Discord (And Other Messenger Apps)

[Simizen 1,100]

Hopefully this is in the right spot for this topic. My goal is to have this in the most publicly accessible spot for people to jump straight into.

Additionally, this topic can be used for similar issues regarding other messengers.

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So, due to the Discord controversy of them rolling out their "Everyone's a default teenager" logic, there's been some interest in moving over to other messenger programs.

Now, one concern is, how will we handle a switch over to a different messenger? And, to clarify, yes, there's going to be issues moving large groups over to another messenger, but the one I'm focused on here, is, how will we handle both of the community Discord servers? Cause we've got both Simtropolis and the SC4Evermore servers. And I'm sure there's others that I'm unaware of, I just know these two to be the biggest and most popular.

Of course, there's been a lot of talk of moving a lot of people over to TeamSpeak, but the biggest issue with them is simply the fact that people would need to setup and host their own servers. And I can certainly see some issues regarding that, I wonder if maybe that could be advantageous to the community to some extent? Like, we've already got the STEX and LEX, so, I don't see any particular issues that could prevent us from utilizing the current webservers for TeamSpeak. That said, I am aware that webservers run a bit differently and the rules behind them may prevent something like this without going through some kind of clearance process. I'm just not sure if there's anything particularly technical beyond webhost limitations that would prevent the establishment of something like TeamSpeak.

The idea behind this, is that both Simtropolis and Evermore could host their own TeamSpeak servers. Though, I don't know anything about integration, but if possible, we could have those setup so that all you'd have to do is just log into your appropriate account to use them. So, if I wanted to chat with people on the Simtropolis side, I could do that.

Alternatively, we could just merge the two parts of the community together into a single one. This of course does come with a combined pressure of 2 sites running off of the same equipment, but also introduces a potentially unwanted effect, of having it centralized. And of course, if it goes down at any point for any reason, we're out that entire messenger service.

Now, I know that there was some mention of using Stoat (formerly Revolt), as it seems closest to Discord in it's design. I have been messing around with Stoat for a while cause I remember there was something that came up with Discord a while back that had me start looking into alternatives (I think they were discussing going public with their company at the time), which allowed me to see how it worked out a bit. And it does seem to be the closest to the Discord experience we've known. So, if we're looking for "closest to Discord with least friction" Stoat's probably a good one to go with.

I, personally, am not against checking out, exploring, and using other messenger services, but I'm aware that not everyone is going to be all that interested in making 50+ accounts to random programs that may/may not survive the next year.

And I'm not trying to force the community into one right now, as we do have some (albeit limited) time to find a good one. My goal with this is to kick off a discussion of what everyone (more or less) is interested in moving over to, as that will help out greatly with reducing the friction regarding moving over.

Of course, another idea is, we could find a way to implement a messenger system directly into the websites, allowing people live chatting there. Though, it may not be as robust as something like Discord. And I do remember there being an option for a live chat box on a website, as one of the first forum sites I was on had it and it was pretty fun to use at the time. And if there's a way to implement something along the lines of an RSS feed, then we could easily have a standalone program that would act like Discord, but connect directly to a website that has the chat boxes. Though, with that said, I'm aware that such a thing would be a bit of work due to the programming involved with it.

Still, I do think having an integrated chat box on the sites would be good to have. Though, with how we don't have forums on the new Evermore site, it's quite possible only Simtropolis would end up with that. Hopefully I can be proven wrong in that regard.

 

Another key concern, is how exactly would we handle some stuff? Because we've got:

• basic chat rooms
• images/memes
• videos/streams
• various projects

And I feel that some of the projects, we could probably just move over to forums either here or over on Evermore. I do agree with @Ulisse Wolf, along with many others I've seen online on other sites, that Discord's actually done quite a number on information access, and that we're better off with forums for a lot of things. And, at least in regards to the projects, we are going to need a place to keep their development and access to any information that comes up from it.

Of course, I'm sure that things like the basic chat rooms and memes can be easily overlooked. Except for the above mentioned issue, in which a ton of information is going to be lost soon due to Discord being such a closed system. Videos and streams will probably be fine, as I don't believe Discord really keeps the streams around, as it's neither Twitch, nor YouTube. But, I do feel that these are still some valid concerns that we should probably begin addressing sooner, rather than later.

And the thing is, we might get lucky, and Discord doesn't make a complete and utter mess of things with this implementation. But, if we do get lucky? We absolutely have to take whatever buffer we gained from that and be aggressive with moving everything around, cause that's likely a one-off event. It'll just give us some breathing room long enough to work it out.

 

Additionally, if we do end up merging both the Simtropolis and Evermore groups together, we might be able to relieve some stress on the admin/mod teams, as they won't need to be pulling double/triple duty across so much stuff. Cause we've already got a bunch of people like @Tarkus who's considerably overworked by being a mod/admin on the Evermore site, the Evermore Discord server, being the NAM Team Leader, etc, and this could prove beneficial to where he won't be as overwhelmed. Maybe. It is hard to say given how everything's setup, but we could just move all the admins/mods over from both Discord servers into the new messenger with their same rank without too much fuss (theoretically).

 

Oh, and for any projects where we want to keep the development hidden, if they're moved over to the Simtropolis site proper, we'd need to find out if there's a way to lock forums/forum groups behind certain roles and start giving people roles to allow access to them. No clue on how the current forum software works, but it's certainly something to keep in mind.

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Linus Tech Tips going over it in part of their WAN Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLZr4cccNQI

Discord's 'Teen-By-Default Settings': https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally

Reddit post for alternative messengers: https://www.reddit.com/r/allkeyshop/comments/1r3vsk1/best_discord_alternatives_to_try_in_2026_voice/

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I would certainly like to know everyone's thoughts on this. And if you've got more sources and suggestions of Discord alternatives, please do share them.

[nos.17 5,247]

On 2/17/2026 at 9:08 PM, Simizen said:

And I feel that some of the projects, we could probably just move over to forums either here or over on Evermore. I do agree with @Ulisse Wolf, along with many others I've seen online on other sites, that Discord's actually done quite a number on information access, and that we're better off with forums for a lot of things. And, at least in regards to the projects, we are going to need a place to keep their development and access to any information that comes up from it.

I definitely agree with this - it's something I've been thinking about for awhile. The Cost of Ephemeral Communication is a nice article that talks about the benefits and drawbacks of platforms like Discord. There's a lot of things that happen in the servers that is sequestered away which it would be highly unfortunate to lose all of that. In the same way old SC4D is an invaluable source of information, Discord (the SC4E server in particular) is slowly becoming that way too. Fortunately there are ways to export data out of discord. I set up a bot account in SC4E and have began backing up the information in all the channels - it's actually pretty easy to do. Then you can run tools like DiscordChatExporter and then DiscordChatExporter-frontend to visualize the exports. I started running it on some of the SC4E channels and it seems to be working well so far. In the long term I imagine there could be regular incremental backups of new content, and this would all be hosted somewhere publicly accessible outside of discord.

 

I'm not really in a position to comment on the pros or cons any of the Discord alternatives as I haven't tried any of them. I can say though that two huge advantages discord does have is that it requires minimal know how to set up and administer, and running servers is free. I could be wrong about this as I haven't done any investigation, but typically alternatives require some technical knowledge from someone to self host and administer the server (and also someone willing to personally eat the costs of doing so), or much larger monthly payments for commercial hosting. For context, ST discord has 2300 members and SC4D has around 1800. Look up the cost for commercially hosting 1000+ user Teamspeak servers. 

I'll also add that consolidation of two servers into one is a meh proposition IMO. Each of the servers has their own unique vibe: ST is far more active for off topic and non-SC4 city building, and SC4E is much more narrowly focused on SC4 with off topic far less active. From a moderation perspective it's a non-issue. In 2025 between the two servers there's probably been single digit numbers of moderation actions. While I obviously can't speak on behalf of others, I think it would be fair to say that overall the things overwhelming us are majority IRL related, not server/site administration.

[Simizen 1,100]

On 2/19/2026 at 9:21 PM, nos.17 said:

I definitely agree with this - it's something I've been thinking about for awhile. The Cost of Ephemeral Communication is a nice article that talks about the benefits and drawbacks of platforms like Discord. There's a lot of things that happen in the servers that is sequestered away which it would be highly unfortunate to lose all of that. In the same way old SC4D is an invaluable source of information, Discord (the SC4E server in particular) is slowly becoming that way too. Fortunately there are ways to export data out of discord. I set up a bot account in SC4E and have began backing up the information in all the channels - it's actually pretty easy to do. Then you can run tools like DiscordChatExporter and then DiscordChatExporter-frontend to visualize the exports. I started running it on some of the SC4E channels and it seems to be working well so far. In the long term I imagine there could be regular incremental backups of new content, and this would all be hosted somewhere publicly accessible outside of discord.

Yeah, I came across someone explaining that if people wanted to move from Discord, they could grab the Discord Chat Exporter, so I'm glad other people know about that.

And I read the article, it was a good read, and does explain a lot.

On 2/19/2026 at 9:21 PM, nos.17 said:

I'm not really in a position to comment on the pros or cons any of the Discord alternatives as I haven't tried any of them. I can say though that two huge advantages discord does have is that it requires minimal know how to set up and administer, and running servers is free. I could be wrong about this as I haven't done any investigation, but typically alternatives require some technical knowledge from someone to self host and administer the server (and also someone willing to personally eat the costs of doing so), or much larger monthly payments for commercial hosting. For context, ST discord has 2300 members and SC4D has around 1800. Look up the cost for commercially hosting 1000+ user Teamspeak servers. 

Yeah, the cost of hosting servers, at least via Teamspeak, is definitely a hurdle for a lot of people for sure. It's part of why I was wondering if maybe it could be beneficial to have it hosted by the sites directly. So, Simtropolis would host it's own Teamspeak server, as would SC4Evermore. Though, I haven't seen the prices yet, so that could be a serious disincentive for doing something like this.

On 2/19/2026 at 9:21 PM, nos.17 said:

I'll also add that consolidation of two servers into one is a meh proposition IMO. Each of the servers has their own unique vibe: ST is far more active for off topic and non-SC4 city building, and SC4E is much more narrowly focused on SC4 with off topic far less active. From a moderation perspective it's a non-issue. In 2025 between the two servers there's probably been single digit numbers of moderation actions. While I obviously can't speak on behalf of others, I think it would be fair to say that overall the things overwhelming us are majority IRL related, not server/site administration.

Yeah, I had a feeling that was basically a non-issue. It just seems like it would be somewhat easier to merge the 2 given the huge overlap with the community. But yeah, it makes sense, given that there's hardly been any real issues on either side that requires moderator actions, at least, beyond banning/kicking the spam/hacked accounts.

Course it does raise the question on whether or not we should merge the OpenSC4 group into either server, lol.

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Okay, seeing the prices now (though the info may be out of date), that could definitely be a hurdle for either site to try and support 1k+ people. Though, a great question does come up from this, which is: how many people do we actually expect to be on the server?

Cause, let's face it, the majority of the members of most Discord servers are just lurkers anyway. Don't get me wrong, they probably get tons of info and such that they need from it, but realistically the majority of the people are just kinda there and not really doing much. Even if we have 1k on either of the community servers, we're looking at like 100-200 who are plenty active at any given point. And it sounds bad, but like, would we even need larger servers if those people aren't really contributing much?

Of course, I would like to point out that, overall I'm not against them being in the servers, and I do think that if they're interested in being there, even if all they do is lurk, they should be allowed to be there. But, at least in regards to something like Teamspeak, where you'd have to pay for a server to hold 1k members, it probably does require some consideration in how best to approach it.

So, maybe it wouldn't be the best option for the community as a whole, but could work amazingly well for say, the NAM Team given that there's considerably fewer members on NAM. But this would require an alternative that could easily hold 1k+ people at an overall lower cost.

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Additionally, I did end up learning of yet another Discord alternative, which could be promising. Though, I'd have to look into it some more. And from what I can gather, this might be the "official" Discord replacement for a large number of people. Though, with the huge migration back to Teamspeak for a lot of people, it's likely that we will no longer have a monolithic setup like we've currently got with Discord, and that people will simply pick one of, or both, messenger/s as needed.

Honestly, I'm fully expecting the messenger setup to become spread out in a way. As Teamspeak is likely useful for the smaller communities/groups, but then for the larger ones, you'd end up with Discord and alternatives.

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the new messenger in question:

Fluxer overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP1P0e8ueqk

Fluxer messenger: https://fluxer.app/

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Also, seems that Discord's pushing it off for a time. So I was right, we got lucky with it not getting implemented yet. So, we will definitely need to be working towards some kind of an alternative now that we've got some time.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Discord-postpones-global-age-verification-to-the-second-half-of-2026-as-it-considers-adding-more-verification-options.1233763.0.html

Additionally, I'm seeing more stuff pop up in my feed now for other Discord alternatives. So, that's on me for looking down the rabbit hole and not paying attention to how close I was to the edge of it, lol.

[Lab Rat 16]

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