Where's the Discord Replacement?If you just want to skip to the list of recommended other things to try instead of discord, feel free to scroll to "so, what do I use?"
If you're reading this, it's probably because Discord has done something to upset everybody again. Maybe it's a data breach, or some more aggressive monetization, or some policy change. Whatever. Discord's done something bad and everybody's talking about leaving discord again, and once again the question in the air is "but where else do we go?".
There is a lot of good options for subsets of what discord does (see later), but It wants to explore that question, and why it doesn't think there will ever be one conclusive answer for the one platform that will replace Discord. The reason it thinks that is simple: Because running a direct replacement for Discord is not economically viable.
Discord came about during the mid-2010s startup boom, and the version of the app that users seem to want to retvrn to was a version of discord that was not making any money. It was burning through VC and investment cash, following the same model as Uber and other startups - get users in by using VC and incubator money to make and market your MVP, and then work out how to squeeze users for profit later. The general public at the time were less wary of these tactics (and had very few other options: the only other free voice chat thing most folks knew about was Skype, which was slow, ugly and lousy with spam) and bought in, allowing discord to use the network effect to keep people around while they added more and more and more monetization. It's the typical startup grift, and at the time, it worked.
Running discord is probably very expensive. It's huge, offers every remotely chat-related service under the sun, and committed at some point to making the entire core product free, so it has fallen back on F2P game tactics for making money. Cosmetics, premium tiers, and other such crap. As it has grown, it has also faced regulatory pressure from places like the UK's OFCOM, leading to invasive age checking measures like face scanning to access adult channels.
Any successful direct discord replacement would be expensive to run, too, and it would be subject to the same pressures. Discord is a megaplatform, and anything that tries to directly replicate it from the private sector will have all the same problems a few years down the line (unless they require payment to use, which would sort out the money part, but not the regulation part).
We can rule out states as a possible source of a replacement (most would not know how to run it, and it would certainly be surveillance hell) and a non-profit or commons organization would likely be unable to support a discord-like platform because getting enough donations would probably fail (unless, like signal does for being extremely secure, it had a role to fill that was important enough that those who rely on it can't use anything else). So it is very unlikely that we will ever have a "discord killer" worth a damn.
it's not all doom though. Before discord we didn't have a discord-like platform for consumers (businesses had slack and such, but they were not mass-market products). And we don't need a discord-like platform. There is already other things that fill subsets of what discord does much better and you can move to.
so, what do I use?
If you just want to get off discord, here's what this one would recommend:
for smaller groups of very active members, or larger groups of semi-active members, Signal. It's run by a non-profit (which has funding from a lot of online security, journalism etc sources, so it is not going to just run out of money and die), it has voice and video calls for up to 75 members, and it is far more secure. If one chat room is not enough, it works fine for having, eg. an announcements group and a chat group, or on-topic and off-topic chats. It does require everyone involved having phones for initial set-up, but phone numbers are not shared and the app works great on desktop.
for teams, open-source projects and others that need super organized chat with more different perms and subgroups and so on that something like signal can't do as well, Zulip would be its current pick. You can self-host it if that is your jam, or pay monthly for a hosted plan (which, like it said in the main piece, is somewhat inevitable if you want to avoid bullshit. Servers are not free)
if you really just want the lowest-latency voice chat for games, Mumble is still around and still does a better job of that than discord, though you will need to sort out hosting.
for a forum, bug reports etc, get a real forum using something like Flarum or Discourse (or hell, PhpBB if you really want). Discord's forums suck anyway.
what not to use, or to be skeptical of
be wary of anything that does not have a clear funding model or is VC funded. It will disappear, or enshittify. Stoat is currently promising to basically be old discord again but open source. It is deeply unclear how it is funded aside from donations, and without a strong and dedicated base, donation funding is unlikely to scale enough to keep it going. servers are not free.
matrix is likely to never be friendly enough to get most of your users to switch, but you are free to give it a go.
You are likely to have at least one person in your community that will want to move to IRC. IRC is old, a pain to use, does not have voice nor video chat, and does not even have the ability to see chat scrollback without hacky workarounds. Any place where you could use IRC you are likely better using signal, unless your community is all open-source boomers.
mattermost and rocket chat are self-hosted slacklikes (and by extension discord-likes, as discord's core UX is a slack clone) but are both really connected to military-industrial crap. Both are decent software, but this one is sus.
microsoft teams and slack are both made by and for shitty corpo users. They have all the hallmarks of that. They are also both not very secure.
it thinks that is it. Thanks for reading our bs for a bit.