Discord has announced that it's rolling out age verification checks globally from March – and the decision has sparked fury from many privacy-conscious users.
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.
Then people are cooked, only way you can do all the shit discord does is by having massive funding to pay for all the backend. Or we can brutally murder all the advertisers and slowly move back into a sustainable tech society through fear of tech bro hunts.
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.
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.
Would absolutely advise against telegram.
They have your phone number and you have 0 privacy.
There is 0 support.
If you are banned - there is nowhere to file complaint and you just lose all your contacts.
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.
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
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.
yeah it’s the closest to a real discord clone, at least discord before they introduced screen sharing
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.
Then people are cooked, only way you can do all the shit discord does is by having massive funding to pay for all the backend. Or we can brutally murder all the advertisers and slowly move back into a sustainable tech society through fear of tech bro hunts.
Is IRC still a thing? I havnt used it since 2006. I’d love to see it again
Yep, still on it.
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 is dead
and it was roblox’s property anyway
Oooohhh.
Good…uhm riddance?
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? 🤔
I keep getting my verification mail, try to verify, and it tells me that something failed.
Yeah, they’re swamped! Glad I made mine around the IPO announcement…
Guilded went to Roblox-only in 2025. I’d never heard of it until someone else mentioned it as an alternative.
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.
deleted by creator
That is not what the post says. They sell encrypted messaging to government organizations. It’s basic SaaS and allows them to fund themselves.
Would absolutely advise against telegram. They have your phone number and you have 0 privacy. There is 0 support. If you are banned - there is nowhere to file complaint and you just lose all your contacts.
Stoat seems like the only alternative, most of these are telegram clones,not discord clones, one of them is even abandoned
This is a free to use platform, just saying:
Meet Pavel Durov, the tech billionaire who founded Telegram
https://www.businessinsider.com/pavel-durov-telegram-billionaire-russia-instagram-wealth-founder-dubai-lifestyle-2022-3?op=1
Nope. Never use telegram.
You can get banned out of the blue and just lose all the contacts.
Never touching that