Welp

On February 9th, 2026 Discord announced to the world that it's facial recognition and ID tracking implemented to comply with UK law was coming to global in March. (captured 2/9: https://archive.is/nARng)

In this announcement there's a few things that matter:

1. Discord is implementing a teen-by-default approach, and will effectively “card” anybody their AI models can't figure out is an adult or not. Similar to YouTube
2. Discord claims your verification selfies won't leave your device, but your government ID images will. We all remember how well that went in the UK.

Typically you would expect a company like Discord to learn from it's mistakes after a blunder like that, and they probably have a totally different verification partner lined up to handle the global roll out. However this assumption does not consider the fact that Discord nearly has a monopoly on internet chat. It's not a true monopoly given there are alternatives (we will get to those shortly), but it has a ton of users who are all in deep with Discord and likely won't migrate until things are even more dire. Even if some of the alternatives I mention below seem like the perfect fit for you and your community – if you are the only one that moves, you'll just become unhappy and move back. It's exactly this line of thinking that keeps Twitter alive today. Right now Discord has no real need to get this right, but so long as their servers are still up and Discord is still the easiest platform to get your gamer friends together on it will remain on top. Discord's executives know this, and we have speculated for a long time that Discord is not profitable and running out of VC money.

Once the bill comes due, what are they going to sell to make payroll? Your data!

Dielan why are you effortposting this?

Great question! I've been looking into Discord alternatives for a long time hoping to move this community off of Discord, which we joined in 2015. Back in 2015 Discord was a breath of fresh air, and we had recently made a rocky transition from Teamspeak 3 to Mumble during the height of Warframe 8 player raids. We only moved because the Teamspeak server physically died and I didn't want to go through the trouble of getting another TS3 license. Mumble is free and open source and honestly just as good as TS3 ever was. However it was too confusing for the average gamer to use private-key/public-key authentication. People in IT are rolling their eyes reading this but it's true. Gamers see they have to save a file to prove who they are instead of a password and get lost. Discord in 2015 was the obvious choice.

As for why I'm writing this right now, I'm just taking advantage of the current Discord hate online to get attention. If I wrote this when the UK ID scanning first rolled out nobody would have read it.

So you want to try a Discord alternative?

Just referring to these programs as “Discord alternatives” is actually harmful to the cause. Discord does a lot of things wrong, but every alternative to is going to be compared on features, and if even one is missing it could be justification for your one stubborn friend to ruin your entire community migration plan. Before you dive down this rabbit hole you need to accept that these are chat programs, voice chat programs, community platforms, and so on. Some will do things Discord either doesn't do or does poorly, and some will only miss the mark by a feature or two but otherwise be way better. Normally competition is very good and ships good features fast, but since Discord users are so stubborn these other platforms have only a fraction of the population. Nothing is going to be a good fit right away, but if we never leave Discord will just keep exploiting its users.

Since not a single one of these options today can go feature-for-feature (some are really close) I'm not going to compare them like that or try to give them some kind of score. Instead I will describe the app, and give you pros and cons. Your community's most stubborn member is going to complain at the first deal breaker they see, so let's just list those out to keep it simple.

Steam Group Chat

Pros:

• Everyone you know already has it
• Steam rich presence
• You can drop game invites or watch/streaming invites in chat
• Chat persists, but does not persist forever
• Comes with a Forum (put persistent text in there), Event Calendar, and announcement system that uses steam notifications
• Works great on Steam Deck/other handhelds

Cons:

• Can only stream your game if it's a steam game or running via steam launcher
• Can't share desktop
• No webcam/video
• Mobile app sucks
• No encryption

I'm putting Steam first in the list because it's surprisingly the most obvious choice to me. Of all the options in this post, all of your friends have this installed already. Just make a group, make a chatroom, and set up a forum. This gives you all in one community management. Some menus are simple and easier than discord, some aren't. If Valve saw some metrics showing a ton of people suddenly using chat I bet they'd put more effort in it. I think the mobile app is the only thing really holding Steam back from taking social capital away from Discord even before all this ID business went down. Beware though, if Discord is the primary way you send people private messages on your phone this one isn't for you.

Root (rootapp)

Pros

• $9 Million dollars in seed funding specifically to make a better Discord
• Bot & app support
• Import feature allowing you to quickly set up a Rootapp server that matches your text chat and voice lobbies 1 to 1 with your existing discord server
• Already supports screenshare in beta version

Cons

• Not self hosted (trading one corporate overlord for another), how long until the government compells them to ID verify?
• Unclear how the company intends to make money

Unfortunately I haven't personally tried Rootapp myself. It looks pretty close to feature parity with Discord, the only thing I couldn't tell from the changelog and the videos online of it I've watched is I'm not sure if there's video/webcam support. I'm pretty sure people care a lot more about screenshare than webcam support. I can't help but worry this is just kicking the can down the road of another centralized prison in need of money with only our data as capital. I just don't know enough about this company's long term plan to really recommend it. Also the former community manager of Guilded joined Root as CM, perhaps many will see Root as the spiritual successor to Guilded (an early Discord competitor that won't be on this list that was owned by Roblox)?

Stoat (formerly Revolt)

Pros

• Actually looks like Discord
• Can be self-hosted
• Completely open-source
• You can make a “server” discord-style on the Stoat developers default instance without actually hosting your own infrastructure
• Funded by donations

Cons

• Does not federate
• not encrypted (at least, not E2EE)
• Screenshare and webcam support are planned, but not yet implemented

Stoat was originally called Revolt chat a few years back, 4 years back to be exact looking at my lobste.rs post breaking the news of it's existence. If I recall Revolt was originally a Discord clone project put together by some motivated college students, now all these years later they are still working on it for donation money. This is a model that can work long term without any fear they will sell people's data. Even if they did try that, the only data they would have to sell in the first place would be that of the users on the default server. Any self hosted instances would be under the control of whoever set it up, which is a good thing.

Teamspeak 6

Pros

• Aiming for actual feature parity when it's fully released
• Can be self-hosted

Cons

• Antiquated licensing structure (not open-source)
• Current “discord-style” server options on main teamspeak instance limited to a small number of people, and not free
• When self-hosting, your server capacity is limited by the license you purchased, which must be renewed every six months or yearly

I wish I could write more nice things about TS6 but I can't. Our community happily used TS3 for years. When we first migrated from a public server to our own we used a free license which had some kind of stipulation that we were a non-profit or something, I don't remember. Here we are in 2026 and TS is still charging big money for self hosted licenses, and there's no free license loophole like we once took advantage of for TS3. I know they have to pay the bills, and I can tell from their forums that active development is taking place but I would rather donate to the college kids that made Stoat than pay for this.

Matrix

Pros

• Self-hostable & federated
• optional encryption
• Multiple, competing mobile apps to connect to your account
• Discord-like default server to make an account on if you don't want to look around
• Supports persistent text chat, video calls, and screensharing
• Matrix protocol designed to be an all-encompassing ecosystem

Cons

• Project is mismanaged (lots of donation money, limited tangible improvement over time)
• Competing mobile and desktop apps can have different features and be confusing to newcomers
• administrating your own instance is a nightmare
• No rich presence, really no gaming-centric features at all

Let's not waste your time. Your gamer friends aren't joining this one. Matrix is simply too difficult to learn, use, and administer. It's community features are not sufficient to really replace discord. Individual chat channels are feature rich, but a community typically needs a collection of topic'd chats to organize discussion and matrix's solution for this just isn't good enough.

XMPP

Pros

• Easy to set up
• federated
• Optional features can be easily added to apps and servers (these are called XEPs )
• Can be encrypted
• Supports voice, video, and group chats

Cons

• OMEMO encryption (more like oMEME) is known to mess up your chats, potentially rendering months or years of chat history un-readable
• An XMPP-based gamer's paradise is possible, but nobody is packaging XMPP server software with this kind of experience out of the box. Your community needs a motivated administrator to even attempt to pull this off, and you'll be on the hook for tech support for every minor problem
• This option has so much complexity even though it is federated you might not capture much of the Discord user base to even chat with

I actually really like XMPP. It's a flexible & extensible standard that if all the open source donation money (which mostly goes to Matrix it seems) would have gone to XMPP instead we might have a whole ecosystem of federated chat platforms that mimic the Discord experience. Unfortunately we don't live in that alternative universe.

For a few years my lovely wife @ironee212@shitposter.world and I used XMPP, specifically Conversations for Android as our primary texting app. One broken phone later and our chat history became totally one sided (only I could read it) and we migrated our daily text messaging to SimpleX.

Mumble

Pros

• 'ol reliable
• Feature parity with Teamspeak 3, which many people used before jumping to Discord
• Audio link and broadcast controls, ideal for MMO raiding (Discord can't do this)
• Easy to set up the server
• self-host only and open source with no arbitrary limits on how many users can join
• Can record channel audio

Cons

• No persistent text chat, you only see what you are present for
• No rich text chat
• Difficult to set up the client, key-based auth is confusing
• No video, no screenshare

We currently have a Mumble server set up to record our podcast and it does that job better than any other option on this list. However Mumble's only claim to fame is audio. If you just need to talk, this option works. We have our server configured with a few open rooms as a backup if Discord were to ever suddenly break, and we set it up before we discovered how good Steam chat has become. We can recommend if you have a spare server laying around you should put mumble server on it and see for yourself. It's lightweight and simple.

Here are some quick honorable (and dishonorable) mentions

Federated Pipe Dreams

Flotilla – This is a discord clone that uses the Nostr protocol under the hood to work. It's still in development but you can try it out now by either self hosting, or paying somebody like coracle.social 10k sats a month to host it for you. 10k sats isn't that much money, but it ain't free. Also not everybody sees the art and simplicity of using a public/private key pair to sign in to a website (see my words on Mumble above). Gamers just aren't ready for that.

Roomy – This is more of a Twitter Spaces competitor than a Discord competitor, but it uses the AT protocol under the hood to work. That normally would mean it's decentralized but what it really means is you need a centralized Bluesky account, which requires giving the Bluesky company your cell phone number. Yikes.

Meme Tier

Xf1re – The youth won't understand this one, maybe that's why it's good though?

Going back to IRC – We are NOT going back to IRC

Not even competing Tier

SimpleX – I have my SimpleX contact info on my SPW pinned post but as of today I only use it to talk to @ironee212@shitposter.world everyday, and rare messages from my fedi mutuals. It's a great app that does have group chats and a desktop app, but it isn't ready to drive communities like Discord does. It's too basic.

Telegram – I only ever hear about Telegram being used to do crime on the internet, this is obviously not the alternative we want. Isn't the CEO in prison or something?

Ventrillo – Have you seen their website? Looks like it hasn't been updated since 2005.

Corpo Tier

Rocket.chat

Mattermost

Zulip

Don't let anybody tell you any of these are presentable to your gaming community. If you've ever worked a corpo job you know exactly what pieces of software these are competing with, and it's not Discord.

THANK YOU FOR READING MY BLOGPOST

I actually posted a first draft of this blog on melonmancy cafe our community's public forum proudly running the latest version of Flarum. Please consider signing up! I wrote this with the intention to share it widely so if you've never heard of the Melonmancy Podcast, or the Fediverse give those last two hyperlinks a click.