Alternatives to Discord

Tek7

Tek7

CGA President, Tribe of Judah Founder & President
Staff member
With a possible Discord IPO (Initial Public Offering) in March, Discord requiring identification for full access starting in early March, and a data breach that may have exposed the government IDs of over 70,000 Discord users last October, there's sufficient motivation to discuss potential replacements for Discord for the CGA community.

If we end up migrating from Discord, I'd prefer to move to a self-hosted solution that still allows easy onboarding, at least most of the same features of Discord, and relatively low administrative overhead. I haven't found anything that meets all three criteria yet, but I plan to keep researching and watching potential alternatives.
 
My suggestion is probably either Staot or RootApp. I mostly started using both.

I tried TeamSpeak, but it has servers behind a paywall.

www.rootapp.com

Root - Not Just Chat, Built for Action

Root is a next-generation social platform that combines communication tools with a customizable app framework, allowing communities to organize, coordinate, and extend their functionality through apps.
www.rootapp.com www.rootapp.com

Stoat

Stoat is the chat app where you are the main character.
stoat.chat stoat.chat
 
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I found another alternative, it's open source, something called Valour. I don't know if it's Self-Hosting though.

Valour

Valour is a community social platform based on privacy and transparency.
app.valour.gg app.valour.gg
 
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teamspeak is sitll an option. i have a teamspeak server instance i can donate. i run my personal minecraft on this machine..but i have an extra license i am wiling to donate if you folks want to administer it...
 
Tek7 said:
With a possible Discord IPO (Initial Public Offering) in March, Discord requiring identification for full access starting in early March, and a data breach that may have exposed the government IDs of over 70,000 Discord users last October, there's sufficient motivation to discuss potential replacements for Discord for the CGA community.

If we end up migrating from Discord, I'd prefer to move to a self-hosted solution that still allows easy onboarding, at least most of the same features of Discord, and relatively low administrative overhead. I haven't found anything that meets all three criteria yet, but I plan to keep researching and watching potential alternatives.
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do not forget discord allows ai to mine everything that goes on that network.
 
MonstroMarthias777 said:
don't you need to pay a monthly or yearly fee for a server? I like mine for free.
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To quote Andrew Lewis in 2010, "If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."

Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/

One of the key reasons we've kept the CGA Forums offline even after most of our activity shifted to Discord is because we own the data on our forums. Yes, we pay annual expenses to operate the forums (hosting, forums software license, forums style license, domain name renewal), but the continued existence of the forums is dependent on community members donating to cover our expenses, not on the capricious favor of some corporation or venture capitalist or other party that doesn't know we exist.

If and when (and historical trends of technology companies that went public and became beholden to shareholder interests strongly suggest it's a matter of "when") Discord follows the trends of many of its predecessors, I'd strongly prefer that we have already moved to a platform where we own our data.

I'm currently reviewing multiple open source and self-hosted options, but I don't believe any of them are ready for prime time just yet; however, development is active on several projects that look promising and I'll be making every reasonable effort to stay current on potential successors to Discord.
 
Hescominsoon said:
teamspeak is sitll an option. i have a teamspeak server instance i can donate. i run my personal minecraft on this machine..but i have an extra license i am wiling to donate if you folks want to administer it...
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TeamSpeak's 32-user limit for "free" (meaning we don't have to pay TeamSpeak for a license; we would still need to pay for hosting) servers and yet-to-be-announced pricing model for servers supporting more than 32 users might be dealbreakers for our community. If the 32-user limit were to apply only to simultaneous voice chat users, that wouldn't be an issue; however, that's not how I understand the limit. I'm also somewhat concerned about TeamSpeak's slow development pace.

I'm not ruling TeamSpeak out and a TS3 server would serve in case of an emergency outage, but TS6 is already a few steps behind other options like Stoat and that's with years of development to pivot with industry trends and either catch up to or surpass Discord.
 
Tek7 said:
TeamSpeak's 32-user limit for "free" (meaning we don't have to pay TeamSpeak for a license; we would still need to pay for hosting) servers and yet-to-be-announced pricing model for servers supporting more than 32 users might be dealbreakers for our community. If the 32-user limit were to apply only to simultaneous voice chat users, that wouldn't be an issue; however, that's not how I understand the limit. I'm also somewhat concerned about TeamSpeak's slow development pace.

I'm not ruling TeamSpeak out and a TS3 server would serve in case of an emergency outage, but TS6 is already a few steps behind other options like Stoat and that's with years of development to pivot with industry trends and either catch up to or surpass Discord.
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Well, I learned that Staot runs its rules based on European Laws and not the USA. So, I don't know if the Old World Nations allow Free Speech, if you know what I mean. Here's a screenshot of what they told me.

Screenshot 2026-02-17 144647.png
 
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You can still do Christian Servers on there, but I kinda prefer using Rootapp the most, it's defenitely similar to Discord with a lot of new stuff being planned for it with a feature requests thing going on for it, but that's just my opinion.
 
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