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.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
Matrix is an ok alternative to Discord for what Discord does.
Support forums are not an appropriate use of Discord, or of Matrix. Discourse is pretty great open source forum software. NodeBB forums even added ActivityPub support! I never particularly like when companies use Reddit as a primary communication method, and for the same reason I’d rather they didn’t use Lemmy or Piefed, but all of these are vastly better options than Discord, Matrix, or other un-indexable private chats.
Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can’t !lemmy because many of the communities don’t have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.
As part of #3, I’d also like to add the ability to publish forums to the open web. That way, people can discover, archive, and access discussions without logging in.
As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I’m very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.
One of my friends’ husbands brought it up, so good old word of mouth.
I did notice I wasn’t able to get logged in last night, though the night before I was able to make an account without issue. I wonder if they got a hug of death like Stoat did.
@craigers@other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.
It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.
Gen Z will not comply with this. They’d rather lick boots and get bullied by chuds. They treat social media networks like kids in the 80s treated 7-11. And they will not leave.
It’s too bad the open source community couldn’t find some programmers to help them make an alternative.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
Hear hear!
Matrix is an ok alternative to Discord for what Discord does.
Support forums are not an appropriate use of Discord, or of Matrix. Discourse is pretty great open source forum software. NodeBB forums even added ActivityPub support! I never particularly like when companies use Reddit as a primary communication method, and for the same reason I’d rather they didn’t use Lemmy or Piefed, but all of these are vastly better options than Discord, Matrix, or other un-indexable private chats.
For me this is the biggest probem about Discord and Discord alternatives why not just use Lemmy what’s the problem with Lemmy?
Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can’t !lemmy because many of the communities don’t have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.
But you don’t need Google to search lemmy,. lemmy’s internal search is very good and you got whole index (even without an account)
Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I’m very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.
One of my friends’ husbands brought it up, so good old word of mouth.
I did notice I wasn’t able to get logged in last night, though the night before I was able to make an account without issue. I wonder if they got a hug of death like Stoat did.
Haha I opened a github issue on that and the main Dev confirmed they were getting the HoD.
@craigers @other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
My issues with matrix were mostly around the voice services.
@craigers oh ok! So far everything seemed to work fine with them. I hope they’ll keep being stable in my experience. Thanks for sharing!
I saw earlier that Zulip already has that option, but I still would much prefer a regular old forum.
Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.
It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.
But in a success story for open source software, the entire community migrated from freenode to libera.chat in like 2 days.
The way to defeat enshittification is by disallowing lock-in.
Gen Z will not comply with this. They’d rather lick boots and get bullied by chuds. They treat social media networks like kids in the 80s treated 7-11. And they will not leave.