Switching from Discord is... difficult at best... impossible at worst...

History

There was a time when you came from school and you fired up, depending on the time, MSN (rip), Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype (rip)... There were tons and tons of communication platforms around, but then in 2015 Hammer & Chisel created a platform to resolve all the mess that was the communication online, especially for gamers.

They solved a real issue, when if you started a new game... you had to download and create an account on another server... another platform... fragmenting and separating even more the communities.

But now in 2026 it's simple, you fire up Discord you join the server via a link and that's it. You can write, talk, stream... share everything you want with a click of the mouse.

And Now?

But like always there are some caveats in the new platform...

Being a closed, proprietary platform, you don't know what they do with the data that they collect, heck they took 8 years to implement a end to end encryption for the voice channels... and the messages are still not private...

You might say yes even TeamSpeak is proprietary but unlike Discord... you can at least self-host it... and with TS6, and rumors around the implementation around the Open Source protocol Matrix, you can at least keep your communication more private.

And with the recent scandal around the age verification... well... they cracked the community, they betrayed the community.

And yes you don't need, at least for now, to give your ID to discord if you don't care about the features and restrictions that they will make on your account... but still there will be people that... in order to use the platform that it seems to be the only one in the recent years to encapsulate all the communities around the world, they will give their ID... unfortunately...

Ok, but what are the options?

With the ease of use, multi-platformness, integrations... well unfortunately now there is none like Discord...

If you want to accept the compromises like: only on PC, the cost of the license and hosting, the not so ease of use and required skill around setting up the server... and i can go on... unfortunately... there are:

Conclusion

Do I think that Discord is going to ~~die~~? No.

Do I think that communities are going to switch? Maybe, not the big ones.

Do I think that some other platform is going to born? Yes, but it will take time...

Nastro_