Disclaimer

While all attempts have been made to make this piece as factual as possible, by necessity there is some opinion involved. These opinions are mine and mine alone and don’t represent anyone else’s but mine. As always, please do your own homework. I have tried to, where possible, provide links to the sources that form the basis of my opinions. Please use your judgment.

What is the background? (or how did we get here?)

In a press release dated February 9th, 2026, Discord stated that it was moving to a “teen by default” global settings. In order to gain access to fully “unshackled” access, this would necessitate any of (but not limited to) the following:

• automatic determination of a person to be an adult (it’s unclear exactly how this would be determined)
• A face scan
• Submitting government issued ID.

According to the press release, the scans are on device and the information is deleted once the verification is complete.

The concern

The problem with this in my mind is two fold:

1. Discord has had historical problems with data breaches. This seems to fly in the face of any “privacy first” efforts the company might state they champion
2. There’s questions as to what third parties the company has selected to perform this effort. In particular, there is good reason to believe that the company may have contracted with a company As such, there is good reason to question the motivation of such a move as one of surveillance, not protection as discord may state. While it is important to understand that company operates globally and thus must comply with the laws of the places in which it operates, proactive compliance seems questionable. Particularly when said third party holders of information have ties to ICE and other surveillance initiatives, including those in the United states.

Why does this matter

1. It puts those who use the service who are older than 13 in a position to have to prove ourselves to be adults. This has historically not been the case except in certain cases where adult content is likely to be available. In general, the assumption is that the user is of the age permitted by the terms of service.
2. This provides would be criminals another attack vector by which they can obtain your Sensitive Personal information. In most cases, it is not 100% clear who ends up with that information due to undisclosed third party contracts and/or contracts which are not immediately apparent to the user.
   1. The United States does not have as strict of protections as it should when compared to the European Union. Some states are better than others (California, as an example, has similar but not identical protections when compared to GDPR.
   2. If Discord or third party handler should fail to protect your information, the user may have no legal recourse and the issue becomes either a matter for arbitration. See “Settling Disputes between you and Discord” for further details. But in short: You may be subject to arbitration and have waived your right to a class action lawsuit by simply using the service. While a judge may see it differently if brought before the court, there is no guarantee of that, given the Supreme Court’s historical precedent (support) for arbitration clauses. Note that the cited is one example, but in general, this is generally the attitude of the court.
3. Depending on who this information is shared with, this may become a problem if Discord proactively shares this information with the government without a warrant due to simple requests or pressures and NOT valid subpoenas and/or warrants. This is not a theoretical problem, either, as there is a New York Times article detailing such an administrative subpoena. This is problematic if the government decides to start quietly “doxxing” people it deems problematic. Today, that’s criticizing ICE. Tomorrow that may be a result of not liking certain neurological conditions, certain religious, political, or other orientations that the state deems problematic. Further, as recent years have proven, those with the power choose what laws they will and will not follow.

To summarize: By continuing to use discord, your service may be degraded, the data should be treated as at risk since your data and chats are tracked on their hardware and thus subject to the whims of the company who decide what you can and can’t say.. Whenever this happens, you are at the mercy of whoever controls the hardware. Whoever controls the hardware, controls the data. So, it’s important to know who to trust in that situation. Discord has proven on several occasions that it cannot be trusted.

What is the solution? For sake of brevity, I will cover three options below. Please note that there are other solutions out there beyond the scope of the article (e.g. Teamspeak) that certainly can be reviewed. However, I have limited this to three options because in general, I find “less is more” when it comes to offering choices to humans. The three options covered below are Stoat, Matrix, and IRC.

What is Stoat?

Revolt, now known as Stoat, is a chat application that is available for any desktop operating system with applications coming for iOS and Android. It is based out of England, as judging by its terms and conditions. It is open source and licensed as AGPL3. In plain english, this addresses a gap in GPL3 that excludes the network. Further, the license is designed to ensure that changes are shared with the community if they are made (as opposed to a MIT license, which does not have that requirement.) and that it is not possible for a company to later reneg on their software license.

Stoat changed its name due to IP issues with its previous name and was sent a Cease and Desist.

Stoat contains many of the features that many discord users likely are interested in and would use. This is primarily text and voice. Anyone who has used the user interface for Discord will likely feel right at home. It is also possible to integrate bots.

The company provides development documentation and some guidelines for anyone wanting to contribute and/or write their own bot for the service.

Some of the drawbacks to Stoat:

• You will not be able to do video chat, custom emojis, etc.
• Much like discord, it does appear to be centralized and not federated (ala Lemmy and/or Matrix, which we’ll be talking about in a bit.)
• There is, at present, no end to end encryption. According to a recent reddit megathread, this is something planned for DMs but not for spaces.

For ease of use, I expect discord will feel right at home. Additionally, it’s very cool that this is indeed open source and run by volunteers. However, as always, with centralization, one should be aware of the risks.

What is Matrix?

Matrix has several components that make up a decentralized chat platform:

• Matrix itself consists of a set of APIs that define how chats/federated instances interact with one another. Matrix is also open source and appears to be, on cursory glance, Apache 2.0
• Element is effectively the “front end” and is also open source under AGPL 3.0 (similar to Stoat)
• Synapse is intended for home server use if you want to make your own server. It’s also open source license is AGPL 3.0
  I would recommend for more details for what specific platform that you’re after, but in general, expect to find iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux applications for what you’re looking for.

Matrix is extremely powerful and can do many things that Stoat at present cannot. It offers the ability for video messaging, spaces within spaces, and end to end encryption by default for messages and groups chats. Additionally, bridging to other services, such as discord, irc, Microsoft Teams, etc. Is available. Further customization is available with bots and widgets. If desired, it appears that it is possible to encrypted spaces if so desired. Also, as alluded to earlier, if it is desired that the data be completely housed by the user on their server and encrypted, this can be done as well.

That power comes, however, at the cost of a certain amount of user friendliness. Given the decentralized nature of the product, there is some “natural” cost to that. Additionally, because of the myriad of options, this is likely to turn off some would be users from exploring this option. However, element.io gives a fairly straight forward option to try out the service using the main matrix server as its initial offering. Here, you can play around with the software and give it a test run with little headache.

The other drawback is speed. The initial load to preview some servers can be fairly substantial, however, this is a “one and done” situation. After loading is complete, there’s no further need to be concerned with load times.

How secure is the end to end encryption?

In a blog entry from Matrix, they cite that various public servants have advocated for its use in the military and for department of defense applications as opposed to Microsoft Teams, which is NOT encrypted or secured. Included in that blog post is a letter from Senator Ron Wyden that details his concerns.

That said, Breaches are possible and no security is going to be 100% perfect. This is also dependent on the server that you join.

What is IRC?

This is, by far, the oldest protocol on our list. IRC is a plain text messaging protocol that is Open with a limited ability to transfer files. In most cases, this means that you can run it without much overhead. It reflects the Linux philosophy of doing one thing and one thing well.

Getting into IRC is pretty straightforward, though it may be a bit intimidating for a first time user. In short, start by getting a client of your choice. In my case, I used Hexchat because it comes with a lot of stuff for free out of the box, such as a server list and a nice way to join channels once you’ve connected to a network. You can also use web clients to do the same without the need to install any special software.

Depending on the server that you connect to and channels that you participate in, you may be required to register. For example, the Linux channel on the Ubuntu IRC requires that you be registered with Libera.chat. This is fairly simple as you only need to submit an email address and password and then ensure that you’ve confirmed your registration.

With that said, it should be assumed that whatever you put on the server is indeed like speaking on an open mic in public. It is great for communication, but privacy is not inherently part of the system. It is, however, decentralized as there is no “main” server similar to Discord and Stoat. Please also note that some features that are taken for granted in discord (e.g. Replying to a message from a person in server so that the message is quotes for clarity) aren’t going to be found here. Again, this was not part of the design. There is some basic encryption at work for things like userIDs and passwords, but not necessarily what anyone would consider “secure” for sensitive communication. Private messaging per user is possible, but it is unencrypted.

If this is something of interest, there are other fantastic resources available beyond what I can provide in this blog post. I would recommend starting here or here. You can also look at references for Libera.chat here.

Conclusion

In general:

• If you are looking for the closest thing to a discord clone, pick Stoat. Do note that you can self-host stoat as per their readme found here
• If you are looking for something that is open and have no need of any other bells and whistles beyond text chat and file transfer use IRC.
• If you prefer that your communications be encrypted by default with the option to also encrypt spaces AND self host, use Matrix/Element.

Addendum

Some additional tidbits worth reading: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-and-persona-end-partnership-after-shady-uk-age-test-sparks-outcry/
New York times article – Please note that this is an archive.ph link. This is something Wikipedia finds suspect. Unfortunately, my alternative is paywalled. So, use at your own risk.