A Discord alternative with no phone number
Discord wants an email or a phone number, your date of birth, and increasingly a phone check on top before you can talk to anyone. Rift wants a username and a password. Here is what that changes, and the one place it makes your life harder.
What signup asks for
The entire form, both sides.
Rift
- A username.
- A password.
- That's the form.
Discord
- An email address or a phone number.
- Your date of birth.
- Often a phone verification for new accounts.
- ID-based age checks, rolling out in several regions.
Nothing else. No "optional" phone field that turns mandatory the first time you join a busy server. No email to verify before you're allowed to post.
Why we don't want it
It isn't generosity. It's self-interest.
Every phone number and email address a service holds is something it has to protect, hand over when a court asks, and apologize for when it leaks. We would rather not have the problem.
So we don't. Rift never stores your IP address either. A short-lived fingerprint handles abuse and is destroyed within 48 hours. Your DMs are end-to-end encrypted, so we couldn't read them if we were asked to. If someone ever cracked Rift open, they'd walk out with a pile of unreadable gibberish attached to nobody.
That last sentence is the whole security model. There is nothing here worth stealing.
The one thing it costs you
Credit where Discord wins.
No email means no "forgot your password" link. That's the trade, and it's a real one.
When you sign up, Rift hands you a Rift Key: twelve words that recover your account and your encryption keys. Lose your password and the Key gets everything back. Lose the Key too, and optional cross-device authentication can still save you. Lose all three and the account is gone. We can't reset it, because we have nothing to reset it against. That's by design, and we'd rather tell you now than in a support ticket.
Write the twelve words down. Somewhere that isn't a screenshot on the same phone.
What about bots and raids?
The question everyone asks next.
Phone verification is sold as a bot filter. Mostly it filters people. Bots rent numbers in bulk; your friend who doesn't want to hand Discord their number just doesn't join.
Rift limits what brand-new accounts can do until they've been around a while, lets any Shard filter joins by account age, and flips on raid mode on its own when the join rate spikes. Join applications and AutoMod are built in, not a bot you invite and hope stays online. It isn't perfect. Neither is the phone check, and ours doesn't cost you a phone number.
Try it without giving us anything
Username, password, done. If it's not for you, you've lost a couple of minutes and zero personal data.
Discord is a trademark of Discord Inc. Rift is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Discord. Numbers reflect our own testing in June 2026 and will change. If something here is wrong, email [email protected] and we'll fix it. Or just open Rift and check.