I have created no fewer than three posts regarding the Discord debacle over the past three days, and the fact that you haven’t seen these posts means that I couldn’t find a way to talk about it that wasn’t taking the “hellfire and brimstone” sermon-from-the-pulpit route. I admit that I wanted to be early out of the gate with my hottest takes, but of course that way lies madness; specifics hadn’t formed, events hadn’t fully unfolded (and probably still have not), and there wasn’t much substance to my posts aside from “old man yells at The Cloud(tm)”.

Now that a few days have passed and I’ve calmed down and done some lookin’ into things, here’s what I hope is a more measured lukewarm take on the matter.

Think of the children!

Laws in the UK and Australia had driven Discord to initiate an age verification system like no other. Rather than rely on users truthfully scrolling to the depths of a long list of years to indicate age, Discord was setting all accounts to “teen”. It is then be the burden of individual users to prove that they were old enough to do whatever older people get to do in the UK and AUS, and the way to do that was to submit a snapshot of a government issued I.D. or to take and submit a snapshot of their face. As this is a government mandated requirement, there’s not a hell of a lot folks could do, I assume, if they wanted to keep using Discord.

Now Discord is rolling this out worldwide, setting everyone else’s accounts to “teen” mode and then requiring individuals to demonstrate otherwise. Based on the specifics laid out in the original blog post, users could send in a scanned I.D., or would be able to take a selfie and upload that.

Data retention and data breaches

Handing a non-government entity a copy of one of our most personally identifying documents is always going to rub folks the wrong way. When that entity is a rather inconsequential and non-essential service like Discord, people get really uppity. Starting there as a baseline, then, the option to post a regular old selfie adds another layer of enshittification, because we all know that Discord will be pushing these images through AI parsers which, if folks were already being pissed off, is not going to make them feel any better.

Last year, Discord had a data breach and supposedly the breachers got ahold of the exact confirmation data used in the UK and AUS that Discord is saying will not be retained after use. Plot twist: they said the same thing to the folks in the UK and AUS before hackers stole that exact data. Naturally, trust in Discord is at an all time low.

AI parsing combined with previously crappy data stewardship, with a side of lying and a healthy serving of current government intimidation and harassment for dessert is making many people consider their options for leaving Discord if the company goes ahead with this.

Nitpicking until the pain stops

Apparently Discord is paying attention, because they’ve been trying to do damage control. Recently, they said that most users would not be affected by this. The company would use various account markers and AI to “infer” the age of an account holder. They go to great lengths to assure users that their message content would not be used in this determination.

None of their proposed concessions are airtight for their purposes, though. I could will my account to an underage user who would immediately get the benefits of my determined “advanced age”. My daughter told me about an incident where a streamer (who was an adult) got their Discord account banned because they played a lot of Animal Crossing because apparently only children play Animal Crossing, which shows that Discord may know their tech but certainly not their audience.

Sadly, they said that in some cases, there may be call for a user to repeatedly verify their account, so I’m wondering if I were to suddenly start playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure for three months, would my previously verified account be called into question? Is this a “one and done” verification, or something we’ll need to maintain based on Discord’s tone-deaf AI determining factors?

Seeking safer harbors

Whenever a contender for someone’s crown shows up, the peanut gallery always asks “why do we need another [insert platform, service, or item here]?”

This is why, you absolute steamed broccoli. This is exactly why.

We had Guilded which, IMO, was a far superior platform to Discord. It offered more bells and whistles and fewer restrictions on features that Discord was charging for (I’m thinking specifically of higher resolution screen and game sharing, for free, than Discord’s). Adoption was low in part because of the “why do we need another?” crowd, but also because Discord was a place that communities had spent years building through messages, images, and forum posts that they could not take with them. Ultimately, Roblox acquired Guilded, and then shut it down in 2025 leaving us with virtually no other contender.

TeamSpeak has gotten a face-lift since I last looked in on it. At first blush it looks like a serious Discord contender, but then you find out that each server you want to create costs a minimum of $4.99 per month. Still, it is very voice-forward, with the inclusion of text-chat channels at the bottom of the middle column navigator. Sadly, there’s a hard limit on storage and the number of members who can join a server, so that’s a downgrade for certain. Since I am old I totally forgot that TS can be self-hosted, so if you have the server, or are willing to pay for a host that will accommodate the “beta 6” version, then maybe things aren’t so terrible after all.

Of course, we still have the O.G. platforms of Ventrilo and Mumble as well. They still work, but after years of working with Discord, it’s like asking people to commute to work on a penny farthing. Those platforms are good for voice but not much else. Ventrilo links to another service, in beta, called GameVox, which I haven’t looked into as of yet but there are conflicting reports that it shut down in 2017, but it’s still in active beta, and seems to be pimping integrations with game servers I’ve never heard of before, so I don’t know if this is even an option right now.

There are even more being mentioned in this merry-go-round, but a lot of the usual suspects like Slack, Teams, and others are primarily focused on business users. Discord was making headway into business situations, apparently, so this privacy update isn’t just affecting gamers, it seems.

In order to replicate Discord, users would need to also layer on a text chat option, and a long-term archive system. Now we’re going back even further to something like IRC and forums, and while both of those are still kicking around, Discord’s ascension has basically made advancements in either field pretty much nil.

A call to action

I’ve been looking into alternatives lately, because no matter how dominant a platform or product there’s always going to be people out there who think they can do better. Sometimes they can, and sometimes they just use the domination of a platform or service as a template for their own thing.

The first port of call was Matrix. Matrix isn’t a gaming platform like Discord. It’s more like Slack or Teams, focused mainly on real-time chat rooms. I’m not sure how to categorize Matrix; maybe it’s a platform, maybe it’s a protocol, but I know that there are several versions of it, both externally and self-hosted, and one’s choice of UI client is variable as well. I use Element to connect to Matrix.org, which I think is the most widely used client. This avenue’s biggest claim to fame is end-to-end encryption, which I think is why It’s been growing over the past few years. Recently, they’ve been beta-testing more Discord-ian features like webcam and screen share to compliment the existing voice and text communications.

I stumbled across Stoat — formerly Revolt — because I was hearing loud talking about how it was the closest thing we could get to Discord. Apparently everyone else heard about it as well because the Stoat servers were getting absolutely hammered over the past few days. New registrations required verification emails which were not sent out in a timely manner; password reset emails were even worst. As a result, Stoat’s subreddit was filled with 75% of the people complaining they weren’t getting their emails, and 25% of the people telling people to chill, the service was getting hammered.

Stoat/Revolt had been around for years, apparently, and it kind of shows as their last blog post was from October 2025 and their last post on BlueSky prior to the recent rediscovery was 6 months ago. The Stoat/Revolt team seems completely blindsided by these events and were obviously unprepared not just for the crush of new and returning users, but for demands for features that people were leaving behind with Discord. Personally, Stoat has a long way to go to be a viable replacement product, but it’s open source so we’ll see if this is a help or hinderance over the next few months.

My daughter told me about Root which, unlike Stoat’s default client, doesn’t try to ape Discord on a nuts-and-bolts level. It’s also got live chat, voice and screen/game share features, although “game share mode” caps out at 720p. I was able to try voice comms with my daughter and, while connecting was slow, voice sounded nice and crisp.

Root is closed source, leading many to worry that it will inevitably follow Discord’s lead; personally, I’m not above paying for a decent service that I use a lot, and if and when Root seeks to monetize I hope they look to Discord as a cautionary tale on how not to keep the lights on at the HQ.

Neither Stoat nor Root have as many features as Discord does now, but Discord’s feature set was built over many years. All of the proposed substitutes are viable for folks looking for a new home, but there will be pain. Obviously, content will not port, so communities will have to come to terms with leaving history behind. Feature parity is also not there no matter which platform you choose, so in some ways it will be a step backwards for those who used Discord to it’s fullest.

Is futureproofing probable?

The biggest concern I can see at this point isn’t which platform to choose now, but which platform to choose for the future. In this regard, I suspect that many people would side with the open source alternative Stoat. There will no doubt be many more clients made available for that service, and self-hosting is an attractive option for those who want to maintain their own stranglehold on their community platforms.

“Just self host” is a privileged position, though, and there are some/many/more people out there who do not want to or cannot self-host and will gravitate towards another corporate offering. That’s not inherently bad, but platforms who choose this path should really look at Discord’s pain points and make the community-forward decision to give people an out should they want it. Data portability isn’t the sign of pre-defeat that some people may view it as; I’d be far more inclined to use and even financially support a service that would let me export my content any time I wanted.

Some people have already decided to leave Discord in the rear view, but I’m going to play the wait-and-see game. I did cancel my Nitro subscription as a small gesture of fuck you, but my friends are as old as I am and are significantly more incalcitrant. We spent a lot of time when we were younger migrating through platforms and games, and they’re all tired of moving at at whim — a whim usually spearheaded by me. I tried moving them to Guilded but it wasn’t Discord so they whined and complained that it was too confusing. I don’t want to have to explain Matrix, or run into lack-of-feature complaints about Stoat or Root right now. I might be able to convince them to return to Nu-TeamSpeak if we didn’t have to pay for it in order to even approach the usefulness of Discord.