and you don’t wanna give it to em.
Hello, everyone. 👋 I am bibbleskit, or just bibs, please. I’m a sysadmin by day, digital artist by day, and so very sleepy by night.
Too Long; Didn’t Read. Just tell me what to do.
Option 1: “I care more about convenience than privacy.”
- Stoat has your back.
Option 2: “I care more about privacy than convenience.”
- Matrix is the only real choice.
| Feature | Stoat | Matrix |
|---|---|---|
| Not owned by a company | NO ❌ (but self-hostable) | YES ✅ |
| No Age Gating | NO ❌ (see below) | YES ✅ |
| Works on all devices | YES ✅ (except native iOS) | YES ✅ (even your toaster) |
| End-to-end Encryption | NO ❌ (in discussion) | YES ✅ |
| 1 on 1 voice calls | YES ✅ | YES ✅ |
| Group Calls | NO ❌ (in the works!) | YES ✅ |
| Video Calls | NO ❌ (in the works!) | YES ✅ |
| Screensharing | NO ❌ (in the works!) | YES ✅ |
| Themes | YES ✅ | Sorta ❓ |
| Custom Emoji | YES ✅ | Sorta ❓ |
| Stickers | YES ✅ | Sorta ❓ |
| Easy Sign-up | YES ✅ | YES ✅ |
| Discord-like Channel Structure | YES ✅ | NO ❌ |
Stoat is the easy simple choice. Don’t wanna think much? Choose Stoat. It’s popular, too.
Matrix is great, is ever improving, and has a ton of familiar features. The difficult part is that it is NOT Discord. It never was and it won’t be. I personally believe it’s worth getting to understand. It’s pretty much future proof. But it’s not a 1:1 replacement. It is fundamentally an entirely different protocol. The transition is made way easier with the right client, though. I recommend the following:
- Commet
- Very discord-like.
- Supports voice, video, and screen-sharing.
- Only text chat is allows for encryption at the moment.
- Cinny
- Very discord-like.
- Currently doesn’t support voice, video, or screen-sharing.
- Text chat allows for encryption.
- Element
- Not discord-like.
- Supports voice, video and screen-sharing.
- Everything can be encrypted.
Anyway, the whole Discord fiasco is really fucked up. All my friends are there. All your friends are there. Getting all your friends to move feels like an impossible task. And, well, that’s because it is. I’m going to be honest here: I have very very little faith that this article will convince most of you to move. Not because I don’t believe in you as a person, but because doing the easy thing is easier. It’s far easier to give the corporation your face or government issued ID because the alternative is a lot of work. And I don’t blame you.
But dammit I’m going to try. Right now is the best time to make the move. The earlier the better. So I’m going to give you the best option that I’ve found:
If you’ve been searching for a replacement for Discord for privacy reasons, it feels like there’s no other real option than Matrix. I have looked at all of the following, and you may have tried or checked out a few:
- Stoat (formerly Revolt)
- Guilded (killed itself lol)
- Fluxer
- Root
- some other application i have forgotten about it’s been a long couple weeks okay
They all share the same problem:
They are privately owned and using their service means your data is being kept by a company. If they want to comply with the law, they will eventually also require you to verify your age somehow. They are no different than Discord in this way.
It’s a massive shame because I like Stoat. It’s very “discord-like” and is an easy transition. But, sadly, the devs themselves have expressed that they’ll have to comply and are already enforcing compliance based on region.
Stoat the GOAT?
I just gave a huge BUT in the previous paragraph, but (but but but) Stoat is still a great choice due to the following things:
- discord-like, so its familiar
- open source, so you know what’s going on
- no ads
- no tracking
- no paid subscription bullshit
- very customizable
- you can self-host your own server if you want full privacy
- easy bot integration and API
- doesn’t have ties to Peter Thiel and Palantir.
It’s a great choice still, and the devs are working hard to give people a place to move on from Discord. If you want the easy transition, pick Stoat. Nearly all of the “NO ❌” sections are being worked on. And, due to the open source nature of the platform, you can watch its progress and even help out if you know how.
“Tell me more about the age thingie.“
Right, so. Stoat has to comply with the law, so that means that they cannot allow anyone under 18 to view NSFW content. The neat part is that they have literally no method in place to determine your age. So, anything marked NSFW is just inaccessible to anyone. Including the owner of the guild/channel/content lmao. This can also be viewed as “not neat.”
Stoat devs are bashing their heads against the wall trying to figure out the best way to deal with this. They KNOW users are signing up left and right to get away from Discord. They KNOW that asking for your face or ID is absolutely going to bring the same fury upon them. It’s a very difficult situation to be in. It’s costly, it’s awful, it’s a pain in the ass. They don’t want your personally identifiable information. Do not be mad at them, be mad at your law makers. Send them angry letters. It’s the old people in charge’s fault, not the Stoat devs. You can be mad at Discord, though. They actively do want your data.
All this to say, if you are cool with using Stoat with the caveat that it’s not purely private and that NSFW content might not be labelled as such, absolutely go for it. It’s a great choice and it should only get better, I think.