Why Discord Alternatives Don't Need End-to-End Encryption

In the ongoing search for Discord alternatives, a common refrain emerges: any replacement must have end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to be considered viable. This demand stems from growing privacy concerns and the desire to escape centralized platforms. However, after years of community management and observing the practical challenges of building large-scale chat platforms, I've come to believe that E2EE is not the priority it's often made out to be for Discord-like services.

The Technical Reality of E2EE

The cryptographic challenges of implementing E2EE at scale are substantial. While I'm not a cryptographer, the practical implications are clear: if E2EE were easy to implement, we'd see more platforms doing it successfully. Signal stands as the notable exception—a platform that has achieved cryptographic approval and widespread trust. But Signal serves a different purpose than Discord, focusing on private one-on-one and small group conversations rather than large community servers.

When examining what actually challenges existing Discord alternatives like Stoat, E2EE doesn't even appear on the priority list. The developers are grappling with fundamental issues: getting their apps published across platforms, finding developers to contribute, implementing effective moderation and spam prevention, and scaling infrastructure to handle potential mass migrations from Discord. Their public work tracker reveals immediate priorities: replacing Redis with RabbitMQ for better queuing, fixing event processing pipeline bugs, building administration tools, and resolving user blocking functionality issues.

These technical challenges represent the foundation of any successful chat platform. Performance optimization, robust administration tools, and bug fixes that ensure user safety are prerequisites that must be solved before considering the additional complexity of E2EE.

The False Security of Encryption

Even if a Discord alternative implemented E2EE for all chats, including large public servers, the security benefits would be limited. Discord has experienced multiple scraping incidents where user data was harvested from the platform. E2EE doesn't protect against this because scrapers operate on the client side—they're the intended recipients of the decrypted messages. The encryption protects data in transit and at rest, but once messages are decrypted for display, they're vulnerable to scraping.

This reveals a fundamental truth about online communication: you must trust the people you're communicating with, regardless of encryption. In large public servers, the threat model changes entirely. State-sponsored actors or motivated individuals can scrape messages directly from client applications, making E2EE a false sense of security in these contexts.

Misaligned Priorities

The push for E2EE in Discord alternatives often misses the actual problems users face. Discord's issues aren't primarily about encryption—they're about centralization, lack of competition, and corporate priorities misaligned with user needs. The platform has become a de facto monopoly for gaming communities and increasingly other interest groups, with decisions increasingly driven by the pursuit of an IPO rather than community wellbeing.

What users actually want from Discord alternatives includes better moderation tools, more transparent policies, resistance to arbitrary bans or server takedowns, and platforms that prioritize community needs over profit. These are the problems that deserve immediate attention and resources.

Different Tools for Different Needs

There's also a category error in demanding E2EE for platforms designed for large public communities. Discord serves multiple purposes: private gaming sessions with friends, public community servers, and everything in between. But these use cases have different security requirements. Private conversations with close friends benefit from E2EE, while large public servers function more like forums or social media platforms where the focus is on discoverability and community building rather than privacy.

This is why we have different tools for different jobs. You wouldn't demand E2EE for Twitter or Reddit because the value proposition is different. Similarly, a Discord replacement focused on large community building might be better served by other security measures—like robust moderation tools, transparent data handling policies, and user-controlled privacy settings—rather than blanket E2EE.

The Path Forward

The most effective approach for Discord alternatives is to first solve the fundamental problems of building reliable, scalable, and user-friendly chat platforms. This means focusing on performance, moderation capabilities, user safety features, and creating sustainable business models that don't rely on surveillance capitalism. Only once these foundations are solid should platforms consider the additional complexity of E2EE.

For users concerned about privacy, the solution isn't necessarily to demand E2EE from every platform. Instead, it's about using the right tool for the right job: Signal or similar apps for private conversations, and Discord alternatives with strong privacy policies and good moderation for public community engagement. This nuanced approach recognizes that different communication contexts have different requirements, and that security is about more than just encryption.

The obsession with E2EE for Discord replacements reflects a broader misunderstanding of what makes online platforms safe and useful. Security and privacy are important, but they must be balanced against usability, functionality, and the actual needs of communities. By focusing on these core requirements first, we can build better alternatives to centralized platforms—with or without E2EE.