Discord replacement?

[lefou]

Discord will require age verification starting in March 2026. We hopefully understand, why this is a problem for a free software community. The issue is obviously not the age of our users, but the complete privacy intrusion and exploit-ability of our personalized and verified data. I will be no longer available on Discord to chat and provide support.

For Mill, this means Discord is no longer (if it was ever) an open communication channel for our users. The question is, what alternatives could we use? We don't need a very feature rich platform, just some chatting and some spam-protection would be enough. Ideally, it can be read without any login and the chat history is publicly accessible for a long time. (Alternatively, we want to be able to export and archive it in our git-repository.)

There is still the older now Matrix-based Gitter chatroom, which still works and which I started to monitor again. I think, this could be a nice short-term solution for all those, who don't want to or can't use Discord anymore.

But it would be cool, if we could collect some alternatives below. Please provide you suggestions with pros and cons. Please open a new comment for a single platform and discus it in the sub-comment sections.

Please vote with your 👍‍ and 👎 .

Thank you!

[joan38]

From what I understand you'll still be able to message on Discord even without verifying your age. You will just not be able to receive direct message and access channels marked Age restricted.

[lefou]

Maybe that's true. I don't really know what feature requires what account properties. But I guess, we never will find out who we leave behind, which is the opposite of an open and including community. E.g. Discord announced, that they try to automatically guess the age of existing users based on their chat history (which in itself is a huge anti-trust reason to me). Most of us will probably not need to proof their age. But this makes us blind for the real accessibility hurdles other users may have. I don't want to hang out in a privileged chat room, knowing, that other users either can't join or need to make sacrifices.

[lostiniceland]

I never understood why communities use discord anyways: there used to be no message threads (I think they do support it by now) so with many people it results in an unreadable mess.

Zulip might be an alternative, though I haven't read whats required. I just know that Quarkus uses it.

[lefou]

I find the Zulip UX quite hard (at least if you want to have simple chat), which is probably because the structured Zulip interface is more for communities who seek to replace mailing lists and forums and want to have threaded and longer lasting conversations.

While for Mill, we rather want to have all these essential planning and thinking processes in the issue tracker or the discussions. I think the Mill chat should primarily serve quick on-off communications, shorter questions and some chatting. It does not necessarily need threads.