Signal
Recently Discord announced "Teen-by-Default Settings Globally" which I think will be destructive to the platform. I could go on a huge rant about it, and maybe I will at some point, but I'm trying to make the effort to focus this space more on building up good things than be an easy portal for ranting. Most of what I'd like to say about the situation is probably said elsewhere by someone better and has more interesting takes on.
The good news is enough people seem motivated to move off of the platform- I am shocked by this and so far I've had a much more positive response at trying different things that I'd typically see. This is a great sign!
People are looking to alternatives, whatever that may be. I think this may be the wrong question to ask specifically but it's a start. On Discord Alternatives is a great post I read today about this that I think gives a pretty solid overview of why this is a challenge.
The post brings up, and you really won't hear a conversation about chat applications without this coming up, Signal.
Every time, it's always about just using Signal for chats if you can. The encryption is a big selling point and as far as I know it's the only platform where it's legitimate and trivial for users to think about- or so they tell me.
I think Signal is not really an answer to Discord but I think anything you can use to build up contact lists outside of Discord is a good start.
I've had a Signal account for years but I never really tried to push for it and nobody in my circles has ever really brought it up as as serious suggestion to use- so my contacts list on it has been empty.
I didn't want to like Signal and have been rooting for other platforms- the phone number requirement is a serious no thanks to me. I don't like giving out my phone number if I can help it- this is a sensible default position to have regardless of what a specific application is using it for- so even if I signed up for it, it felt like a hard ask to do so of anyone else. Ultimately though I think Signal won the war here, so I decided that it'd be worth reaching out to people to add me on it.
I got a few groups up on it running now and overall it's pretty great! Low friction to get people on, just passing out links (to either add me as a contact or add to a group directly) and it's generally pretty fun. I've used telegram in the past (many years ago, before Discord was even a thing, and got off it quick after finding out its claims about encryption didn't really matter since chats weren't encrypted by default) and it's pretty similar to that as far as its usability goes. I've heard feedback of Discord being too complicated and Signal definitely feels like it can be a good answer to that.
It's 100% the right move for direct messages and can be great for smaller group chats. I think the larger your chats get the format might not work so well, but I don't know for sure- I supposed it depends more on the activity you expect than anything else.
Here's some areas where I think it isn't great:
First off, and relates to the phone number issue, is identity management. Because it's tied to your phone number you have less options for segmenting your identity across different kinds of spaces. This has always been an important aspect of the Internet for me and Signal isn't having any of it. Which is bizarre to be that Signal will spend so much on encryption but nothing on this. I think it could do better to support a little bit of this, maybe multiple IDs or something to tie to a single account. Discord has this mostly right in a few ways: custom server profiles (some features of this are paywalled but basics like display names and pronouns aren't) and multiple accounts (made easy because you don't need a phone number to sign up- desktop even has an account switcher!). It's not a deal breaker but something to consider around maybe you won't be able to get everyone on Signal.
There's a lot of features that just don't matter and probably shouldn't even be in there. Thankfully they're mostly additive but it feels like there might be a little too much going on in here. Plus there's a weird cryptocurrency thing. No thanks!
Chat management features in general need some tweaks- you can't really sort your active chats, it's just recent at the top. It'd be great to be able to separate contacts and group chats. It's fine but if you add many chats to Signal this could get really complicated quickly!
Signal is focused in on what it is so while this isn't a negative you do need to manage your expectations- it probably can't replace the multi-channel nature of a Discord server. I probably wouldn't post signal group links publicly- instead you'd need something else before going to signal.
But ultimately on the plus side, if you need something you can get people onto quickly, Signal is great. I think it's pretty fun as a chat platform too!