The Great Discord Exodus That Hasn't Happened (Yet)
There’s a conversation happening right now across tech communities that feels both refreshing and frustrating in equal measure. People are genuinely fed up with Discord’s data hoarding practices and are actively looking for alternatives. The thing is, we’ve been here before, haven’t we?
Someone recently posted asking about open-source TeamSpeak alternatives for self-hosting, and the responses painted a picture that’s all too familiar. The nostalgia hit hard when someone mentioned paying three dollars a month for a Ventrilo server back in 2006. Remember those days? When we actually paid for services and in return, we got exactly what we signed up for – no data harvesting, no feature creep, no sudden policy changes that make you feel violated.
But here’s the reality check that keeps coming up: we’ve trained ourselves to expect everything for free. Someone put it brilliantly – most people would rather pour ads on their cereal every morning and hand over their diary to big tech than spend three dollars on an app. It’s depressing because it’s true. Our collective expectations have shifted so dramatically that the idea of paying a small monthly fee for a service feels almost outrageous to many people now.
The comparison to Jellyfin and Plex keeps popping up in these discussions, and honestly, it gives me a bit of hope. Plex got greedy, the community responded by building Jellyfin, and now Jellyfin is genuinely competitive. It took time, sure, but it happened. The question is whether the same can happen with Discord.
Looking at the alternatives being discussed – Mumble, Matrix with Element, Stoat Chat (formerly Revolt), Fluxer, Root App – there’s no shortage of options. Matrix in particular has been around for ages and ticks all the right boxes: open source, self-hostable, end-to-end encrypted, decentralized. Element looks a bit corporate, sure, but it works. The problem isn’t the technology; it’s the network effect.
My work recently moved some internal communications to Matrix, and the technical setup was straightforward enough. But getting everyone on board? That’s the real challenge. People resist change, especially when “everyone else” is still on Discord. It’s the same problem Signal faces against WhatsApp – you can have the superior product in every meaningful way, but if your mates aren’t on it, what’s the point?
What really gets under my skin is how Discord has killed forums. This drives me absolutely mental. Small projects now keep their documentation buried in Discord servers, completely unreachable by search engines, without any proper archival, organized in the most chaotic way imaginable through a bloody chat interface. Who thought this was a good idea? When I need to troubleshoot something and the “documentation” is scattered across three years of Discord messages, I want to throw my MacBook out the window.
The irony isn’t lost on me that Reddit killed forums first, then Discord made it worse. We’ve somehow ended up in a world where people go to Discord chat interfaces to read documentation and come to Reddit to ask tech support questions. Everything is backwards.
But here’s what gives me cautious optimism: the conversation is happening. Three years ago, people weren’t even questioning Discord’s dominance. Now there are developers actively building alternatives like Fluxer, which from what I’ve read, looks genuinely promising. There are communities forming around these alternatives. The technical barriers to self-hosting are lower than they’ve ever been.
The challenge is bridging that gap between “technically possible” and “normie-friendly enough that I can convince my gaming group to switch.” Because that’s ultimately what it comes down to. All the open-source idealism in the world won’t matter if the onboarding experience requires running Docker containers and configuring TURN servers.
Maybe Discord’s latest shenanigans with face ID verification will be the catalyst. Maybe it won’t. But I’m keeping an eye on these alternatives, particularly Matrix and Fluxer. When the time comes – and I think it will come – I want to be ready to jump ship and take as many people with me as possible.
In the meantime, I’m documenting everything important from Discord servers I care about, because when those servers eventually disappear (and they will), a lot of knowledge is going to vanish with them. That’s not paranoia; that’s just experience with how the internet works.
We deserve better than trading our privacy and data for free services. The alternatives exist. Now we just need enough people to give a damn.