Too late biiiiiiiiiitch we already had our exodus.
“Too late” isn’t even relevant anyway, they’re still doing it, so everyone should still be leaving.
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.
Delaying in hopes that people forget
That’s just gives Fluxer more time to prepare for the switch 👍
Programmers with thigh-high striped socks should still take one for the team and work on Fluxer. Seriously!
That’s what my community is doing. We’re going to move to Matrix just to be rid of Discord and then seeing what we want to do next.
Matrix seems to be filling the role of discord for me. I’ve noticed element’s client is lighter on system resources then discord
Lol, already deleted my account.
They can get fucked.
Yep. Its wasn’t even a question
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.
As much as I like a lot of the discord alternatives out there I fear they will all eventually face the same fate. Decentralised or someone wrapping the signal protocol into a discord like client is probably the only way to avoid this again.
Well I mean Fluxer is open source and have self hosting options on their roadmap. 🤷♂️
Fluxer plans federation in the future, and its AGPL licensed.
However, it’s still in beta, and the backend’s ability to scale is currently unproven.
For something that’s more proven, we have Movim, which is already federated with the open standard XMPP protocol.
I’m still hopeful about https://veilid.com/ but I suspect that’s a long way out; the protocol is still in development stages, let alone implementations of it.
Is fluxer as network f’ed up as Discord without the minimum democratic standard of human readable domains, or is it the slavery of dozens of undocumented raw IP addresses?
Honestly I have no idea yet, as I only heard of it and signed up last night. I am optimistic though…
Still never using again
Delay all you want bitch i’m already gone.
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.
I feel like this article was written for you, based on your last paragraph (the author definitely relates).
Thanks, this article was great. I guess I’ll finally check out XMPP, cause Matrix was… really mid when I tried it a few months ago and put me off. SimpleX was a mess too.
Side note, I get that the movim UI/Client is web only, but does that mean I can’t access Conversations.im (I know the app/client itself is Android only) on movim? I feel a little ashamed that I can’t understand this…
I feel a little ashamed that I can’t understand this…
Nothin’ to be ashamed of, we’re all newbies to this at first. I had to learn it too :p
Part 1: How XMPP servers differ from XMPP Clients
Okay, so: Movim and Conversations are both clients that can be used to login to any XMPP account. Those two clients in particular are a little bit more confusing than normal, because they also offer free XMPP accounts on their own XMPP servers (which are independent of the client software).
To try to liken it to something familiar, it’d be like if the Thunderbird email client (which you can login to any email account with) also happened to offer a separate email hosting service too, so you could login to your SomeReallyCoolUsername@thunderbird[.]com from the Thunderbird app.
Or to liken it to how lemmy works, if you’re familiar with the Photon front-end, it can access any lemmy account, even your blahaj account, as it’s just an independent front-end, it’s not actually hosting the lemmy server itself.
Part 2: How it works in practice
So in practice, if you create an XMPP account on Movim’s server, you can login into that same account right from your Conversations App too. The same would apply if you’d created an XMPP account on the Conversations server; you could login to it right from the Movim client.
One client can also communicate with any other. Let’s say you had a friend using the Conversations client, and you were on the Movim client; you could talk to each other no problem through text, or even call each other 1 on 1 with audio or video.
Part 3: The complication :(
But, bit of extra complication; the Conversations client hasn’t yet implemented some of the features Movim is capable of. Specifically, it cannot yet do group audio/video calls or screenshare. So if you’re in a chat room with your friends, and everyone is on Movim except for one friend (who’s using the conversations client on their phone), if you started a group call, that one friend won’t be able to join it.
However (‘But’ part 2); that limitation would only crop up if someone is using the Conversations client/mobile app itself.
If that same friend happened to have a Conversations XMPP account, they could still open Movim in a browser tab on their PC or phone and login to the Movim client with their Conversations account, and then would be able to join the call no problem.
And that’s it! :D
Sorry if I didn’t do the best job explaining that. I’m very much looking forward to the day when Conversations gets those missing features and I only need to explain the first part about how clients and XMPP accounts are separate 😅
Thank you for the wonderful response! I figured it was kinda like Fediverse, but I was lost if the difference in features caused issues with where your account was made. I made an account on conversations.im and now use Movim on browser and Conversations (from F-droid) on my phone. I need to start finding communities!
Glad to hear you’re all set up ^^
If you’re interested in Solarpunk, my instance’s sysadmin hosts solarpunk@chat.slrpnk.net on XMPP, and there’s a cool little DIY project community at craftmanship@muc.loqi.im :)
If they come, someone will build it
Delays…
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
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.
Are your friends going to share their documents with Discord?
But a true easy to use discord alternative is still not there.
wdym there’s been good alternatives to Discord for decades.
TeamSpeak 6 and Stoat? Didn’t use the second one.
The matrix protocol is actually easy to use, it just takes a bit of effort to get into. Once you’re in, then it’s as easy as Discord, I haven’t had any issues and it’s been a great learning experience. https://joinmatrix.org/
The only credible alternative to discord right now that is also free and open source and not completely reliant on venture capital and traditional economics in general is Fluxer.app - The app in itself is extremely promising and provides an almost 1:1 clone to discord with a few nice additions such as federation (which is still not available but in course of making). Unfortunately it is still under maintenance right now but I am willing to wait a little to be able to use something that respects me as a user and human being instead of being milked to death for my data to be taken by big evil corps who’re actively working to suppress our freedom. It is the only financially sustainable and therefore credible FLOSS alternative to Discord right now. Also, about the controversies of the CLA, Hampus (dev of Fluxer) has completely removed it stating that it was just a loophole to use if fluxer didn’t take off in the open source community. If course Fluxer eventually did take off and of course the CLA got removed
I won’t delete my discord account because sometimes I also wanna chat with friends who still play on console but I won’t chat on it again and I will definitely wipe out all of my chat history and leave all servers I’ve been, sooner or later
I wiped all messages too, because it feels good, but in reality I think you actually don’t need to bother as they have already scraped everything and all it does is that other users won’t see them.
Well of course discord users are pissed off they have to upload their ID. Now their discord kittens will know how old they actually are.
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.
