~/tools/communities

Communities

last updated 2026-08-02 · 2 recommendations · what changed

Discord alternatives for community and group spaces: servers, channels, voice chat, for people who'd rather not hand every conversation their community has to a single ad-funded company.

before you pick This is a deliberately thin category. Most of the genuinely interesting privacy options for group chat (fully federated or no-server-trust designs) already have full write-ups under Messengers. What's listed here is specifically aimed at the Discord-shaped use case: persistent servers, channels, and voice for a community.

what actually matters

ownership / self-hosting

Can your community run its own server, or are you still trusting one company's infrastructure and policies?

encryption

What's protected in transit and at rest, and who holds the keys if anyone does.

data retention

How long messages, voice metadata, and member lists sit on a server you don't control.

recommendations

Stoat

the discord-alternative pick
self-hostableopen sourcefree

Stoat (formerly Revolt) goes after the same problem Discord solves: persistent community servers with channels, roles, and voice, without everyone's conversations having to live in one company's infrastructure forever. It's built in Europe under EU data protection law, with a public codebase and a privacy policy short enough to actually read. Your community can run its own instance, which means the people actually running the server decide moderation policy and data retention, not a platform-wide policy team.

good
  • Self-hostable: communities can own their own infrastructure
  • Familiar server/channel/voice structure for groups migrating off Discord
  • Open source codebase
mind the
  • Smaller ecosystem and community than Discord, fewer bots/integrations
  • Self-hosting shifts moderation and uptime responsibility onto whoever runs the server
  • Less independently audited than longer-established messengers
free, self-hosting optional stoat.chat →

Fluxer

the discord-alternative pick
🇸🇪 swedenopen sourcefree tier

Fluxer is another community-chat platform built explicitly as a Discord alternative. It's made in Sweden, fully open source under AGPLv3, and has the usual layout of servers, channels, voice, video, and screen share, but with a privacy-respecting bent: less telemetry, no selling user data, and an explicit promise not to feed your conversations into generative-AI training. It's still in public beta, but it's a good fit for a group that wants the Discord experience without the data-collection baggage.

good
  • Privacy-respecting defaults: minimal telemetry and data retention
  • Familiar community/voice structure for easy migration
  • Open source
mind the
  • Much smaller user base and integration ecosystem than Discord
  • Younger project, less battle-tested at scale
  • Feature parity with Discord (bots, integrations) still catching up
free, freemium tiers in beta fluxer.app →

worth knowing

Want no-server-trust instead of just "Discord, but nicer"? If what you actually need is a fully federated or zero-server-trust option, not just an alternative company running the same kind of server, look at Matrix/Element or SimpleX Chat under Messengers. Both already do group chat and voice and go further on the trust model than anything in this category.