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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
Is the third one of these a chat app or a verb?
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
yeah it’s the closest to a real discord clone, at least discord before they introduced screen sharing
Guilded went to Roblox-only in 2025. I’d never heard of it until someone else mentioned it as an alternative.
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
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.
I hear complaints about UX and usability but I will give it a try. Thanks!
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.
Revolt is Stoat now and it doesn’t even let me verify my email right now.
Yeah, they’re swamped! Glad I made mine around the IPO announcement…
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? 🤔
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
https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/110340953550548309
That is not what the post says. They sell encrypted messaging to government organizations. It’s basic SaaS and allows them to fund themselves.