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Discord delay global rollout of age verification to improve transparency and add more options
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Thank you for giving me more time to figure out alternatives
Yeah, keyword here is "delay".
I just found out about Fluxer today. I might tinker around and see if it’s any good.
It definitely seems like the best competitor popping up. Familiar UI, nearly all essential features already functional, open source and self-hostable. I will say it feels like it came out of nowhere and having paid options out the gate feels a bit sketchy so I'm not completely placing any bets on it, but after trying it out for a bit I've been liking it far more than any other alternative.
Matrix is more mature and established but very clunky, confusing for casual users, and most clients are terrible. Stoat feels extremely dated and buggy, and it feels exactly the same as when I first tried it a year ago before the name change. Alternatives are few and far between and nothing really excels just yet, but Fluxer feels the most promising.
If a program trying to replace discord doesn't ask for money it's a scam. You can't do something at that scale and not have subs or paid options.
There's fucking nothing free in life and I'm fucking tired of people expecting and demanding everything be free. That's how we fucking got to this point in the first place. Companies turning to ads, data gathering and other things to generate revenue. Because the number of paid users is a drop in the bucket.
Either you pony up and put money on the table. Or YOU are the fucking product and will be sold off as parts to support the stuff you use.
Bandwidth, labor, hardware all costs money. Even self hosting still costs labor.
AND FUCK AI.
Isn't fluxer partially LLM-coded according to the dev?
The timing with Fluxer is very fortuitous, it's been in development for years but only just got public which is why it seems to have come out of nowhere. I am with you on the money bit, but it comes down to how it gets used. I haven't looked into how transparent the finances are. I understand the need to rustle up money fast in order to scale up development, as a proper Discord competitor needs to be more than a one-man effort. So I'm hoping that's what the money will go to.
I agree that Fluxer is by far the best alternative yet, so I want to be hopeful.
Move to matrix. It’s very stable, maturing up well, and has almost all of the discord features including streaming/video chat.
Do you have a recommendation for which project to host and/or clients to use? There are so many.
Get element desktop or element x, and start by just having an account on matrix.org. If you are reasonably nerdy and have hardware or a VPS, then start a synapse server.
Tuwunel or Contiuwuity for the server and Commet for the client(though presently you'll need to provide another client to register)
Why do you think that’s a good suggestion for a newcomer?
The servers I suggested are much lighter and simpler to setup than synapse. Commet is very Discord like which lets you on board people much easier than Element. It also supports voice rooms unlike Cinny(waiting for this to merge https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/pull/2680)
I host two homeserver, one on synapse and one on continuwuity, both pretty small (tens of users), but with users in lots of large rooms. The second one was significantly easier to set up, and uses a lot less resources.
Also, element and element X work, but aren't great. It depends on the user, of course, but I don't think you get people by giving them the 'dumbed down' version.
Nether of them are your friends. Fluxor seems a bit sketchy with their limited time cash grab of lifetime memberships, and GitHub history compression. Stoat is basically discord 8 years ago and is in the UK where age verification is law. It has time to change and their privacy policy doesn't look great (they also collect information from you).
Fluxor could be fine, I am just skeptical of it at the moment.
Stoat is better than discord, but not by much.
Fluxer has been in development for a while, it just only recently went public. Everything has to go public at some point. Judging something just because of that feels ignorant and kinda stupid
Also literally every thing ever in the history of business. Has had initial investors of some descriptions. Again this feels insanely stupid to judge something because it's trying to gather seed money.
300k wasn't even a lot of money. For what fluxer is trying to do it's going to need millions and a steady inflow of cash.
If anything the fact they didn't try to get more money is a red flag.
No, the red flag is being 'self-hostable', but trying to concentrate all your users in a central, non-federated, monetised instance.
Also, we cannot verify how long they where in development because they squashed their git commits. There's usually no good reason to do that.
Movim seems like a much better option, they just need a few weeks to get a couple of extra features out
Tell me more?
https://movim.eu/
It's based on XMPP, which means it's open-source, federated, and has E2EE in private chats. It also supports video calls, including in groups (which most other Discord alternatives have problems with).
Also, there's no phone number or even email requirement to sign up. You can set a recovery email, but you can skip that step during setup. Just pick a server, username, and password
The main thing it's missing right now is "places" aka what Discord calls servers/guilds. But they're currently working to roll that feature out soon
https://slrpnk.net/post/34490207
haven't gotten around to trying it myself. But the fact that it's built on XMPP is cool, and I hate that that all these new clients seem to develop their own new standards rather than build off what already exists.
Sounds like movim as a project has been around for a while, but recently moved to be more discord like in intention, so it's picked up interest there.