Why Choose Eris When You're Ready to Leave Discord
The chat platforms we rely on every day are built to serve advertisers, not users. We set out to prove there's a better way — one where your community actually belongs to you.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had that moment. Discord updates its privacy policy again. Ads start showing up where they didn’t used to. You realize the community you spent months building could disappear tomorrow if Discord decides it should.
We’ve all been there. And if you’ve started looking for alternatives, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of them. So why Eris?
The core problem
Discord, Slack, Teams, Telegram — they all work the same way under the hood. Everything flows through their servers. Your messages, files, voice calls, your community’s entire history — it all lives on someone else’s computer.
That creates some real problems:
- They can read your messages. Even if they say they won’t, the capability is there. Your data sits on their servers, unencrypted.
- They can shut you down. One policy change or mass report and your server disappears overnight. You have no recourse.
- They control the experience. Pricing changes, feature removals, UI redesigns — you don’t get a vote.
- You’re the product. Free tiers exist because your activity, social graph, and engagement data are worth money to advertisers.
None of this is hidden. It’s just how the business model works.
What Eris does differently
When you run an Eris server, it runs on your hardware (or a VPS you control). Your data doesn’t leave your machine. Nobody else has the keys, so nobody else can take it away.
What that looks like in practice:
- Messages are stored on your server, not ours. Delete something and it’s actually gone.
- Your community can’t be de-platformed. No terms of service changes can touch it.
- You decide how things work. Want to modify capabilities, restrict features, or customize the experience? Go for it.
”I don’t want to run a server”
Fair enough — most people don’t. But you probably don’t have to. In most communities, one person who’s comfortable with this stuff sets up the server and everyone else just joins. Same as Discord, except the admin controls the actual infrastructure instead of renting it from a corporation.
We’re also working on one-click deploy options to make setup as simple as possible.
Encryption by default
Most chat apps treat encryption as a marketing talking point. Eris treats it as the foundation. Every direct message is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves your device. The server you’re connected to can’t read it. We use the same cryptographic protocols that Signal uses.
Your messages get scrambled into unreadable data on your device. Only the recipient can unscramble them. Not us, not the server admin, not anyone.
Portable identity
Something that always bothered us about Discord: your identity belongs to them. Get banned and you lose access to everything — your username, your friends, every server you were part of.
On Eris, your identity is a cryptographic keypair that lives on your device. Think of it as a digital passport that nobody can revoke. Take it to any Eris server and your identity travels with you.
This works because Eris is federated — servers talk to each other. You can be in communities across different servers with the same identity, and DM anyone on the network.
How we stack up
| Discord | Eris | |
|---|---|---|
| Who stores your data | Discord’s servers | Your server |
| Message encryption | Not end-to-end | End-to-end by default |
| Identity | Owned by Discord | Owned by you (keypair) |
| Can you be de-platformed | Yes | No |
| Cross-server communication | No | Yes (federation) |
| Voice/video | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
| Ads | Yes | Never |
We don’t have every feature Discord has — they’ve had a decade and billions of dollars. But the things that matter most (messaging, voice, file sharing, community tools) are here. And the things that should have been there from the start (real encryption, real ownership, real privacy) are what we built first.
Who it’s for
- Friend groups who want an actually private space
- Gaming communities tired of getting burned by moderation policies they have no say in
- Creators and teams who need communication without a corporation watching
- Privacy-minded people who’d rather their conversations not train AI models
- Organizations that need confidential communication
Try it
You can open the web app right now, no download needed. Or grab the desktop or mobile app from our downloads page.
If you’re setting up a server for your group, the self-hosting guide will walk you through it. Takes about 15 minutes.
Questions? Want to talk about making the switch? Reach out on GitHub.
Published February 14, 2025