Stoat around the time of their name change announcement.
On the one hand it looks good and is definitely the closest Discord clone at the moment. I was disappointed about a couple of things though:
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They have a self hosted server option but it doesn’t have the full feature suite and seems like they’ve decided that it won’t in the foreseeable future.
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They’re aware of federation and have no plans to head down that path for the software.
Bit of a shame because if I could self host the full software that’d be pretty damn good as a replacement for all of my friends. If it could be federated in a way where servers could work in tandem that’d be a great distributed alternative to Discord for the entire community! I understand why they’re not pursuing those avenues but it’s still a shame.
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yeah it’s the closest to a real discord clone, at least discord before they introduced screen sharing
Element or any Matrix client will be more than enough I guess. It already passed many stepping stones and has all the functionalities which discord users might want + open source
Revolt is now Stoat
Revolt is Stoat now and it doesn’t even let me verify my email right now.
I signed up yesterday and just got my verification a little while ago. I hear that they’re being swamped right now. I wonder why? 🤔
IRC :(
No voice/video calling, no screen sharing, no persistent chat history.
Sometimes you need to accept using more than one piece of software. And IRC can have persistent chat history.
That’s why IRC isn’t and never will be a replacement for Discord. Most people don’t care to accept comprimises and friction and people developing the alternatives can not impose compromises on their users and expect general market adoption.
I really wish there was some real alternative that actually worked like lemmy communities for example where you wouldn’t need to self host but be able to use a server someone else made available to be able to create a community there. And search engine indexing, that would be a must imo.
Matrix does exactly that.
I’ve only used it for private chats, but you can also have a public discoverable chat. And you can sign up at one of many federated servers. The biggest and likely easiest being matrix.org.
Is IRC still a thing? I havnt used it since 2006. I’d love to see it again
Check out libera.chat, one of the most popular IRC networks today. Freenode suffered a hostile takeover and there was a mass migration away from it so I’d avoid that one
My instance actually posted something about IRC recently I saw, right after commenting. The luck. I saw the mirc client link, and the memories flooded. Mirc is still okay though?
I’m basically a noob again. Later this week I plan to sit down with my computer and have a look. I used to only use it to download music, probably would like to do that again… I had every NoFx album,song,recording back in the day. Every single one lol I’d die to have that hard drive back.
Yep, still on it.
It is. Also widely bridged with Matrix.
Guilded is dead
and it was roblox’s property anyway
Oooohhh.
Good…uhm riddance?
Trying to point my friends towards matrix/element, they already started a teamspeak server instead though >. >
The biggest issue is it didn’t seem like matrix/element has streaming video in voice chat, we use that pretty heavily as we’ll play different games and just hang and talk several streaming at a time.
Don’t - they sell your data to police and authoritarian governments
That is not what the post says. They sell encrypted messaging to government organizations. It’s basic SaaS and allows them to fund themselves.
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
One of my Discord friends has a stalker and can’t get anything but automated messages.
Like this: spiritual advisory pastor to serve only 6 months after molesting a 12-year-old for years
Morris’s attorney said the molestation was her fault because she was “flirtatious.”
Hear me out. Maybe, if you are a parent, its your duty to keep an eye on your child, and exert some control over the spaces and people they interact with?
Absofucking- lutely!
My 12 year old has zero unsupervised access to the internet. Zero. “But they’ll suffer sociallly!”
Will they? My son has tons of friends and they play sports and Nerf guns. And, he can read. A whole chapter book, on his own, without prompting.
Suffer socially, ask the “incels” who have recovered if the internet access they had as teens “helped them socially”.
My kids had full internet use with only porn and advertising blocking, except for “homework time”, as well as no restrictions on video games (except for fucking Roblox). They recently graduated high-school at the top of their class and continue doing great in university.
They grew up to be nice, well-rounded young men who make friends easily, aren’t assholes, aren’t glued to their cell phones (which they had since they were little), don’t mindlessly watch TV, can easily switch tasks and “buckle down” when they have to, and have a great work ethic. They grew up with the attitude that internet/cell phones are tools, not rewards or distractions. Once they hit high-school I found I no longer needed to monitor them (and it was starting to feel creepy and invasive). When they had to study they studied, on their own without prompting or timers.
I had no worries because I know how to read papers, and there was (and still is) ABSOLUTELY ZERO evidence that doing so would be harming, but in fact the reverse is true.
Kids grow up to be like their parents. Don’t want them to be assholes? Then don’t be an asshole. Want them to grow up with a reading habit? Then read for yourself. It’s that easy.
It’s interesting to see that their friends who had strict internet/gaming rules ended up turning into complete shitheads they no longer associate with.
Lot of pride here… Good for you?
Kids don’t always grow up to be their parents. I found such a broad statement to put such a sour taste in my mouth when I read it.
Feels pretty privledged, and like, good for you, but damn this statement … Is very broad, dare I say arrogant. Plenty of good kids come from shitty people and vice versa.
Anyway, enjoy your adult kids and thanks for sharing
I feel like it will be more common to heavily restrict the tech access of children as people who actually grew up using the internet become parents.
I also plan to restrict my (future hypothetical) children from internet access until 13 or so, depending on maturity. So your comment gives me some optimism in that regard.
My nephew plays lots of on online games. My sister checks in with me to make sure that he is both playing games that are appropriate for him, and with people who are appropriate to play with. We’ve setup a discord specifically for him and his friends, and the account he uses is actually my sister’s account, on her own device, so she has direct control over what communities he’s on in discord, who he talks to, and what content he is exposed to.
He is not allowed to play public lobby games with out her supervision, or a trusted “chaperone” (one of many IRL friend and family members) being in the lobby with him. This is as much about protecting him from harmful content, as it is about teaching him proper gaming etiquette. He was showing some toxic behaviors (greifing mainly) and I shut that down pretty quick.
The conservative belief is that children are basically property and as such can be used for hard labor and kept from appropriate healthcare… But then when it comes to porn, Big Government has to do everything for them.
Nobody ever said it was a consistent ideology.
Conservatives have been using the “think of the children line” to justify Draconian overeach for years. All while simultaneously doing everything in their power to take away programs that help children.
Let’s not act like the dems don’t do some of the same shit.
And no I’m not both sidesing this shit…just saying that the dems/left uses this reasoning a lot as well.
Minnesota recently used their tax on billionaires to expand education and provide free lunch to children so while the party isn’t perfect they are not at all comparable.
What makes them so similar is first pass the post it guarantees a two party system and the practice of your gerrymandering creating safe seats. The worst Democrats are the ones with the safest seats. If you want positive change start there.
We’re talking about trying to pass legislation in the name of “think of the children” logic. KOSA is a fairly recent one that is from the dems.
Off the top of my head I can only think of Lieberman and honestly the ESRB was a reasonable compromise.
Tipper gore? KOSA
What’s tipper gore got to do with anything in the last thirty years? And kosa was bipartisan and died in the house.
deleted by creator
You’re mostly correct, but Dems are not left in any political paradigm with the slightest awareness of the existence of non-American countries.
political parties aren’t real. Their only purpose is market segmentation.
It doesn’t matter which teams win in sports, billionaires own all the leagues.
Bugger off ml bot.
I, too, attack the source when I cannot refute the claim
As a parent: 100% agree
Hear me out: parents are irresponsible, and also can’t watch their kids 24/7
I hear you. I guess shitty parents is a good enough reason to let a company monetize your PII for a bit before they (or one of their customers) gets hacked and dumps to the dark web.
It’s not, but that doesn’t make your argument any more sensible.
Ah, so maybe shitty parents isn’t a good enough reason to let a company monetize and eventually lose your PII to the dark web?
That is what I said, yes.
Okay. Cool that’s what I said too. Just… the way you said it sounded like you were advocating for using bad parenting as a pretext for massive breaches of privacy and identity security.
The way you said it sounded like you were advocating for parents to watch their kids every second of every day, and if they don’t then whatever happens is their fault.
And how do you , practically, do that?
Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.
Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.
Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.
Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work. No parent has time for that. And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.
I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.
You went to a school where they had no controls over what you could and couldn’t access?
My school was blocking harmful content on their computers when i was there in the mid to late 2000s.
When i got home i had something called CyberSitter on my computer in my room that sent logs of all my internet usage as reports to my dad.
It took me until 16 when i went out and bought my own computer with my own money before i had “unfettered” access to the internet.
Were these tools impenetrable fortresses? no, of course not. but they were a damn sight better than the ISP level blocks and legislating the “good” companies out of existence that the UK (and others) Government is currently engaged in.
Not that any of this is really about “protecting kids” anyway
And how do you , practically, do that?
By paying attention to your child.
Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.
Yes, by paying attention to their children.
Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.
Yep, by paying attention to when the kid was on the computer and what they were doing on there.
Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.
If you give a child a tablet or phone, you should probably pay attention to what they are doing with it. You wouldn’t just give them a full tool box to play with unsupervised.
Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work
Yep, by paying attention to the kid.
No parent has time for that.
Bullshit. You need to pay attention to your kids, that’s a basic fucking part of parenting.
And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult
Maybe you should pay attention to your kid and not let them have unsupervised access to the whole Internet until they are ready for it?
because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.
Actually, you do have an ability to monitor who your kid spends time with, and when. It’s called parenting.
I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.
Let’s not pretend that phones and the Internet only started existing in 2026 too. I was a child in the 90’s, during the real “Wild West” days of the internet. If anything, parents have more tools and controls over what their child can access in 2026 than they did in 2000. There weren’t “child” cellphone controls when I got my first phone. My dad didn’t give me one until I both needed it, and was mature enough to have it. The parental controls on my old Window 2000 machine were laughably easy to defeat. Do you know what kept me out of trouble though? My dad paid attention to when I used the computer, what I was doing on there, and how much I was doing it.
Either parent your kid, or don’t, but it is not my job to make sure your kid is coddled on the internet.
Either parent your kid, or don’t, but it is not my job to make sure your kid is coddled on the internet.
As a recently new parent myself, your post is great. And as a IT nerd, your post is also infuriating.
It is so beyond easy nowadays to monitor and restrict your child’s access to online content. Seeing the post you’re replying to just reminds me of everyone I’ve ever talked to that had X issue and their only response is “throw hands up in the air after trying nothing”.
My kids are still too young to be reasoned with, but my wife and I agreed that:
- No dedicated personal phone until middle school, and it ain’t gonna be some top of the line iphone
- No “tablet kid” bullshit
- No unfettered YouTube access
So far our oldest loves finding our phones and can open the camera app from the lockscreen and she runs around taking photos. So we’ve been letting that slide…but we don’t unlock the phone, so it’s a compromise we’ve made as she LOVES taking photos and seeing photos, which I want to encourage. As for content watching we have a TV with Plex and if there’s something we approve of on YouTube and we want our kids to watch it(Ms. Rachel), then I download the YouTube video and put it on my Plex server. No ads, no algorithm auto played videos, just pure approved content. And we have classic cartoons(Rolie Polie Olie) and disney/pixar/ghibli movies, etc.
Of course if your kid is at school with no phone but its recess and their friend has a phone with zero limits…yeah I can’t control that. But I can at least parent my kid to know that I don’t like that and I don’t want them to participate it.
Also when they’re a bit older(5 or 6 years old) I plan on teaching them internet safety. Don’t post PII, don’t visit certain websites, always use an adblocker/ublock, only talk to people online that you know in real life, etc. I do plan on playing video games with them(if they have an interest) and I know that will eventually lead to online lobbies, but I am hoping to teach them in private Minecraft servers certain etiquette first and go from there.
I’m both excited and terrified, but this is my job as a parent!
It sounds like you are doing the right things.
Long ago, I had a co-worker ask me if fortnite was okay for their kid to play, and I said “I don’t know. Why don’t you go play fortnight with your kid this weekend and see for yourself” and it was like a switch flipped in their head. Playing games online with your kids is something you can do, both to see how people are interacting with them, and to see how they are interacting with other people. I think it is really important too, that kids (especially only-childs) see other people gaming online first hand, so they can see that the person on the other end could just as easily be their mom, or grandpa, or another human being, and not just a bot that they can antagonize without consequence.
By talking to your fucking kids lmao
Like, have a conversation with them. Treat them like a person, a real human being, with thoughts and feelings and basic decision making capabilities, instead of treating them like a wild animal that needs to be leashed.
Everyone immediately thinks “it’s impossible for parents to be aware of and block everything they don’t want their kids to look at on the Internet!”. But maybe the first step should just be talking to your kids about what you do/do not want then looking at on the Internet, and trusting that they’ll heed your warnings. Tight fisted control over what your kids can/can’t see on the Internet should be the last resort.
Devices given to children can be configured to restrict access to unwanted things. Obviously, school networks already are.
The only uncontrollable thing would be kids seeing things via friends with less observant parents, but that is not a new thing.
No, it’s the not the same but there are options you’re ignoring.
We don’t need to kid-proof all of society. Adults deserve things like freedom and privacy and to not be treated like children.
You dont give children tablets and phone, full stop.
Exactly, how can you limit a child who knows internet and technology more than their parents? Like, if I was a child I don’t think they could limit me at all
Exactly, it’s basically impossible to control as a parent, but just blaming the parents is a simple solution for many. Everybody loves their easy solutions to complex issues: left, right and center.
I don’t give a shit if it’s difficult, you chose to be a parent fucking deal with it and don’t make it everybody else’s problem
It’s not impossible - parental controls can be used and school networks don’t HAVE to allow access to Porn Hub
So are you for or against mass surveillance veiled as “child safety”?
Should be pretty evident from the comment.
I can’t help but see their comment as a joke. One can only hope
I wasn’t a huge discord use but I just removed all the channels before deleting the app on every device.
Not going to make a huge difference but if everyone does it, maybe it will!
There really isn’t a good alternative to Discord, sadly. Yes, I’ve tried Matrix
Ventrilo + signal
or Mumble + IRC
This? You’re joking, right?
Voice chat works fine, you can text chat and send pics via signal.
Works for me.
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A lot of people use Discord only from their phones. I vastly prefer using a PC so I can’t imagine why anyone would opt in to using phones only, but many people do. This is not an alternative for those people if it can only be downloaded on a PC.
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Come on man, no one is going to use some Windows-XP-ass program like that lol
Sir, this is the fediverse, we all have xp-ass programs running on our PCs, despite them being linux.
Second, people just might have to change how they do things slightly (gasp!). They might even have to…LEARN something new!
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Stoat?
I’ve heard (though not personally confirmed) that their servers are overwhelmed
I just signed up yesterday, and yeah, it took almost a day to get my verification, but it worked. And the rest seems to work fine.
Absolutely not.
Stoat (formerly Revolt) is an utter shit-show of alt left and right extremists and the development is dead in the water. They’ve claimed to be working on feature parity with Discord for years now. Not to mention the developers jumping ship and the whole “Stoat” rebrand. Not to mention, their email verification server is just hosted on a homelab setup which has lead to a plethora of users being unable to receive their verification emails, resulting in them requiring a manual approval via emailing in… which guess what… those are also failing to come through!
Don’t touch Revolt/Stoat. It’s no better.
I just signed up yesterday, and yeah, it took almost a day to get my verification, but it worked. I haven’t seen any extremism yet, but I’m still new. I’ll look into the development thing.
