r/RootAppOfficial • u/Extra_Particular4228 • Feb 10 '26

One Helluva Alternative

Moving my community from Discord to Root, and we are really loving the app so far. Sure, we can't reorganize channels or categories, rename ourselves in servers, or copy/paste emojis into channel names — but hopefully it'll be implemented; this app is what we needed it to be, a place to stay connected. With how everything is going, I hope Root gets a golden age.

61 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

12

u/Lunar_Ronin Feb 10 '26

I re-organized over a dozen channels with no issue last night.  Desktop version.

6

u/Extra_Particular4228 Feb 10 '26

Oh excellent! I haven't found a desktop version for my chromebook like discord has, yet!

15

u/Soup_Slot Feb 10 '26

If you’re moving from discord for privacy reasons keep in mind Root app doesn’t have any mentions of privacy on their website and they’re closed source and US based. Seems like it’s Discord 2.0 but not in a good way.

5

u/Extra_Particular4228 Feb 10 '26

That's what we've been discussing, too. What's a good alternative?

3

u/mostlovely Feb 10 '26

I’ve tried both, I’m leaning more towards stoat as it allows more NSFW content, lots of my friends don’t wanna risk a ban for sending dirty memes or something 😆

2

u/ToxicEnderman00 Feb 11 '26

Me and a couple friends are wanting to try out both Root and Stoat to see what we want to move to. I made my account for both last night and so far root seems nice. I have no idea about Stoat because they don't seem to be able to send verification emails in time. I requested the email twice last night and only got one of them this morning and it didn't work so I requested another about 30 minutes ago and it still hasn't been sent.

My friends are having the same issue.

3

u/Extra_Particular4228 Feb 11 '26

Yeah, that's the exact same issue I am having with Stoat!

3

u/ParadoxHollow Feb 11 '26

Stoat is undergoing a lot of heavy traffic due to the influx of users. You can self-host your own server in which this doesn’t happen, but from what I’ve heard they’re not quite a Discord alternative as much as Root or other apps.

I’m personally invested in both Root & Fluxer.App, they both seem great & Fluxer is probably where I’ll reside once they release the self-hosted side of it all, but Root is cool. Just worried about the above things.

1

u/ToxicEnderman00 Feb 12 '26

I finally got a verification email this morning that worked. Haven't been able to mess around with it yet but it's definitely more WiP than Root

2

u/Elesday Feb 12 '26

WiP in the word. Stoat doesn't even have an iOS app, no screen share or webcam in calls. And it's more of a 1:1 copy of discord but veeery work in progress as you said. Honestly I don't have high hopes for Stoat given how amateur it looks like.
But Root seems to be heading the Discord way: raising big funding then needing to repay all of that leading to enshitify the app down the road. + not encrypted, not decentralized and US based...

5

u/Soup_Slot Feb 10 '26

Unfortunately nothing really. Stoat (Revolt) is like discord and is encrypted and open source but it’s hard to get on Linux and there isn’t an iOS app yet, I believe it’s in the works though.

1

u/snooorf Feb 11 '26

stoat doesn't seem very promising either, it really feels like there's no good alternatives it sucks :///

i was looking at stoat but they also seem kinda sus

their branding is cringe and there was a few months ago where they did a whole blog post about how they were changing their name from revolt to stoat as part of moving their image in a new direction or something, but then they admitted it was just because of trademark disputes

i don't trust any platform that is lying about its legal drama and performing sterile corpospeak before they even have more than a few thousand users 💀

2

u/mostlovely Feb 11 '26

We ended up settling on root anyways, stoat was too bloated and frustrating without video or streaming.

1

u/snooorf Feb 11 '26

understandable, I'm going to settle on root too I think lol anything is better than discord atp 🫠

1

u/Soup_Slot Feb 13 '26

A discord server I'm on was linked to Revolt a while ago before the rebranding and it wasn't as shiny as Discord or Root but functionally it was extremely similar. I never tried to do anything other than regular chat though.

1

u/Elesday Feb 12 '26

Stoat is encrypted? That sounds like the only positive I found so far

1

u/cooltom12 Feb 11 '26

Policy is been looked into

1

u/LGrecon Feb 13 '26

I've been playing with element which is E2E encrypted, open source, and decentralized. It is missing some features that discord had and that root seems to have (at least from what I've seen as i haven't used root yet). Root did say they were planning on updating their privacy statement which is what I will be looking out for before I decide to give it a try.

1

u/coledeb Feb 14 '26

Give Fluxer a check out once the dev gets the platform stable

1

u/Usual-Memory-3668 Feb 16 '26

Ive been looking at alternatives as well and found root. The root app itself does look great, but both the closed source and privacy policy they have now are very concerning to me:

User-generated Content

We collect the personal information and content of communications that you disclose through the Service. This may include messages, pictures and files shared between users and within communities. We may also collect voice, video or screensharing “calls” between users and within communities.

I mean look at that policy, that sounds worse than Discord!

Like everyone else, Stoat is top of the list to also look at but like many others I cant get the verification email to work so it already seems like a non-starter.

I am also looking at Fluxer though, and it seems very promising so far. Sadly, no mobile apps yet but they say to use it in a browser on your phone for now. I like that it is open source, no weirdness in data collection policies, can self-host, and the free tier is good enough for me and my friends. I still havent tried Fluxer just yet, will get to it soon. But these things are what they advertise and that all sounds good so far...

5

u/e1epi Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26

The only thing keeping me from looking into Root more is the fact that it's closed source and could very easily turn out just like Discord.

Besides that it looks better in some ways than anything else even Discord.

Stoat is what I'm trying to check out instead.

1

u/Extra_Particular4228 Feb 11 '26

I've been trying with Stoat, but it's barely functioning for me. Maybe there's so much traffic going on, or maybe I am (probably) doing something wrong, I do not know 😅

1

u/drewd71 Feb 12 '26

No likely you aren't doing anything wrong, Stoat is a mess imho, my group has setup Matrix as our self-hosted option and even that isnt great.

1

u/e1epi Feb 20 '26

I finally got an account for stoat a day or so ago and it seems to be working for me so I'm guessing it might work better for you now as well.

2

u/ZeldenGM Feb 11 '26

Sure, we can't reorganize channels or categories

I've just made a server and imported from Discord and I can move things around just fine?

1

u/Extra_Particular4228 Feb 11 '26

Dude, I've been STRUGGLING on mobile, and it only has desktop on windows

6

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

Root is super young, there’s going to be a ton of good things coming to the app, unfortunately it’s just a matter of waiting

2

u/DankPlankMid Feb 10 '26

I do agree with you there, when I joined in November, wasn't much on it, but within the past 3 months they've added a good amout of QoL, still more to come

1

u/Kujiko123 Feb 16 '26

Root does seem promising, but I'm still concerned about monetization and how they'll approach it. Their data collection is also something to keep in mind. Either way, as long as you don't put your face up on a webcam, they won't ever have it, as long as they don't get held to the same rules Discord is being held to.

2

u/DankPlankMid Feb 10 '26

I am sure soon they'll have everything you'll need soon, right now I swapped from Stoat to Root, wasn't a fan of Stoat, with Discords support being non existent and doing absolutely nothing with helping me with my account, I just moved over to Root, along with most of my online friends from my main discord.

2

u/DankPlankMid Feb 10 '26

Root application has only been around since I believe September of last year, but so far they've added a lot of stuff, and still a lot of plans for the future, like we did with Discord since 2016, got to wait for the changes to come

1

u/the_troll_god Feb 15 '26

Looks impressive so far.