With the triple gut punches of AI surveillance, ID requirements, and data breach affecting 70k identity documents, there’s avid talk about moving gaming communities out of Discord.
Where are people here going to?
What do you like and dislike about other options?
Telegram has 1 billion users worldwide. Telegram allows to share files up to 3GB, which is huge for game development teams, to share assets, even betas. Telegram allows you to create private servers with chatrooms, categorize rooms, and within the same server files automatically categorize in sub-categories like: images/links/videos, so is another great plus for people sharing work, or communities relying on active feedback loop.
I've been using Telegram since 2021, there's nothing like it. You can try Stoat as it is almost a Discord clone, but has some problems, lacks some discord features, and now due the sudden massive influx of new users leaving discord trying to join all at once. Second you can try Matrix.
But personally I can only recommend what I know first hand, Telegram is robust and a very useful tool, allows full control and respects your privacy.
Stoat looks like is going to be the biggest candidate right now and where most people will jump into based on internet top 10 searches, second candidate is Matrix.
i've been researching the last days multiple socials, trends and internet searches and everything points to Stoat (previously known as Revolt) as first candidate (which makes sense by the way, since Stoat is almost a carbon copy of Discord so people used to Discord interface and how the app works will feel at home using Stoat right away).
Articles online shows:
- "Discord's new Age Verification triggers 10.000% spike in alternative searches online" - Internet searches for Discord alternatives are skyrocketing since.
- "Stoat, the privacy-focused platform formerly known as Revolt, saw searches jump 9,900% while Matrix climbed 2,133%. Even IRC—that relic from gaming’s dial-up days—surged 1,500%."
And the Top 10 internet searches data pulled from Google Trends in order, from top to bottom:
I personally going to make the jump into Stoat, and pull all my contacts there, specially as well all the development projects going on, which was the only reason I was using Discord in the first place. I will keep using Telegram for other things, but for gamedev-teams, GameJams and other small communities based on hobbies, to me will be Stoat, seems the more popular choice to hop into right now, which means bigger chances to find people there running projects too or set up your own server/community.
Soulblighter Music is right, Stoat is good, although still somewhat rough in some regards in my opinion, it's still open source so it runs on community contributions and donations.
Some other good ones that are worth giving a try:
An interesting but harder to set up alternative is SpaceBarChat: https://github.com/spacebarchat/spacebarchat
It's basically self-hosted Discord, so instead of having Discord host your servers on their infrastructure, you host them on your own machine and use the Discord client API interface to communicate with the server. This means using it exactly like Discord, with the bonus that there's no one to monitor your activity there since you're hosting the server on your own private machine. Self hosting also means you bypass age verification, telemetry and all of the privacy critical concerns.
Where are people here going to?
I’ve been touting XMPP and/or Matrix for years. XMPP is the OG protocol that used to power things like WhatsApp and Google Chat. Like Matrix, there are many interoperable XMPP clients.
Matrix is shittier in pretty much every way but had the bucks for marketing, so it won over XMPP. That being said, I’ll take anything.
