Why I No Longer Use Discord

Posted: 2026-04-01 | Categories: technology | Tags: discord, FOSS, privacy, self-hosting

No, I won’t join your Discord server.

For a few months now, I have been free of the odious communication system known as Discord. In this post I’ll explain exactly why it sucks and I will no longer be using it… With some caveats.

At the time of this writing you’ve undoubtedly heard of Discord’s decision to enact age verification through some rather invasive means. That’s been explained and discussed ad nauseum by now so I won’t talk about it here. Instead, I’ll give a few reasons why it was terrible even before this all happened.

Discord is not private

Using Discord is not much better than using something like Facebook as far as your control over your data goes. All of your messages are stored on a centralized server owned by Discord and are completely accessible by them. Absolutely nothing you send over Discord is private, full stop.

Even removing your data from Discord by deleting your messages is made to be cumbersome with your only option being to delete your messages one by one. Deleting your account doesn’t actually delete any of your messages, just labels you a deleted user with a blank profile picture while your messages remain. Now you have no option to delete at all, since you can’t access the account anymore. Nice.

A popular solution is to use a browser extension that can automatically delete your messages such as Discrub, but you’ll have to hope they don’t detect the use of an automated tool because that is not actually allowed. Remember, though: Discord is closed source. Even after you crawl your entire Discord history and finally remove everything, we have no way of knowing what truly happens server side and whether your messages are actually deleted. I haven’t tested this, but supposedly you can get Discord to “delete” your data for you if you invoke a GDPR request via email or something – I’ve heard they don’t always honor this, however.

You’re also trusting Discord to not bungle something or get hacked and lose your messages and whatever else you have saved on it. A lot of people use Discord as their primary method of communication online and they have no control over all this data they probably don’t want to lose.

Discord is spyware

Both the desktop client and web application include a lot of cool trackers, because of course they do. You didn’t think it was really free, did you? You can avoid this a little bit by using a third party client like Vesktop, but you’re technically not allowed to do that. I’ve never been banned for using a third party client and I know Vesktop is popular, but I have a hunch that sort of thing won’t be allowed to go on forever.

Discord is terrible for support communities

Unfortunately, a lot of open source projects as well as communities that offer support for tools or games or whatever else are based in Discord. I groan every time I’m looking at a project’s website or github page to see that their primary avenue for discussion is a Discord channel. It’s understandeable when it’s just a group of gamers or something, but open source projects have no excuse for this while Matrix and other options exist.

Any kind of information being hidden behind Discord is a travesty. Remember when you could just google something and find a solution written by someone 5 years ago who had the same issue on the public web? Now everything is locked behind a Discord account sign up page and the hope that the Discord mods and their kittens have organized everything in a reasonable manner. Bring back forums! Public and searchable! Threads! Wikis! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fixed something after finding that someone else had the same issue 5 years ago and posted the solution on some forum somewhere easily found with a web search.

The aesthetics of Discord are annoying and terrible

I hate the stupid glowing profile pictures and stickers and hecking silly memes everywhere. That’s all.

As a sidenote, Vesktop is even worse. Last I checked, the splash screen is an anime furry girl dancing around. As a result, a lot of normal people will understandably not want to use this.

Alternatives

For a long time there really just weren’t any viable alternatives to Discord that could replicate its functionality well enough to convince anyone to switch, let alone stick to an alternative. I think that’s finally changing.

Full disclosure, I haven’t actually tested most of these as I replaced Discord with something much simpler and better suited to my needs which I’ll explain in a moment. These services are all being tested and reviewed everywhere since the age verification news dropped so I won’t go into detail on anything, but I’ll list some open source and self-hostable (most of them, anyway) alternatives that you can look into.

Overall, at the time of writing Fluxer looks promising but lacks encryption. Matrix is popular and seems to be the best choice currently if you want something federated. Note: there are privacy concerns surrounding Matrix due to links to Israeli intelligence… 😒 🇮🇱

That’s right, I put my money where my mouth is after reminiscing on old web forums and replaced my Discord server with a Mumble server. 🎧

Reject bloat, embrace Mumble

My needs for a “communication app” are very simple, and I think they are for most people too: I needed a lightweight, self-hostable voice chat service for a small group of friends to use while we hang out or play video games. There is nothing better than Mumble for this specific use case. I run it on a VPS and the setup was dead simple. Here’s the comfy guide I used to set it up.

The voice chat is great and of higher quality than Discord. It includes basic text chat for telling each other our mics are muted or sharing youtube links. Encryption by default, and the server runs on a VPS controlled by me. Freedom! Plus, the absolutely beautiful UI fills me with sweet memories of better and simpler times.

As a group, we do have a need for a persistent chat application that supports both desktop and mobile and for this we use Signal. The desktop client is on all platforms and essentially functions like Discord for us. We already used it and the Discord text channel was redundant anyway. Do something like this if you need to send memes or whatever while playing. We could even use group voice calls on Signal as a backup to the Mumble server (which is always rock solid).

A lot of people will roll their eyes at Mumble being suggested as a Discord replacement. Their qualms will include its “limited functionality” and the fact that it requires you to actually know the people you talk to and can’t be used as a social consoomer dopamine drip. I forgive their foolishness.

I guess some people like to share their screens while they game, so you’ll need one of the above alternatives if you like to do that. I don’t know exactly which service supports that. As long as Mumble is maintained I’m probably never thinking about this again.

Getting people to switch

Most of the alternatives are still in some form of beta and the more mature ones are either not 1:1 with Discord on features, or require some tech savviness to use, especially if you’re self hosting. As a result, many will stick to Discord – the age verification stuff may have happened too early. But these alternative tools have already seen their userbases explode since the news broke, so I have hope.

Utimately, we’re going to have to take responsibility for our part in what the Internet and overall technological world has become. This is a great opportunity to break away from one of the enshittified tools that we allowed to become this way.

Exceptions

Here are those caveats I mentioned. Relationships are important, and as I get older, old friends seem to get further and further away every year. I’m hoping the age verification stuff wakes people up, but in all likelihood Discord will be my only real method for keeping up with friends some distance away.

If I absolutely can’t figure something out on my own or with the help of forums and a project or community doesn’t have a useful website, I guess I’ll suffer the doge memes and seek support in some sordid Discord channel.

I retain the right to pop in every now and then. But that’s it!