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Complaints about Nitro, Discord's subscription, and the venture capital-backed pressure to grow that guides the company's product decisions have existed for years. While those might play a role, the current exodus from Discord seems like it can rest squarely at the feet of the company's age-verification policies. Discord announced a new collection of teen safety features in February 2026 to follow the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, and a growing number of laws that require platforms to use age verification to prevent children from accessing adult content. Discord's so-called "Teen Default

With an open-source chat platform, security is still an issue, but a mass age-verification system isn't a concern when you're just hosting a server for you and your friends. Not every option offers the same familiar interface as Discord, but you can get core features like text chat and voice and video calls from most open-source chat apps. If you actually want to easily self-host a server, the options get more limited. Apps like Stoat, Element, Fluxxer and Cinny offer Discord or Slack-like experiences that you can run on your own hardware, either using a bespoke system or the open-source Matri