Discord has announced that it's rolling out age verification checks globally from March – and the decision has sparked fury from many privacy-conscious users.
Would absolutely advise against telegram.
They have your phone number and you have 0 privacy.
There is 0 support.
If you are banned - there is nowhere to file complaint and you just lose all your contacts.
Guilded is dead. Their website redirects to a thank-you page of some sort. I remember trying it out ages ago and I thought it was pretty decent competition for Discord and had a lot of the same features, but ultimately it would have been susceptible to the same kind of fuckery that Discord is giving us right now. These private companies only want to extract value out of their users.
Trying to point my friends towards matrix/element, they already started a teamspeak server instead though >. >
The biggest issue is it didn’t seem like matrix/element has streaming video in voice chat, we use that pretty heavily as we’ll play different games and just hang and talk several streaming at a time.
Meet Pavel Durov, the tech billionaire who founded Telegram
Pavel Durov was born in St. Petersburg in Soviet Russia.
The tech entrepreneur cofounded the encrypted messaging service Telegram with his brother Nikolai in 2013. The brothers were born into a family of intellectuals, according to a biography on the Digital-Life-Design Conference website. Durov spoke at the conference in January 2012.
Durov is now worth $17.1 billion, according to Forbes. Much of his fortune comes from Telegram, which he said hit 1 billion users in March 2025.
Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
Would absolutely advise against telegram. They have your phone number and you have 0 privacy. There is 0 support. If you are banned - there is nowhere to file complaint and you just lose all your contacts.
Guilded is dead. Their website redirects to a thank-you page of some sort. I remember trying it out ages ago and I thought it was pretty decent competition for Discord and had a lot of the same features, but ultimately it would have been susceptible to the same kind of fuckery that Discord is giving us right now. These private companies only want to extract value out of their users.
Revolt is now called Stoat Chat. Some sort of legal issue apparently.
Anyway, for those who don’t know, it’s basically an open source clone of Discord. Definitely worth a look, probably where I’ll my stuff now.
Guilded went to Roblox-only in 2025. I’d never heard of it until someone else mentioned it as an alternative.
IRC :(
Revolt is Stoat now and it doesn’t even let me verify my email right now.
I signed up yesterday and just got my verification a little while ago. I hear that they’re being swamped right now. I wonder why? 🤔
I keep getting my verification mail, try to verify, and it tells me that something failed.
Yeah, they’re swamped! Glad I made mine around the IPO announcement…
Trying to point my friends towards matrix/element, they already started a teamspeak server instead though >. >
The biggest issue is it didn’t seem like matrix/element has streaming video in voice chat, we use that pretty heavily as we’ll play different games and just hang and talk several streaming at a time.
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That is not what the post says. They sell encrypted messaging to government organizations. It’s basic SaaS and allows them to fund themselves.
This is a free to use platform, just saying:
Meet Pavel Durov, the tech billionaire who founded Telegram
https://www.businessinsider.com/pavel-durov-telegram-billionaire-russia-instagram-wealth-founder-dubai-lifestyle-2022-3?op=1
Nope. Never use telegram.
You can get banned out of the blue and just lose all the contacts.
Never touching that