A veteran Discord admin did a deep dive into chat platform alternatives - Signal, Matrix, Zulip, Rocket.Chat, Discourse - stacked against five key pillars: functionality, openness, security, safety, and decentralization. Discord didn't come out looking great. Centralized. No end-to-end encryption. Shaky data persistence. The evaluation spotlights rising open-source players with stronger privacy and longer-term values baked in.
