Welp
On February 9th, 2026 Discord announced to the world that it's facial recognition and ID tracking implemented to comply with UK law was coming to global in March. (captured 2/9: https://archive.is/nARng)
In this announcement there's a few things that matter:
Discord is implementing a teen-by-default approach, and will effectively "card" anybody their AI models can't figure out is an adult or not. Similar to YouTube
Discord claims your verification selfies won't leave your device, but your government ID images will. We all remember how well that went in the UK.
Typically you would expect a company like Discord to learn from it's mistakes after a blunder like that, and they probably have a totally different verification partner lined up to handle the global roll out. However this assumption does not consider the fact that Discord nearly has a monopoly on internet chat. It's not a true monopoly given there are alternatives (we will get to those shortly), but it has a ton of users who are all in deep with Discord and likely won't migrate until things are even more dire. Even if some of the alternatives I mention below seem like the perfect fit for you and your community, if you are the only one that moves, you'll just become unhappy and move back. It's exactly this line of thinking that keeps Twitter alive today. Right now, Discord has no real need to get this right, so long as their servers are still up and Discord is still the easiest platform to get your gamer friends together on, it will remain on top. Discord's executives know this, and we have speculated for a long time that Discord is not profitable and running out of VC money.
Once the bill comes due, what are they going to sell to make payroll? Your data!
Dielan why are you effortposting this?
Great question! I've been looking into Discord alternatives for a long time hoping to move this community off of Discord, which we joined in 2015. Back in 2015 Discord was a breath of fresh air, we had recently made a rocky transition from Teamspeak 3 to Mumble during the height of Warframe 8 player raids. We only moved because the Teamspeak server physically died and I didn't want to go through the trouble of getting another TS3 license. Mumble is free and open source and honestly just as good as TS3 ever was. However it was too confusing for the average gamer to use private-key/public-key authentication. People in IT are rolling their eyes reading this but it's true. Gamers see they have to save a file to prove who they are instead of a password and get lost. Discord in 2015 was an obvious choice.
As for why I'm writing this right now, I'm just taking advantage of the current Discord hate online to get attention. If I wrote this when the UK ID scanning first rolled out nobody would have read it.
So you want to try a Discord alternative?
Just referring to these programs as "Discord alternatives" is actually harmful to the cause. Discord does a lot of things wrong, but every alternative to is going to be compared on features, and if even one is missing it could be justification for your one stubborn friend to ruin your entire community migration plan. Before you dive down this rabbit hole you need to accept that these are chat programs, voice chat programs, community platforms, and so on. Some will do things Discord either doesn't do or does poorly, and some will only miss the mark by a feature or two but otherwise be way better. Normally competition is very good and ships good features fast, but since Discord users are so stubborn these other platforms have only a fraction of the population. Nothing is going to be a good fit right away, but if we never leave Discord will just keep exploiting its users.
Since not a single one of these options today can go feature-for-feature (some are really close) I'm not going to compare them like that. Instead I will describe the app, and give you pros and cons. Your community's most stubborn member is going to complain at the first deal breaker they see, so let's just list those to make it simple.
