Alright, stoat or revolt or anyone else, you've got 6 months. I'll move my group over in 6 months and donate to the best solution. Thanks everyone for pushing back against discord, to the indie devs who are working on alternatives, and to the self-hosting community for making it possible for me to even plan to move off of discord.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Yeah that's what I'm thinking too, stoat, fluxer, whatever, don't care which, but 6 months now that there is momentum gives me hope they can smooth out the UX
So this, but Discord.
This is SO GOOD
As if backlash matters to them. There's 200+ million active daily users. They're betting on the majority not giving a fuck, and they are right.
I try and try again to convince my friends to leave discord, but they don't care. Not sure what it will take for them to change.
Seriously, I already deleted my discord account once before, because their terms of service already were claiming that all private messages and channel messages are being collected and sold to advertisers and data collection groups. I only joined back because I missed my friends. But now?? I could give a fuck, I already spun up Sharkord, and it runs well. In 6 months time, it will likely be good enough to completely ditch discord, so fuck it. My privacy matters more than friends who don't use their damn brains.
They're delaying it by six months. They're banking on this blowing over by then. Fuck discord.
Let's hope this gives competitors more time to get things setup well.
Was about to say this, how nice of discord to give people time to migrate to another service
The thing that's insane to me is that most of the alternatives have screen sharing with working audio on the back burner, while I can tell you that the first one to get it working will be my go to. Hopefully with this extra cushion, one of them can get it working it's the only thing discord has over its competitors other than general stability related things.
This is my take. Fluxer and Root are the top two for my group, but they need more time in the oven(hell, everything does).
So far I've uninstalled discord on my devices and I'm using it via the web browser only in a container tab, until my group switches over to something else.
Can't fucking wait to delete my account.
Same thing happened in 2021-ish when WhatsApp changed their policy that all your information would be shared with Facebook. Outrage pushed it back six months, and then they did it anyway.
this is the second time they have "delayed" the age verification
I cancelled my nitro when it was announced they were doing this shady crap and it's staying cancelled until there is credible assurances they won't be handing over personal data to the like so palantir and other related goons.
Short of regular 3rd party audits, there's nothing they can do that would assure they're handling your data with privacy and care. And even that's a stretch.
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This is fantastic news! Not because I actually give a shit about sticking with Discord after getting slapped in the face with this insulting age verification nonsense, but because Discord has basically no competition and 6 months will be plenty of time for a real contender to emerge in time for them to shoot themselves in the foot again.
I don't think Discord actually appreciates how much market share is going to slip away from them in the next 6 months. They were probably better off going through with their clandestine spying plan now while some people might be complacent enough to just comply and provide their ID to get handed over to the fucking Feds.
Delay all you want bitch i'm already gone.
Too late biiiiiiiiiitch we already had our exodus.
Where'd we go though? Which place with the streaming and chatting?
XMPP with their myriad of gnu-ified clients.
Which client is the multi-platform one with message history and streaming video?
Gajim is one. Dino is another (I think). You just need to make sure the client has Jingle compatability (xmpp plugin) for streaming video. A lot let you connect to multiple.xmpp servers
dino all dayyyyyy baybayyyyy
cheogram on Android
The only problem I see are my non-techie friends aren't used to the skype style calling anymore. They want a voice channel that is persistent for dropping in and out
Movim. Though due to how recent it was implemented, you must use a chromium based browser to stream the application's audio too.
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"Too late" isn't even relevant anyway, they're still doing it, so everyone should still be leaving.
It's nice in that it gives the various Discord competitors a longer period to work on getting their software spiffed up.
I'd argue its completely relevant as they are trying to save face here. Anyone who has somehow made it to 2026 without a hostile relationship to corporations (most red and blue team in America) will probably take this as a sign to come back for now.
Agreed; Discord is trying to lull people into a false sense of security as a means of convincing them to stay, in the same manner that Reddit gave limited API access to apps like RedReader to stem the tide of users leaving for platforms like Lemmy.
Beyond age verification, if Discord is scanning a user's messaging history to determine what their age is, one can only imagine all the other data valuable to data brokers that they are extracting from it too.
Oh, cool, I definitely trust them again. 🙄
As much I agree with the idea of abandoning Discord - honestly, fuck 'em - I just don't know how I or many other people could practically make the full switch... While I might be able to convince a few of my close friends to go with me to whatever new platform comes about, there's just no way any larger communities would be able to uproot and leave without losing 90%+ of their members, and that's only if the owners of those communities are even willing to leave in the first place. Inertia is a powerful thing, and the reality of the situation is that the vast majority of Discord users will not be convinced to leave over this.
I want to defend my privacy, and I want to tell these corporate ghouls to shove it, but at the same time, I don't want to become a digital hermit. Having to decide between protecting my privacy and cutting myself off from so many valued social connections and communities feels like an impossible choice.
I know I'm not saying anything particularly new or actionable here, I'm just... tired. I'm tired of having to flee from platform after platform into increasingly smaller and more insular corners of the internet to escape the endless cycle of enshittification. I'm tired of what the internet has become, where the only places left where you can exist without being manipulated and exploited by corporate interests are a handful of small, decentralized platforms that are becoming increasingly cut off from the internet at large. I'm just tired of this shit, man.
On this note, I lost contact with a huge number of friends when I deleted my facebook ~15 years ago. Similar for livejournal. I handed out my email address and phone number before I walked away, but people have not used those to contact me at all.
I think people don't want to put any effort into socialisation. Getting a "feed" is so easy, it feels like you're connecting with people. You see the comments and likes. But everyone is lonely because they're not actively interacting, just passively consuming.
If they come, someone will build it
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I just signed up with Fluxer last night and chat with one of my old Discord friends. Fluxer is still very much in beta and under development, but seems to be a pretty promising open source clone of Discord.
Oh man, when they get native mobile apps, I'm looking to switch my Mattermost server to Fluxer. I've had good luck with Mattermost, but its not truly OSS and its been moving features over to paid enterprise accounts so the time is soon.
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Still never using again
I hope they never recover. No ill will to the working level who would be impacted, but it needs to be clear to companies that this shit is TOXIC to your brand to even consider in 2026.
We still have to leave discord. But another months to to discard Discord will help. Remember don't use anything that you can't self hose, corporations are completely untrustworthy
This gives us all more time to find a good alternative!!!
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