this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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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.
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.
While I would like to see those options explored, I don't think they're strictly necessary. For now, it's a reasonable alternative, and the open source code means that a self-hosted and/or federated fork is always possible.
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!
The complaints are definitely fair. It's noticeably less polished than Discord. But well worth trying out to see if that polish is an issue that will actually matter to you.
It is hella janky but its the best we've got, if IRC isn't enough.
If IRC is enough, it is clearly, clearly better than matrix.
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
It is. Also widely bridged with Matrix.
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.
I've never used MIRC. My client of choice is called Hexchat.
If I was recommending irc to someone new, I think I might recommend Quassel because it keeps chat history in a more modern way out of the box.
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 went to Roblox-only in 2025. I'd never heard of it until someone else mentioned it as an alternative.
Guilded is dead
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...
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.
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.
Counterpoint: It has a ton of security features, allows multiple ways to create and maintain channels (including moderation) and is easy to use.
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
Is the third one of these a chat app or a verb?
Chat app similar to discord. I believe they rebranded but I remember them as being
Revolt.chat
Yeah sorry, I was mostly just making a joke there.
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
So what if you get banned? There are all those others you can struggle with if that happens. None of the others listed match the security featureset and ease of use of Telegram.