this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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To quote general Grevious:
“Time to abandon ship”
There’s plenty of other options out there. Discord has been enshitifying for a while now, so I don’t mind dropping it
Yeah, except it's not like you get to choose. If you are on the Discord server for rock climbing in your country, you can leave the community, but you don't have "other options".
It's not like the question is "what platform do I want to use for X?". The question is "The X community uses Discord, do I want to be in it or not?" And of course you can choose to not join, but you don't have an option to choose another app.
I definitely get what you’re saying on that. Leaving behind communities that you’re a part of, potentially for years or longer, is not appealing.
The sad reality is that is where each individual person will have to weigh their options and beliefs.
For me personally, I’m already down to just a few personal communities on Discord and for the one that I run, I will be migrating to either something like Stoat, Matrix or even a good old fashioned web forum. This all stems from not trusting Discord with my personal information, which works for me. Obviously not a one size fits all situation.
It would be nice to see Discord realize that they’re making a huge mistake and backtrack the decision, but I don’t see that happening.
Perhaps this will lead to communities migrating to web forums down the road? Only time will tell.
The problem is there isn’t plenty of other options.
Discord is one of those services independent web folk have been after a replacement for for years.
For an exact 1:1 replacement? Yeah, I do agree about that. If anyone looking for options doesn’t mind making some compromises it opens the doors quite a bit.
I shared in another reply a link to some alternatives. Guilded seems to be the closest to a 1:1 replacement for now.
My personal concern is having to repeat this again if the next proprietary platform becomes too big. My friend group has gone through google hangouts (it was a different time lol), the curse client, which became a Twitch product eventually and then Discord.
I’m at the point where I’m considering going back to web forums and things like teamspeak/ventrillo.
Roblox is asking for the same thing to use chat in-game, but they split people in age groups (9-12, 18-20…), and you can only talk to players in your age group.
Oof. That’s news to me. I’m seeing some stuff about Stoat pop up. Guess that’s what I’ll look into next
Let me know if you get it working with voice channels, tried tonight, no luck, couldn't make voice channels at all. For text it's fine I guess but that's not enough.
Will do. I need to set aside some time to see about it working with most, if not all my devices and go from there.
I did see someone else mention elsewhere that it is possible, but I don’t remember the source.
There’s also Matrix if you don’t mind tinkering around a bit too as another option.
ya I'm setting up matrix with cloudflare tunnels now, first time using cloudflare tunnels, pretty cool. I'm not thrilled at having to depend on a third party service to connect to my own stuff, but it's better than my home IP being public.
What's the best alternative in your view?
I'm going to try self hosting https://stoat.chat/ not sure it has screen sharing yet, but apparently they just re-wrote all their voice/video stuff, so it should be available soon.
I like element honestly, it has everything I need. Element call as a recent implementation is nice for that sort of thing. It also supports screen sharing
It's also worth noting, you don't need to self host. You can sign up for their hosted instance too. https://stoat.chat/login
Of course, if you want to self host that's great too.
I'm in the UK though, so they imply they may (already or in teh future) need to verify my age anyway.
They don't seem to have a great out of box experience currently, will require some more poking around.
I tried tonight, pretty broken, couldn't create voice channels at all
Tonight I've tried a bunch of options
revolt/stoat, and I couldn't make voice channels at all. If I could and it worked fine probably would have used that immediately
spacebar chat, got the server running just fine, no idea which UI to use, and when I tried the options I couldn't connect to the server and it was really clunky
setup team speak 6, immediately wanted me to create an account on their servers, rm -rf
setup mumble - might actually work, but looks like ass, friends are gonna be skeptical
setting up full blown matrix now I guess.
Honestly, what was wrong with Ventrillo for voice and literally any forum software for everything else?
What about for video screen sharing?
Owncast?
Not something that has ever come up for me, personally. So I don't have an answer for that one I guess, if that's something that's important to you.
For a potential 1:1 Discord alternative? The one that has stood out to me is Guilded. I started looking at alternatives last year when talk about this was starting to float around and forgot about it.
Here’s a recent article with alternatives that I found in a quick search. Don’t agree with all of them personally, but I’m not the target audience for some of them.
Guilded was great. Too bad it’s dead. 😕
Yeah, I just learned about that. Really unfortunate. Seems like Stoat is the next option
I really need to watch the prequels again
Dewit