Predictable: Discord Users are Flocking to Alternatives

Discord users are responding to its age verification surveillance by flooding to alternatives. History is repeating itself.

As it turns out, people find it uncomfortable to be subject to mass government surveillance 24/7 while having highly sensitive personal information being placed into a database that can easily be hacked and stolen. I know, there’s the surprise of the century right there!

That is exactly what is happening with Discord right about now as they go full “papers, please!” with their awful age verification systems. People are saying that this is not something they want to be a part of and have started investigating alternatives.

Of course, none of this is anything new in the age verification debate. When Australia implemented their own version of mass government surveillance and censorship program under the guise of “age verification” and “social media ban”, teens started flocking to alternatives as a way to circumvent this unprecedented amount of government intrusion into their digital lives.

With Discord, it’s basically the exact same story. Last year, despite promises of security, Discord suffered from a data breach, exposing the government IDs of at least 70,000 users (potentially more as hackers claimed it was actually into the millions of users). Considering Discord swore it wasn’t storing this information in the first place, this was quite the story.

Of course, in the face of winding up in a hole, the logical thing would be to stop digging. Discord, however, decided to keep digging with an excavator by announcing that they would massively expand their age verification to be a global thing. This caused massive outrage for very obvious reasons. In response, people started to develop tools specifically for the purpose of defeating Discords age verification system.

Discord seemingly responded by “experimenting” with Persona, an age verification system apparently linked to Palantir, a massive surveillance company known for collecting huge troves of information online in a bid to assist ICE in their deadly crackdown of American citizens. Another controversial aspect is the fact that Discord initially claimed that the personal information would never leave a users device, but later admitting that they may store that information for 7 days after all.

This went over for users about as well as you could expect. Reports are surfacing saying that alternatives are receiving a massive flood of Discord refugees. First, reports suggest that searches for alternatives to Discord has shot up 10,000%. From Windows Central:

Since the news broke, there’s been plenty of noise online. Discord users are not happy with the proposed change that treats everyone like a child, and they’re less impressed with the fact that you need to hand over sensitive data in order to once again be treated like an adult on the platform.

Discord users aren’t just expressing their frustration online; they’re also searching for an escape hatch. Over the last 48 hours, searches for “Discord alternatives” in the US have jumped by roughly 10,000% compared to the average from the past month.

Stoat, which is the new name for Revolt, has seen the biggest search gains in the past 48 hours, jumping about 9,900% with another 4,100% for the old Revolt name. Stoat is an open-source chat platform that focuses on privacy, which is something that’s quickly disappearing in Discord.

Matrix has also seen a significant 2,133% rise in search volume, with IRC gaining 1,500% and Mumble gaining 1,000%.

Of course, it isn’t just people curiously searching for alternatives either. It apparently has led to a surge in signups on top of it all. From PCMag:

Discord’s upcoming age-verification policy appears to be causing a surge in new users to Matrix, an open-source alternative.

On Thursday, the messaging protocol’s co-founder, Matthew Hodgson, reported a “huge spike of signups” for Matrix.org’s homeserver over the last few days. “We’d like to give a warm welcome to the massive influx of users currently trying Matrix,” he wrote, later adding: “The biggest difference between Matrix and Discord is that Matrix is an open standard, like email or the Web.”

The exodus is similar to how people fled Twitter after it was acquired by Elon Musk for alternatives like Bluesky and Mastodon, a decentralized micro-blogging platform. Matrix is also decentralized, but it focuses on instant messaging. In 2023, it reached 115 million users.

Matrix isn’t the only one experiencing a surge in new users. Stoat is another alternative that is floating around as well. Apparently, the surge in new users has resulted in servers crashing. From Tech Radar:

As reported by Destructoid, an alternative Discord platform, Stoat, is facing capacity issues due to a large number of Discord users leaving the service to avoid these age verification plans.

Stoat’s status page indicates that performance on the social platform has gone downhill, with a note stating that: “There’s simply too many people, but we’re trying our best.”

It’s worth noting that Stoat was previously named Revolt, but rebranded in 2025, keeping the same team and maintaining the app’s interface.

Fortunately for those flocking to Stoat, the interface resembles Discord’s, but with the benefit of free themes and customization (whereas with Discord, this is locked behind the Nitro subscription paywall).

Another alternative is TeamSpeak which is also apparently seeing a massive surge in traffic. From PCGamer:

In fact, TeamSpeak itself says it’s seen an “incredible surge of new users” recently, so much so that the voice and chat platform’s hosting capacity has apparently been maxed out in a number of regions including the US. It’s worth taking this with a grain of salt because this information is coming directly from TeamSpeak’s own social posts on X and Facebook, and they’ve yet to reveal the cold, hard numbers.

Still, as I saw for myself while testing out free Discord alternatives, it’s hard to deny the appeal of TeamSpeak. It’s quick and easy to make an account, join or start a group chat, or join a massive, game-based community voice server, and at no point does TeamSpeak cheekily ask if it can scan your wizened visage.

During my testing, I was able to dive into 18+ group chats without tripping over an age gate. However, there’s no guarantee TeamSpeak won’t have to deploy its own age verification mechanism in the future. In the UK at least, the Online Safety Act makes those sorts of checks a legal obligation, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently stating “No social media platform should get a free pass when it comes to protecting our kids.”

Besides all of that, if you’d rather not chat to randoms who also happen to have an unhealthy obsession with Arc Raiders, you’ll likely need to pay an admittedly small subscription fee to rent your own ten-person community voice server. By that point, you’re handing over card details and essentially fulfilling an age assurance check anyway. If you’d rather limit how much info your chat platform of choice has about you, there are arguably better options out there.

Apparently, in some regions, TeamSpeak server capacities have also been reached. An apparently common problem for such services at the moment ever since Discord took a machine gun, aimed it at their foot and pulled the trigger with great enthusiasm.

Now, I know what some people are thinking with all of this. That thinking is that other services are going to deploy their own age verification process, so this whole thing is a moot point. Yes, some of these alternative services will likely also join in on the fun of throwing their own users under the bus by also implementing age verification. The thing is, depending on how it is implemented on their end, it could very easily start this whole cycle all over again as users hop onto a different service that won’t be asking for such highly sensitive information. This story of ‘service implements age verification, users flock to alternatives’ is only destined to repeat again in the future.

At any rate, all of this was highly predictable. How much this will ultimately hurt Discord remains to be seen. A large top player platform can be remarkably resilient with some users being so loyal. After all, X/Twitter is still in existence even though a vast majority of the good users have long since moved on to other platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky. This while leaving essentially the worst of the worst. While Discord might well get hurt by that, it would be extremely difficult to see that this is the fatal move that would end the platform entirely. Only time will tell on that, though.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.