Next month, Discord is going to start requiring age verification. The backlash from gamers everywhere has been predictable and justified. I guess their company name checks out.

I’ve had a few people reach out to me because of my prior vulnerability disclosures and criticism of encrypted messaging apps.

(Thanks, Toggart.)

Unfortunately, asking a cryptography-focused security engineer for app recommendations is like asking a rocket scientist to recommend a car dealership in Nebraska: If you somehow get a good answer, it’ll be by sheer coincidence rather than a reasonable expectation.

That might sound weird. Let me explain.

Discord is Different Things to Different People

Gamers made Discord popular, but Discord isn’t just one tool to people.

Discord is simultaneously:

1. The main way normal people do voice chat (often with strangers) without automatically doxing themselves
2. A place to share memes and multimedia content
3. The software that facilitates family group chats
4. A support forum with Q&A sections and bug trackers
5. Live event hosting (AMAs, podcasts)
6. Activism and political organizing
7. Casual gaming coordination
8. A platform for mental health support circles
9. Collaboration hubs between artists and other creative workers
10. Educational spaces for tutoring or code reviews with screen shares
11. A rather poor substitute for wikis and personal websites
12. A point-and-click adventure game to get bots to give you permission to access the actual channels you need in order to solve a problem

And this is just the use cases I’m acutely aware of from scrolling through public invites I can find on the Fediverse and the “servers” I’m already on.

Actually, I need to add one more thing Discord is:

13. Solely responsible for muddying the waters for most people on what a fucking “server” is.

My point is: Asking anyone to recommend a one-size-fits-all replacement for every use case (which may have wildly different user experience requirements) is setting yourself up for disappointment.

But asking a cryptography nerd might be even worse, because we tend to care about how products and services actually achieve privacy and security, where most people simply do not.

Which Apps Are Good for Privacy?

Currently, the only messaging app I’ve evaluated that actually meets the bar for privacy (i.e., end-to-end encryption) is, unfortunately, Signal.

• WhatsApp is owned by Meta, so I won’t even look at it.
• Matrix knowingly shipped vulnerable cryptography for many years and then admitted that fact only after I disclosed vulnerabilities in said cryptography code.
• XMPP (Jabber, etc.) is plaintext-by-default, which disqualifies it. Private messaging apps shouldn’t even have a plaintext mode to fallback onto.
  • Aside: There are some Fediverse users that have claimed this post has been “debunked” simply because some person disagreed with it, concluding that Signal doesn’t meet their personal threat model which prioritizes where data is stored over how it’s encrypted.

    The author of the other blog post and I can disagree respectfully, but anyone who calls their post a “debunk” needs to consult a dictionary.

• Session forked Signal and removed forward secrecy. They recently announced plans to undo this mistake. Time will tell if they fuck that up, too.
• Telegram sucks and the less furries use Telegram, the better.

As for Twitter’s “X Chat” feature, well…

That said, Signal has its faults:

1. You still need a phone number to sign up.
   • You do not, however, need to give your phone number to strangers to communicate with them. Signal rolled out usernames years ago, and it’s no longer a requirement.

     Some people missed the memo and still gripe about this. They are simply wrong.

2. Group moderation tools are nonexistent.
   • As a group admin, I cannot delete abusive messages sent to a group chat and have it be removed from other people’s devices.
3. Signal is largely under the jurisdiction of the United States.
   • If your threat model includes “nation state forces them to release a backdoor that targets your account in particular“, this might be a dealbreaker for you.

     However, Signal historically has not had any data to provide authorities even under subpoena.

4. Signal is largely hosted by cloud providers, and is generally considered Centralized.
   • This has some upsides: A large k-anonymity provides advantages against a passive adversary trying to do traffic analysis on network-level metadata will only see that you and your friends are using Signal, and cannot generally learn who is talking to whom.

     This has some obvious downsides: An active attacker that has compromised Signal’s infrastructure might be able to discern which messages are sent to which profile (via 96-bit “delivery tokens”, which always rotate every time you block someone). It can also see the IP address connected to each request, which could give them more traffic metadata to work with.

     Contrast this with self-hosted or widely decentralized solutions, where your k-anonymity might be as low as 1 (due to being the only user on a server). Passive adversaries gain almost as much information as an active attacker that pwned Signal’s servers without having to expend the effort.

Yet still, some people prefer other apps due to their personal risk profile being stilted in favor of “I don’t care if it’s encrypted at all, at least the data’s hosted in Europe!”

And like, cool, I guess? You do you.

But if you’re asking someone whose full-time employment involves applied cryptography, you’re going to get the most cryptographically secure recommendation.

It would be malpractice for me to suggest anything else today.

Please Just Make a Wiki For Docs

If your use case for Discord is to host documentation (“guides”) for video games or open source software, I implore you to consider Just Make A Fucking Wiki your Discord alternative.

Every time a technologist has to join a Discord server to learn how something works, their resting heart rate and blood pressure move closer to dangerous levels.

On Age Verification

I’m against age verification in general. Protecting children from the Internet should be the parent’s responsibility. Strangers on the Internet should not be responsible for it. Communication software should not be responsible for it. Websites should not be responsible for it.

It’s certainly possible to build age verification without privacy foot-guns. However, the ways these laws are written doesn’t usually allow for cryptographically secure approaches. This might be an intentional feature by the authors of those stupid laws.

When you also consider the Epstein files and how deeply entrenched child abuse is in American politics, it’s pretty clear that most of the wealth-hoarding predator class don’t give a shit about protecting kids. The same can be said for the politicians they have in their pockets.

But when considering apps to switch to once Discord fully shits the bed with age verification, the question that should be on everyone’s mind is:
“Will this other app require ID verification next?”

Unfortunately, the answer to that question isn’t straightforward.

To really get at the heart of the problem, you have to become deeply familiar with how influence emerges in society, how incentives shape behaviors, how Internet projects are funded and supported, and how laws and politics work.

When you take all these factors in, it’s clear that the most robust alternative to Discord is a communication platform that is:

1. Free Software (AGPLv3 licensed and respects user freedom)
2. Self-hostable, if you really want to
3. Federated, for people that don’t want to self-host
4. Decentralized in practice, not just in theory

Any large corporation is at risk of being pressured by lobbyists or oppressive laws. We already know their playbook.

(Whatever you choose also needs to have feature parity with Discord. Or, at least, the parts of Discord’s user experience that are important for your use case.)

Soatok’s recommendation today is…

Nothing.

There isn’t a single solution to this problem that won’t immediately become a privacy nightmare.

The only good encrypted messaging app I know about today is Signal, which is centralized.

Avoiding these stupid age verification laws requires a large decentralization effort. Signal is centralized because it wanted to avoid ecosystem problems.

Nothing? Really?

Yep. There’s nothing today that I can recommend in good conscience to replace Discord. Sorry to say.

But… what about tomorrow?

Ah, now there’s a good question.

Unfortunately, the messaging app ecosystem today doesn’t really offer a good, private replacement for Discord. Yeah, Signal’s encryption is great, but they’re a single point of failure.

We need to build the world’s next Discord alternative. This is a considerable engineering effort. But, thankfully, I’ve been working on laying the groundwork for this kind of endeavor since 2022.

But before any code is written, non-technical people need to organize their efforts on fighting these stupid age verification laws in every jurisdiction they can–including ones that already passed these ill-advised laws. If you don’t do this, you shouldn’t expect a post-Discord app to materialize either.

Technology-minded folks can then focus their efforts on building what’s needed for folks to remain private online. Some pointers:

1. Tor has Onion Services for core infrastructure hosting. This provides a higher degree of metadata-resistance than any cloud-based solution could ever hope to. The downside is latency.
2. Any encrypted protocol at scale has to manage public keys. I’ve spent the large part of the past few years working on Key Transparency for the Fediverse.

   The “Auxiliary Data” feature in my design is perfect for bootstrapping trust for new protocols (i.e., yours) without having to become cryptography experts.

3. MLS (RFC 9420, Messaging Layer Security), when combined with Key Transparency for the Authentication Service, can provide robust, scalable group private messaging.

   OpenMLS in Rust and ts-mls in TypeScript can get you started.

We can build it. We have the technology.

The only question is: Is this problem important enough to get solved?

I cannot answer that question for you.

Closing Thoughts

If you want a real Discord alternative that respects your privacy (and doesn’t leak your government ID), it doesn’t exist today. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be built.

---

Header art: CMYKat, Discord’s logo, and various emoji