The closed-source chat platform Discord announced on February 9 that it would soon require some users to verify their ages in order to access some content — although the company quickly added that the "vast majority" of users would not have to. That reassurance has to contend with the fact that the UK and other countries are implementing increasingly strict age requirements for social media. Discord's age verification would be done with an AI age-judging model or with a government photo ID. A surprising number of open-source projects use Discord for support or project communications, and some of those projects are now looking for open-source alternatives. Mastodon, for example, has moved discussion to Zulip. There are some alternatives out there, all with their own pros and cons, that communities may want to consider if they want to switch away from Discord.

I would like to recommend stoat, but it is centralized. There is matrix, for example, while fluxxer is still in the early stages of development.

Stoat can be self hosted.

Fluxer

https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer

Still in the early stages. Self hosting is coming soon.

It can be, yes. "Centralized" means it cannot federate.

Didn't read the whole thing because I had to stop at the right column at the start.

Federated is "decentralized". The correct word the author is looking for is "distributed". And even then, direct exclusive P2P is only one form of "distributed". Hybrid/Multiple approaches are also wide-spread (torrents anyone!).

Not sure how a technical writer gets such a basic aspect wrong.

Also, beyond the closed source aspect, and being a closed up platform in general, Discord was always literal spyware. And pretending like open-source projects who chose to use it didn't know what they were doing, and glossing over the actions that ranged from collective nagging to almost literal fights in some communities because of such choices, reeks of willful blindness.

I found this article much better: https://wiki.alopex.li/DitchingDiscord

The OP article seems like a promotion for Matrix with only a cursory and not very well informed look at other options.

Also both articles glance over serious recent efforts to modernize IRC, such as https://github.com/ObsidianIRC/ObsidianIRC and https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma which in combination with a Mumble server is also a real Discord alternative.

I'm not sure about it being a drop-in replacement for Discord, but after trying a whole bunch of these I liked SimpleX the most. YMMV.

Movim is also an option. Based on XAMPP.

Fluxer has federation on its roadmap

I found this article much better: https://wiki.alopex.li/DitchingDiscord

That's a really fantastic (and humorous!) summary of, well... everything. Didn't realize Matrix worked so differently.