this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Not an experience that is ever going to find mass appeal. It's good for security but it's not going to get wide adoption like this.
I am not looking for the most secure one, I'm looking for what's most likely to get adopted at scale. I have ruled matrix options out. What matters is community adoptions, subreddits that make a discord, twitch streamers that make a discord, patreons that make a discord, youtubers that make a discord. The next app that is mass adopted will be determined by these communities coalescing around an alternative and making the switch.
realistically, they’re mostly going to grumble about ID verification but ultimately stay on Discord, for the same reasons people are still using the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
I will say, every encryption issue I’ve encountered has been fixable either by giving it a moment to think or by restarting my chat client, which isn’t too different from when Discord has periodic blips.
I don't think so. Groups that want to chat go where community leadership determines they go. If people want to participate in the x twitch streamer's off-stream chat they are forced to go where that community decides to be. They do not have to follow an audience by going to discord, they make the audience go where they prefer. They don't get the audience from discord, discord gets the audience from them.
For this reason chat programs are uniquely vulnerable to people going elsewhere. They have no inherent audience of their own, they are not social networks, they are tools and they can be replaced by another tool at literally any moment. People will run discord and an alternative side by side until they can drop discord altogether. That's exactly how other chat tools died historically as well.