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.
I looked into Stoat around the time of their name change announcement.
On the one hand it looks good and is definitely the closest Discord clone at the moment. I was disappointed about a couple of things though:
They have a self hosted server option but it doesn’t have the full feature suite and seems like they’ve decided that it won’t in the foreseeable future.
They’re aware of federation and have no plans to head down that path for the software.
Bit of a shame because if I could self host the full software that’d be pretty damn good as a replacement for all of my friends. If it could be federated in a way where servers could work in tandem that’d be a great distributed alternative to Discord for the entire community! I understand why they’re not pursuing those avenues but it’s still a shame.
While I would like to see those options explored, I don’t think they’re strictly necessary. For now, it’s a reasonable alternative, and the open source code means that a self-hosted and/or federated fork is always possible.
I looked into Stoat around the time of their name change announcement.
On the one hand it looks good and is definitely the closest Discord clone at the moment. I was disappointed about a couple of things though:
They have a self hosted server option but it doesn’t have the full feature suite and seems like they’ve decided that it won’t in the foreseeable future.
They’re aware of federation and have no plans to head down that path for the software.
Bit of a shame because if I could self host the full software that’d be pretty damn good as a replacement for all of my friends. If it could be federated in a way where servers could work in tandem that’d be a great distributed alternative to Discord for the entire community! I understand why they’re not pursuing those avenues but it’s still a shame.
While I would like to see those options explored, I don’t think they’re strictly necessary. For now, it’s a reasonable alternative, and the open source code means that a self-hosted and/or federated fork is always possible.