Discord will soon require face scans or ID for all users, or restrict access

General News
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Another option is to just bypass it when it comes out, I can almost guarantee full guides the day of comes out. It would no doubt be better if online communities moved away from such a closed platform that is starting to focus more on monetization, but as some others have stated it currently provides the most frictionless experience and has a very low barrier of entry making it very enticing for non technical users.

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isnt zulipp more of a slack alternative?
anyways

@kissu explain your glazing behind Mumble, when theres teamspeak and other alternatives out there, chill, theres no need for people to use specific platforms. Also stoat is the closest we get to the discord alternative, it is also self hostable.

Anyways very ironic when I used to be in a discord community and most have rejected the alternative communication means (DMs) multiple times, Now it must be backfiring on them.
About time to consider the alternatives, and keep in mind that since weā€™re dealing with people that get used to things like discord, pick one that you can use relatively long term, any on those list should do
https://alternativeto.net/software/discord-app/?feature=privacy-focused&license=opensource

if I had to recommend a few:
Matrix with recommending friends the FluffyChat or Cinny clients
otherwise Stoat really.
If you already are trusting valve with your account, you may consider steam chat, it is becoming closer to a discord experience with groups but I also understand why this may deter this specific community but im just saying with almost everyone on a steam account, itā€™s just an option. If on that note maybe also the OG, TeamSpeak [but only when TS6 becomes self hostable]

for personal/close friends and maybe family, really you could also substitute signal in this instance, especially as signal is getting quite the things discord had like polls and pinned messages

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I tested Matrix a few years ago and was frustrated by the decryption errors I would get when logging in on multiple devices. Gave up on it since I wonā€™t use something that isnā€™t reliable.

As bad as WhatsApp is at least they have encrypted Communities (basically organized collections of groups). Iā€™d rather use that than give an ID to Discord.

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Yes but an argument can be made for a lot of discord users who arenā€™t gamers and use it for text based discussions

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Iā€™ve been tracking this topic with great interest as I help manage and run a number of Discords (probably over 10 Communities) and have invested a fair amount of time and effort into each one of them. That being said, the writing has been on the wall for a while with Discordā€™s future.

What I am struggling with at the time is how few alternatives there are that are strong replacements for Discord. That platform is far from perfect, but its ability to build large communities that support real-time chat, extensive RBAC, bot integrations, and more, remains pretty unmatched in my current investigations.

Iā€™ve been researching, testing, and evaluating some of the following:

  • Matrix
  • Stoat
  • Zulip
  • Discourse
  • Mattermost
  • Rocket.Chat

And none of them come close to being a viable alternative. Many present very unique and interesting features for some types of communities, and I could see myself proposing Zulip or Discourse in some cases, but Matrixā€™ utter lack of good RBAC, Stoatā€™s disaster of everything, Mattermost lack of federation, and Rocket.Chatā€™s closed nature, ultimately make all of them poor choices as an actual Discord replacement.

Ultimately, I expect MANY communities will fragment across many different platforms and itā€™ll be a long while before we see as unified of a revolution as Discord became. While it started small with a heavy focus on gaming, it become the go to place for many non-gaming communities, support servers, and hangout spaces.

I personally wish that wasnā€™t the case, but I wish there were stronger alternatives that suited more of the broad needs than we currently have. I remain hopeful, that weā€™ll still see some positivity come of all of this.

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Thereā€™s also Travesty.chat and Strafe.chat but neither of them are even in beta yet and development has been slow.