TBH, I hate and have always hated Discord. I'm a tech nerd and it's way too complex for me. Teamspeak worked fine for me... simple channels, voice or text chat if you want. That's all I need in an app like that. Teamspeak seems to still be around.
Matrix/element is the best bet atm. Had a solid 40m users compared to Discord's 140m at some point, which is good proof they can scale up compared to other. Hardest part is convincing your groups to switch from Discord. But you can bridge the two in Matrix and talk between them which might help ease the transition.
Teamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.
A very large number of people are not interested in any chat that does not have 1) brainless installation and use and 2) mobile apps for iOS and android. Matrix is simply a non-starter for ease of use.
Discord is handling some different tasks, One it is used for overlay voicechat by gamers, both one on one and group chats. Second it is used as an instant messenger which is really pared to the voicechat aspect. Third it's used as a type of forum. It seems those two types of uses may need different solutions. I've read some concerns about Discord's weakness as a type of forum and customer support platform for some software and projects.
I'm enjoying Chatto, https://chatto.run/, which is due to launch soon ish. Open source, self hosting, cloud hosted option, etc. Architecture looks pretty cool.
> Signal is the E2EE chat app and protocol. It's FOSS software, and can be self-hosted (though with much difficulty)
I can not emphasise this point enough: it is difficult and unsupported to a degree that Signal can not be considered self-hostable to any remotely useful degree.
I think I will try to push at least my more techy friends to a combination of Matrix and Teamspeak (because honestly the Matrix implementation of anything VC/Screenshare/Video is pure ass. A group call on Element right now starts a Jitsi conference. Can we be for real). On CachyOS with Wayland I additionally apparently need OBS with WebRTC for streaming because audio streaming support for Wayland seems to be some sort of circle of hell.
Matrix is kinda jank but I hope Discord enshittification will speed up client development a bit. I am just really fond of the concept of federated servers and self-owned chat history. Prevents hostage holding of chats in the future. For people who don't want to switch I will run a Discord Bridge for now but I do hope to get my main contacts off this software honestly.
For me anything that visibly looks like Discord is a non-starter because I want a product with an actual vision, not someone trying to slopcode an exact replacement of the Discord UI. Imagine if Discord just looked like Skype did in 2008. Yuck. The Matrix protocol, for all its faults, at least has some form of vision.
You might be using old clients that are recommended against, as (AIUI) Jitsi stopped being the default with Matrix 2.0 (released ~late 2024 [0]).
Is it totally fair to blame users? Not entirely, as some features are still being pushed into ElementX. But it's a known problem, with a known solution (finish ElementX and/or wait for other clients to catch up), and a weakness of an open ecosystem.
Moxie wasn't wrong when he said that open ecosystems have to move slower, but I believe it's worth it in the long-run.
Was having latency issues with Discord (1+ seconds) with people in adjacent rooms (which created a bit of an echo effect). Tried out self hosted mumble and it's been working pretty well. The older Fedora package refused to acknowledge certificates existed (despite generating them with correct permissions) but the Docker container worked fine out of the box.
I think Fluxer just became a more likely candidate. Its maintainer just committed to removing its CLA[1] once the rewrite's done.
It also has screen sharing[2], which Stoat doesn't have yet[3], though it doesn't support casting audio yet. Also, the mobile app implementation can't arrive soon enough!
I’m working on Prose, a lightweight XMPP team messaging app that can work as a Discord replacement. There’s no calls for the moment and OMEMO support is on the works but everything else is working great and pretty mature.
Lightweight macOS app / Windows running with Tauri are available and they feel native. But it’s also a Web app that can run on any domain.
The main issue for me is lack of bots. I'm running tournaments on Discord, and matchmaking bot. Not to mention automatic moderation tools.
As of now, I can't see myself getting off Discord. I hope to see plausible alternative for Discord though.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 41.5 ms ] threadTeamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.
otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
- Android: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-android
- iOS: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios
I can not emphasise this point enough: it is difficult and unsupported to a degree that Signal can not be considered self-hostable to any remotely useful degree.
It should be in the non-starter category.
They do have chat-channel features now. I've had a look. Meh.
Matrix is kinda jank but I hope Discord enshittification will speed up client development a bit. I am just really fond of the concept of federated servers and self-owned chat history. Prevents hostage holding of chats in the future. For people who don't want to switch I will run a Discord Bridge for now but I do hope to get my main contacts off this software honestly.
For me anything that visibly looks like Discord is a non-starter because I want a product with an actual vision, not someone trying to slopcode an exact replacement of the Discord UI. Imagine if Discord just looked like Skype did in 2008. Yuck. The Matrix protocol, for all its faults, at least has some form of vision.
Is it totally fair to blame users? Not entirely, as some features are still being pushed into ElementX. But it's a known problem, with a known solution (finish ElementX and/or wait for other clients to catch up), and a weakness of an open ecosystem.
Moxie wasn't wrong when he said that open ecosystems have to move slower, but I believe it's worth it in the long-run.
[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...
If you want slack - mattermost is pretty great
Nothing else I’ve run across is production quality that isn’t proprietary.
It also has screen sharing[2], which Stoat doesn't have yet[3], though it doesn't support casting audio yet. Also, the mobile app implementation can't arrive soon enough!
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/FluxerApp/comments/1r8724q/comment/... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1r6muvz/comment/... [3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/stoatchat/comments/1r7tdg4/answerin...
Lightweight macOS app / Windows running with Tauri are available and they feel native. But it’s also a Web app that can run on any domain.
Available at prose.org and https://github.com/prose-im/prose-app-web