Discord is not the most secure platform out there. They have a history of malware and data breaches. But despite that people keep using it because the people they know use it. If you want to chat with someone Discord seems to be the default option. But next month they are requiring Photo IDs for most access.
This seems crazy to me that they announced this only 4 months after a breach were they lost IDs of 70,000 discord users. There is a track record of bad security and no real guarantee that this data is ever really deleted.
Also this week I found out that Discord advises UK users that they “may be part of an experiment” where age verification data leaves their phone after promising this data would never leave the phone. I don’t see how we can trust them with any data at this point.
So I refuse to give Discord my face or ID.
Discord Alternatives
The question is what are the discord alternatives? If you know this site you know I tend to go for privacy and self hosting when I have the option.
Session
My first thought is Session. 100% free and It has very good privacy and security. For pure chat this works perfect. But it lacks some of the bigger community features discord has. While it can support group chats up to 100 people it lacks things like having multiple channels and group voice chats.
Nextcloud Talk
This is more of a self hosted option. You can have lots of people, group chats, and group voice chats. This was my go to for family until I found session. I still think Nextcloud Talk is amazing and I still have it running. But session for me is less work because we don’t do group voice chats and I don’t have to worry about taking care of the server. I self host at home but If my internet goes down then my family can’t chat. Of course if I wanted to pay a little bit in hosting cost somewhere then that would solve that problem. Something like https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/nextcloud
Campfire
I have not used this but it sounds like it could be the closest thing to a self hosted discord. I been wanting to set this up to try it out but have not got to it yet. So because of that I will leave you with a video someone sent me about it.
Teamspeak
I have not used Teamspeak in years but back in the day I used to host a Teamspeak server for Dark Age of Camelot friends. If voice chat is your main thing then I would suggest checking them out. It also seems like their new version 6 looks a lot like discord based on screenshots I seen.
Slack
I have not used this in like a decade. But I remember not liking it for some reason. But for the sake of being informed I wanted to throw it on this list.
Signal
I have not used signal but I heard it’s good too. Session feels this space for me. But this is something else you can look in to. I just can’t give you my opinion on it.
Do you know of others?
Do you know of other Discord alternatives? Let us know in the comments! I know there has to be more out there and something might be better then everything on this list.
UPDATE: More Discord updates from Gamers Nexus
I found this video I think is worth adding to this post.
