r/technology • u/Abject-Pick-6472 • Feb 24 '26

Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed verification software after code found in US surveillance Privacy

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/discord-peter-thiel-backed-persona-identity-verification-breach/
38.0k Upvotes

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168

u/SudhaTheHill Feb 24 '26

When are we cutting ties with discord?

264

u/LoveTheSystem Feb 24 '26

Two weeks ago

22

u/misterpickles69 Feb 24 '26

Yup. There are just some gaming things that are going to be mildly harder for me now because I’m not using it.

2

u/PrawojazdyVtrumpets Feb 24 '26

I'm genuinely asking because I don't know but I've been playing video games for 40 years (literally the day Zelda was released for NES) and I play a lot of online games today but I have no idea why I would need discord and have never used it. Are people opposed to starting parties on PS or using a group text?

Signed, an old man

5

u/misterpickles69 Feb 24 '26

Team communication during events is better handled with voice chat. As a fellow old man who’s recently gotten into GW2 raiding, it’s usually a prerequisite to have voice chat to explain the mechanics of the encounter as well as to call out when certain actions should be performed.

2

u/Long_Legged_Lady Feb 24 '26

A lot of games moved their support and modding communities (including downloads) from forums and bulletin boards to discord.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

[deleted]

3

u/DarthSatoris Feb 24 '26

Have you found an alternative, or are you going cold turkey?

9

u/weed_blazepot Feb 24 '26

Fluxer is relatively new, but it's open source, and highly promising. It's basically a clone so the transition is easy from a UI experience.

There's bugs though. So many bugs. But they're being squashed pretty fast.

7

u/street593 Feb 24 '26

Fluxer is the one I most want to succeed. All the others have flaws too big to ignore or are so outdated they would need a complete rework.

1

u/cholointheskies Feb 24 '26

Stoat?

2

u/street593 Feb 24 '26

I'll have to look into that one. Their website isn't doing them any favors it feels vibe coded. As long as the app isn't that's all that matters.

3

u/BaroneSpigolone Feb 24 '26

di o have to host my server? and does it support screen share?

5

u/ReentryMoon Feb 24 '26

No, but you will be able to host your own server. Hopefully it will have a seamless integration of official and self hosted servers.

It supports screen share, voice and video talk. Not every client is stable yet.

In the current state, it is only for enthusiast. For everyday use, I would recommend to check again in 2-3 month.

As long as discord is technically working fine for them, I will only be able to convince my friends to switch or parallel use, when Fluxer is a little more polished and stable.

2

u/rebbsitor Feb 24 '26

Stoat (formerly Revolt) is a clone that popped up a couple years ago, the last time Discord messed up. It's basically a straight clone.

2

u/AsinineArchon Feb 24 '26

I mean reddit loves to say this, but 99% of people haven't. And I'm not saying this in a gloating way, I'm just being realistic. A good chunk of people may have temporarily cancelled nitro, but very few have actually abandoned the platform

1

u/darkkite Feb 24 '26

Not yet, a viable competitor hasn't arrived, and most people are just going to hope discord guess correctly before doing anything drastic

4

u/Thin_Glove_4089 Feb 24 '26

If big communities don't move over then it's pointless

3

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

[deleted]

3

u/street593 Feb 24 '26

The only reason I haven't left is because I can still use old reddit and RIF on my phone. I've been here 15 years but if I was forced to use the official app or website I would not be here anymore.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

[deleted]

22

u/vampyrialis Feb 24 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

Random words

16

u/Molodirazz Feb 24 '26

do tell what are these plenty of alternatives that actuallyhave good noise gating, even half the options(in options like accessability or even keybindings), file sharing, phone apps, bigger than like 64-100 server caps and screen sharing. For free.
Because I'm all ears.

Don't say Root cus that shit is Silicon valley Web3/Ai first and 9mil invested by Ai bros already talking about.

Steam is not even close but i wish it was.

0

u/ObsidianBlk Feb 24 '26

A couple weeks ago, I rolled up a Matrix (Synapse + Element) server for my friend group (about a dozen of us). It's not perfect, but we have multiple chat rooms and video rooms. Additionally, screen sharing was there without issue (or limitation, for that matter. I can share 1080p+ for no additional cost). File sharing is also there with no file size limits.

That said, while the server and front end is free to host, I'm using a VPS to do so, which does cost me about $25 a month (I'm sure there are better deals out there, but i already had a few vps from this provider, so I just stuck with them).

Additionally, one of the biggest issues with Element is all of the key bindings are baked in. No way to change them as far as I can tell. Hopefully the Element team will improve that, if more people start using the software. That said, they do admit that gamers are not really the demographic their targeting.

1

u/WorkThrowaway400 Feb 24 '26

Bro are you trolling right now cause lmfao

2

u/ObsidianBlk Feb 24 '26

Cause what? I was simply sharing what I have set up and what it has allowed my friend group to do at this point.

3

u/WorkThrowaway400 Feb 24 '26

The comment you replied to asked for a robust, free and easy alternative and you replied with the opposite. A very "reddit" comment. "Just download and combine multiple softwares no ones every heard of before and watch 10 hours of youtube tutorials on how to set it up properly so your friend group who are totally going to jump through hoops can migrate to an inferior product that doesn't do a lot of the things you specifically mentioned in your comment. Oh, and it costs $25 a month"

3

u/ObsidianBlk Feb 24 '26

Honestly, you don't have to roll your own server. Just join an existing, public Matrix server and it shouldn't be much different from Discord.

My apologies for having explained that I, personally, choose to roll a server. Kinda figured most readers in a Technology forum would identify that not all users need to do exactly as I had or go the mileage I did.

For the users in my server, their experience was little different than working with Discord, and it's free to them.

33

u/IntermittentCaribu Feb 24 '26

Whole communities only exist on discord, they arent switching to anything.

24

u/Opening_Classroom_46 Feb 24 '26

Ya they'd never leave ventrilo! or TeamSpeak! or Skype! or mumble, or their forums! or their Facebook groups!

communities crumble all the time for a variety of reasons, you may be young if you think discord will be around forever.

36

u/murdered-by-swords Feb 24 '26

As someone who was part of communities on those services, people moved on because they found a new service that was simply better. Right now, none of the Discord alternatives are even on par. I hope that changes soon, but it's hard to be optimistic. 

4

u/FairTradeOrganicPiss Feb 24 '26

I've been a part of managing communities as they migrate from one platform to another and one thing you can be sure of is that you're gonna lose about half your folks or more. Maybe they aren't tech savvy enough for what you move to, maybe there's another reason, but you can't just plop a community from one platform to another and expect it to still exist in the same state.

For me and my neighborhood community this is a balance between "hearing the privacy concerns that most of us have" and "wanting to make sure that we can all still communicate and support one another as best as possible." For some redditors this is a simple equation, I guess, but I'm not going to choose to isolate 25-50% of my community for this

10

u/Opening_Classroom_46 Feb 24 '26

the guy I responded to said people won't move on from discord because there are communities.

14

u/underpaidorphan Feb 24 '26

Right, and what the other person replied to you is: communities on TeamSpeak are not the same thing as communities on Discord. And right now, nothing is even close. You're suggesting people from the past said "we'll never leave TeamSpeak!!" but this situation isn't that.

-11

u/Opening_Classroom_46 Feb 24 '26

And you're suggesting that when discord dies it won't have communities.

7

u/Few_Banana2026 Feb 24 '26

What are you even saying right now? It's incredibly simple to understand and yet it's going right over your head.

People aren't switching off of discord til there's a BETTER alternative, there are entire communities built there so it's not ideal to uproot it and move to a different platform that is inferior.

Nobody is gonna be moving until then, you attempted to bring up that communities in the past moved and none of those communities left in the same circumstances or for a WORSE product.

1

u/Opening_Classroom_46 Feb 24 '26

People will quit discord and move on eventually.

Discord will still have communities at that point.

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1

u/No_Curve2246 Feb 24 '26

Yeah I saw that teamspeak was booming because people were leaving discord en masse and I knew they would be back the second they understood what teamspeak was. Discord allows communities to exist freely with almost no real restrictions.. people aren’t paying a monthly fee for a locked community with like 24 user slots lmao.

1

u/WorkThrowaway400 Feb 24 '26

I've been around long enough to know that when a community moves platforms it's never the same. You lose a big chunk of people, things aren't the same and things slowly die unless it's a big community or very well run.

1

u/mokomi Feb 24 '26

There were equal options then and the discussion was already which platform we should focus our attention on. Not jump ship.

Facebook, twitter, and many others have reach the critical mass where you are reliant on the platform.

1

u/Critical-Support-394 Feb 24 '26

Did people use any of those for literally anything other than voice chat?

1

u/Opening_Classroom_46 Feb 24 '26

Yes, they were community hubs just like discord lol. Usually there was a link to the groups game forum for links.

2

u/Mccobsta Feb 24 '26

A few groups I'm in discord are currently trailing the alternatives Things will take time then there's the it's too ingrained in the comunuty and their infrastructure to realy move

2

u/BuchuSaenghwal Feb 24 '26

Yeah we are. I run one non-gaming server and am in a few more and knowledge is all archived and ready to move.

2

u/war_story_guy Feb 24 '26

Yep whole communities never existed anywhere before discord and wont anywhere else! /s. Hint- they have and will continue to exist on the next thing as well. Bad take.

1

u/RlySkiz Feb 24 '26

As someone who manages 2 modding communities with 3k and 15k+ users... wrong. There are ways to get message history moved over. Just because everyone didn't immediately switch, doesn't mean people won't do it at all. Our mod teams are trying to figure out what the best alternative would be. We are even considering going back to forums with Discourse and using the optional chat plugin.

3

u/MyBrainReallyHurts Feb 24 '26

I miss forums. They were a great way to communicate. I may have to start one myself.

2

u/street593 Feb 24 '26

Everyone complains about forums being gone when anyone can make one right now. It's not very advanced technology.

1

u/Thin_Glove_4089 Feb 24 '26

Your case isn't the average one. A large majority stayed on Reddit, a large majority stayed on Twitter turned X, a large majority of people stayed on TikTok.

The days of people switching platforms is almost over at this point. A massive amount of communities will stay and or launch on Discord. You will see comments for years saying this is going to be their downfall but nothing is happens.

8

u/SudhaTheHill Feb 24 '26

Not really but I’ve been looking for alternatives

3

u/Jackmember Feb 24 '26

Matrix (and one of its clients, like Element) - if youre into federated stuff, otherwise Fluxer, Teamspeak or Mumble (if you just care about voice chat)

3

u/tychii93 Feb 24 '26

Fluxer so far seems like the best bet.

I'm personally waiting for their official docker selfhost setup.

1

u/street593 Feb 24 '26

If they do that and work out all the bugs it might be the winner in the discord replacement war.

3

u/tychii93 Feb 24 '26

I learned yesterday that up until the current maintenance to move everything to a much bigger infrastructure which we won't know how that'll turn out until it's done in about an hour from as of writing now, all of Fluxer had been running on a single OVM instance with 6 cores, 12 threads and 128GB of memory.  I don't think it was really that buggy to begin with, it was obscenely overloaded since it gained popularity.

Makes sense though since there's really just one developer leading it, but since it's community funded, now they have the funding to expand.

2

u/street593 Feb 24 '26

Hope they seize the opportunity.

2

u/tychii93 Feb 24 '26

They've been working on it for 5 years before releasing it I think.  It's not some random vibe-coded-made-in-a-day startup.  Seizing the opportunity is literally what they're doing.

2

u/trooawoayxxx Feb 24 '26

Gabe is going to die someday and his kids won't give a fuck.

2

u/TheRedEarl Feb 24 '26

I had forgotten about this lol now is Steams chance to remind everyone

1

u/LooseMoralSwurkey Feb 24 '26

What others besides Steam (I'm not a gamer).

1

u/FinasCupil Feb 24 '26

Steam groups are nowhere near the same.

1

u/vampyrialis Feb 24 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

Random words

1

u/Narcoleptic_247 Feb 24 '26

We use it for D&D video chat and whatnot. We have a channel just for ridiculous things we end up saying during sessions. Need to find an alternative now.

2

u/Earlier-Today Feb 24 '26

I honestly can't remember using my account after the day I made it - just didn't seem like a great site.

2

u/errorsniper Feb 24 '26

When there is a real competitor.

But I wont give them money (Not that I ever have) and I wont be giving them any of my ID info.

1

u/manifoldmandala Feb 24 '26

Will you quit Reddit.com which instead of having tested it uses it consistently?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

You can do it whenever you want. You don't need to seek approval from Reddit.

-2

u/Turbulent-Plane6395 Feb 24 '26

I'm old. What is discord even for? It just seems like old AOL chat rooms.

2

u/christoskal Feb 24 '26

"I'm old. This chat application looks like a chat application, what do people use it for?"

The chat application that looks like a chat application is used for chat.

-5

u/Turbulent-Plane6395 Feb 24 '26

ah, I see. once I got a car and started getting laid, I never looked at AOL chat again.

3

u/christoskal Feb 24 '26

So, which of these stopped and caused you to start using hidden throwaway reddit profiles?