Discord is a free and user-friendly chat app thats aimed at gamers and online communities.
But its far from the only choice if youre looking for a way to hang out online.
Here are some alternatives to consider.
Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek
Why Ditch Discord?
Discord is a great fit for most people looking for a place to hang out online.
But Discord isnt perfect.
Jason Montoya / How-To Geek
Due to its growing popularity, its become a prime target for attack, withspammers and scammers.
These range fromunsolicited invites to play new gamesto attempts tosteal login tokens.
In many cases,servers are raided and nuked.
There are some real downsides to using Discord though, particularly if youre privacy-conscious.
This means you cannot self-host Discord and are instead bound to the companys servers.
If you fall afoul of Discords rules you may find that your server is shut down.
If Discord suddenly changed its terms of use, youd be expected to fall in line.
The company was accused of disclosing personal information to advertising networks without authorization.
Everything is encrypted end-to-end and there are no dodgy data-collection or terms to agree to.
You get voice chat, text chat, emoji, video, and GIF sharing.
Sound quality is good and the app has a clean and responsive interface.
Also consider:Element is just one app, be sure to check outother Matrix clientslikeFluffyChatandCinny.
Mumble
If all youre looking for is a voice chat client, look no further thanMumble.
Communication is encrypted and theres a user permission system that gives admins power over their servers to maintain order.
it’s possible for you to host Mumble locally on your system or put it on a web server.
Also consider:Other similar VoIP-based systems includeVentriloandTeamSpeak.
Despite its primary use as a text messaging platform, Telegram can almost entirely replace Discords functionality.
Unlike Discord, Telegrams client-side apps are open source, but the server code is not.
The app uses Telegrams servers, though the company isconsideringchanging the app direction to include self-hosted servers in future.
Best of all, your friends may already have or be familiar with the platform.
Learn more about Telegramand the optionalTelegram Premium subscription.
Slack feels like Discord in a business suit, and the feature set and pricing certainly reflect this.
Also consider:Microsoft Teams, itslike Slack but Microsoft-flavored.
IRC requires the use of a server, on which channels are created for chatting.
Despite the obvious drawbacks of this approach, IRC is still a powerful tool.
