Is there a true alternative to Discord?
A search for a proper replacement to the ubiquitous choice
Discord recently announced new ID requirements for users. People pretty much universally disliked that, and links to Palantir were quickly uncovered, which makes it all a lot more nefarious.
Now, I’m not the biggest privacy hawk. I’ve generally been willing to trade a bit of personal data for the sake of security or convenience.
This feels different, though. There’s something deeply disconcerting about a company tying your government identity to your online speech, especially in the current political climate, and especially when that company has already suffered a data breach that exposed 70,000 IDs.
This also isn’t an argument about whether I want my age verified or not. Look, I get the importance of protecting children. But companies seem to be using that as a cover for other things (less “protecting our children,” more “we have a vested interest in knowing who you are”).
It’s also not an argument of “well, if you have nothing to hide…” This is the argument of those willing to allow the erosion of basic rights to privacy, and it should be rejected out of hand, regardless of political affiliation or beliefs. This isn’t a left or right issue.
Everyone has to decide what they are willing to surrender to the wave of AI, government surveillance, and data aggregation. For me and the friends I communicate with, this is a bridge too far.
Finding a suitable alternative, however, isn’t simple. I’ve tried two potential replacements so far. But first, let’s understand what we’re trying to replace.
What Discord does well
Discord is, admittedly, a great product. They have mastered the friction-less transition between text chat and dropping into a voice call. Their focus on custom emojis and GIFs makes modern internet chat feel accessible, and the crossover between servers makes sharing those features across different friend groups incredibly easy.
While I’m not a heavy voice user, the feature works exceptionally well when I do need it. For gamers, the in-game integrations are virtually unmatched for building community.
Finally, its sheer ubiquity means that adding someone on Discord is now nearly on par with exchanging phone numbers. Very few platforms connect so many people so seamlessly.
What does an alternative look like?
If privacy is a priority, your options for Discord alternatives are unfortunately slim, unless you are willing to self-host.
The reality is that almost any company selling a hosted service will eventually follow Discord’s trajectory. In 2026, it is hard to find a corporation that can be trusted to keep your data truly private. The adage, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” applies here.
Between the proliferation of AI models hungry for training data and the increasing pressure of government monitoring, your private conversations are almost certainly being fed into a model or a database somewhere.
If you decide to ditch Discord, you’ll likely need to get comfortable hosting your own apps. This doesn’t have to be expensive, and it isn’t necessarily difficult, but it does require a mental shift. It’s no longer as easy as just signing up for an account; you’re taking ownership of your own digital space.
IRC
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is the “granddaddy” of them all. Its roots extend back to the late 80s, predating the World Wide Web itself. For decades, it has served as the backbone for developer communities and early internet culture.
At its core, IRC is simple: it’s a protocol that allows a server to facilitate message exchanges between peers. Historically, it lacked the modern features we take for granted, such as being able to see messages sent while you were offline. If you weren’t logged in, you simply missed the conversation.
However, development on IRC hasn’t stalled. Thanks to the IRCv3 standard, many of those old hurdles are gone.
Features like chat history playback (so you can catch up on what you missed while not online) are now standard. When paired with a modern client, IRC offers a surprisingly clean, distraction-free experience that feels both nostalgic and incredibly performant.
Users can also customize it to their preferred experience. Work in a terminal all day? Maybe a command line IRC client is your preferred method. Prefer a full-featured fat client like mIRC? They all connect the same way.
What IRC doesn’t do, however, is serve as a hub for modern internet meme culture. Since the protocol itself was designed to facilitate the transfer of text, there is no native way to “see” media like GIFs or images directly in the flow of conversation. While standard emojis (the ones you’d send in an SMS) work fine, there is no support for custom reactions like a Kappa or a PogChamp.
In Discord, you can react to a friend’s joke with a custom-animated emote in one click. In IRC, you’re back to typing “lol” or using a text-based emoticon. You’re also not natively able to reply to a message in a channel; you’ll have to keep up with the flow yourself.
There doesn’t seem to be much momentum toward changing this, either. Implementing custom reactions or inline media would require a level of standardization across dozens of independent clients that simply doesn’t exist.
There are modern clients and bouncers that offer quality-of-life enhancements, like automatically expanding image links or providing a drag-and-drop upload that hosts the file on a separate web server.
But even with these additions, the experience remains fragmented. You might see the image perfectly in your client, but your friend using a traditional terminal setup will just see a URL. It’s a functional way to communicate, but it lacks the cohesive, shared visual language that makes Discord feel like a digital hangout rather than just a chat room.
But maybe that’s okay. If you simply want a functional, easy-to-use chat system, IRC actually shines in 2026. What used to be a technical hurdle is now remarkably streamlined. With modern server software like Ergo, you no longer have to struggle with the “old way” of IRC, like manually configuring separate services such as NickServ and ChanServ just to hold onto your username or manage a channel. Ergo handles all of that natively, out of the box.
For the user experience, modern web interfaces like The Lounge provide the always-on bouncer experience that was once reserved for power users. It feels much more like a contemporary web app than a 1990s terminal: you get link previews, file uploads, and a synchronized history across your devices. Using it on a phone even provides push notifications, making it feel less like a relic and more like a viable daily driver.
Whether or not IRC can truly replace Discord for your specific circle, however, depends entirely on your group’s expectations. My friends and I are a bunch of nerds; connecting to an IRC server feels familiar, almost like returning home. We’ve all been there before.
For friend groups that are less technically inclined, though, the transition can be daunting. Even with a sleek interface like The Lounge, the underlying concepts (manually joining channels, registering a “nick,” and the lack of a centralized “search for anything” directory) require a mental adjustment. It asks your friends to care about the infrastructure of their conversation, and in a world of “it just works” apps, that can be a hard sell.
One last caveat with IRC: while Discord is focused on gamers, IRC isn’t. It’s not — and I can’t emphasize this enough — focused on anything outside of communication between people through text. While there are some integrations you can likely build out, none of it is native. You can’t see when a friend is playing a game, for example.
And, obviously, there is no voice chat. If you want voice chat, you’re going to need another service, which brings us to…
TeamSpeak
If you played PC games in the early-to-mid 2000s, you almost certainly remember the great divide: you were either a TeamSpeak clan or a Ventrilo clan.
Admittedly, TeamSpeak 3 feels like a time capsule. It looks and functions almost exactly as it did in 2005: utilitarian, grey, and strictly business.
However, the newer TeamSpeak 6 provides a much-needed design overhaul. It offers a sleek, Discord-inspired interface that finally bridges the gap between different servers. You get private chats with friends and the ability to be a member of multiple communities simultaneously.
Setting up a server is also remarkably easy. If you have a bit of technical experience, a simple Docker container on a cheap VPS can have you up and running in less than 15 minutes.
There is, however, a fundamental drawback. While the interface for TeamSpeak 6 is a massive improvement, it remains a voice-first service. If you and your friends are like mine, you likely use text chat 99.9% of the time, only joining voice when you’re actively gaming.
In TeamSpeak, the text chat is largely tied to your active connection. While TeamSpeak 6 has introduced persistent Global Messaging, joining a specific server still defaults to placing you in a voice channel. It doesn’t quite replicate the Discord experience where text and voice are two separate-but-equal worlds.
This is likely the deal-breaker for most groups. In the middle of a workday, if I want to send a quick message to my friends, I don’t want to have to connect to a voice server and potentially disrupt someone just to leave a note.
The biggest hurdle is the shift from membership to connection. On Discord, you are always “in” the server. On TeamSpeak, you have to “dial in.” That extra bit of friction, the manual act of connecting, makes the community feel less like a persistent digital home and more like a conference call you join for a specific task.
For my friend group, relying solely on TeamSpeak for async communication would likely just kill it. We’re just not all going to join a server and stay connected to a voice chat just to send messages back and forth.
Fully replacing Discord likely requires two or more services
With an IRC server and a TeamSpeak server, much of the core functionality of Discord is replicated. During the day, you can stay connected via text through IRC; when it’s time to game, you “dial in” to TeamSpeak for low-latency voice.
Is it a perfect 1:1 replacement? No. There is undeniable friction in managing two separate apps. But that friction is the price of admission for total data sovereignty.
If you want to close the gap even further, specifically for image sharing and those “meme” reactions, you can look toward the Fediverse. For instance, a self-hosted Akkoma instance can act as your media hub. By using a simple webhook or a bot to feed Akkoma posts into your IRC channel, you gain a persistent, searchable gallery of your friend group’s photos and GIFs without ever touching a corporate server.
Other alternatives
I’m also keeping an eye on the Matrix protocol. Unlike the fragmented IRC/TeamSpeak approach, Matrix tries to be an all-in-one, federated solution. Using a modern client like Cinny or Element, you get a very Discord-like experience with rooms, spaces, and even integrated VoIP. However, Matrix can be a heavier lift to self-host and maintain, which is why I started with the path of least resistance.
There is also Stoat (formerly known as Revolt). If you’re looking for the absolute closest thing to a Discord “clone” that you can host yourself, Stoat is likely it. It’s built in Rust, it’s incredibly fast, and it carries over the server, channel, and role hierarchy almost exactly. But I was turned off by some of the discussion about it on Reddit, and they’re likely not far from Discord’s age verification requirements, either. It’s not completely disqualifying, but, like I said, path of least resistance.
The issue with Discord (and other companies)
Setting up an IRC server was my logical first step: a way to see if my group had the momentum to actually make a change. It’s lightweight, nostalgic, and it works. But this experiment has exposed a much larger problem: the danger of market dominance.
When one or two players capture such a massive portion of how we communicate, the alternatives begin to wither. We become so accustomed to a specific user experience that we grow resistant to even the smallest amounts of friction. Then, when the company we’ve all come to rely on makes a fundamental shift (like requiring a government ID or a face scan just to stay connected) we find ourselves in a corner.
Do I surrender my anonymity to a company that has already proven it can’t always protect its data? Or do I lose an essential line of communication with my closest friends?
Ultimately, everyone has to decide where their own line is drawn. But a future where our online speech is permanently tethered to our legal identities is a scary place to be. For me, taking back control of my digital space is worth the “extra click” it takes to join a server I actually own
.