Been looking around for good alternatives to discord, as I’m not staying in the platform if it tries to force me to verify my age using a company owned by palantir’s co-founder.

Originally I was interested in Matrix, but multiple times now it has shown to not be safe/good. Then I came across Stoat

It has:

1. Same design as Discord
2. Hosted in Europe(no American Cloud Act to steal your data at random)
3. Not owned by a big, public company(less likely to enshitify)
4. Possible federation and other stuff in  the future, which would be nice

So far, it’s the only alternative I found that seems actually plausible. Almost a drop-in replacement, only lacking(right now) video streaming(because that’s expensive/heavy)