Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
Matrix is the way. It’s federated and you can have your own server.
if discord is going public they don’t need my turbo sub anymore
Cancelled mine when they redesigned the mobile app anyway. I don’t want a different interface on mobile vs desktop. I want a unified experience, which was their original purpose.
XMPP?
Mumble?
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I’m very excited!
Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.
The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.
Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.
It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.
I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.
I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different
it’s Element/Matrix if we’re lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won’t be a “platform” you have to leave when it goes corporate.
Revolt is F/OSS
https://github.com/revoltchat/
It’s not just a company with a clone of Discord, all the server back end, etc is open.
Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:
- Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
- Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it’ll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.
Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.
My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.
That said I’ve had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.
I get why Federation can cause issues (most of the time it’s moderation related), but why would an extra option be a deal-breaker? Federation can always be disabled on a per-domain basis if you prefer. In fact, I’d argue it’s best practice to only allow domains on a case-by-case basis to prevent spam and abuse.
On the converse, you can’t enable Federation on a platform that doesn’t have it.
They were talking about matrix itself, not a specific option. And I’m not going to lie, having to hand hold your servers federation choices seems like a hassle. At that point why not just use a self hosted, non federated option?
Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.
but also with request ratelimiting
That doesn’t really change that it’s one company hosting it. Unless you’re willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren’t willing to join each others instances?
I guess the easy solution here to to make it use oauth2 authentication. Then you can just authenticate using one account elsewhere. If fediverse services also at some point become oauth2 providers, then even better.
That’s still not a solution. That entails non unified communication, access, and search. Making it easy to log in to others still doesn’t solve easy sharing between others. Also oauth2 is a pain to set up, and many people hosting their own instance aren’t going to bother.
Sorry but what exactly do you communicate and access between discord servers? Are you talking about PMs which are by default independent of servers?
Unified search could easily be achieved through third party tools at the least, like for IRC. I don’t think even discord has unified search between servers.
Oh hey, you’re totally right, that’s crazy. I use Beeper (hosted matrix setup) to aggregate my chats and I guess I’ve always been using that to search across all servers without realizing. Fully thought the DM search would also search across servers.
DMs are definitely also another case though - you can’t easily DM people on another server if that requires you to log into another server.
That’s true about DM, however DMs are not a core use-case for discord-like services. It’s the group/voice chats etc. I could see a workaround like lemmy does, where if you want to DM a user in another server, you might be able to do it through your fediverse instance (i.e. a DM simply has your fediverse instance DM their fediverse instance), but I’m sure there can be more elegant things like. However DMs by themselves are a weird thing by themselves, so much so, that even bluesky had to bolt DMs on-top and outside of their protocol.
…theoretically for now
It a centralized server controlled by the devs
Host your own then
Nheko provides an interface that is reminiscent of Discord. Fully featured and fast Matrix client.
Thank you for the recommendation. I tried element a while ago and found it lacking. Matrix must be the way forward. Disregarding IRC of course.
deleted by creator
Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
I guess that’s the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.
Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.
Honestly, I am ready to go straight back to TeamSpeak.
I miss hosting my own server and having full access and control over it
I used to just host it on a piece of shit. 2003 Dell XP machine I put Ubuntu on
There is also Mumble. TS3 era voip and text chat features, but it’s FOSS.
It was so featureless back when I last used it. I don’t remember it having half the features ts3 had in 14
Oh, it’s basic af. But it did what it needed to do, and still does, for some.
I havent used it in ages, I have no clue what sort of stuff continued development has enabled. If anything.
My friend group went first from Skype to the massively better TS3, and finally to Mumble. I don’t remember really missing anything.
If they add federation I’m sold. Honestly it would be nice if it integrated with Activity Pub
It’s not that kind of application. Federation would be massive overkill for a project like Mumble.
It’s a voip server and client for video gaming, with a couple adjacent features sprinkled in.
It doesn’t even really have accounts, and adding servers is just matter of configuring their IPs. What would you even use federation for?
Hell yah, TS3 crew all the way. (Or TS5 for the zoomers…)
My nerds herd recently also set up a cluster of Matrix Synapse servers so we got our little “We have Telegram at home” set up. Getting non-tech people to accept that this is how to find me has been tricky without sounding like a digital prepper.
: ( i was too dumb to follow the playbook correctly
i wanna have a matrix sever!
but I’ll use snikket for now until i skill up
If you try to do calculus and don’t have the understanding of the underlying math then you won’t have a good time when ansible breaks. I’d advise it’s normally better to learn how to manually install and manage software from the command line.
We believe in you, there are other write-ups and guides on how to get it working. Its was great learning expirence for VMs and Proxmox (thats what I did and it did make it harder, but I feel more confident when im cosplaying as a sys-admin)
This one is pretty close to whats needed, but go into it expecting each step to open a new tool/application that needs to be researched before you press enter. Also look up how to set it to a PSQL db before you start inviting users, it defaults to SQLite and that will cause problems eventually.
Why would you down-grade from Snikket to Matrix?
If you want to skill up a bit add a Slidge.im gateway to your Snikket xmpp server to access Matrix (and Discord etc.) from there.
that is actually what I’ve been thinking. xmpp with encryption seems good enough for me! plus I’ve heard some stuff isn’t encrypted in matrix, (metadata? emojis? not exactly sure)
i am heavily leaning towards scaling up to snikkets big brother, prosody.
The currently common older implementation of e2ee in xmpp has the same issue with only the message body being encrypted. There are newer specs of OMEMO that have better metadata protection, but its adoption in xmpp clients has been very slow.
Prosody is more of a sandbox, with Snikket being a preconfigured version of it, but yes running Slidge will be a bit easier with a normal Prosody server.
TS 6 looks so good. I can’t seem to figure out it’s release window though. Along with the mobile app being updated. Once those are done I plan to move over.
I used to have a free lifetime server from someone that was giving them away, but he shut down after a few years.
Did he die?
Maybe it was based on the “lifetime” of their hamster 🤷
Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.
Time to dust off my old Mumble server!
TeamSpeak exists too
That’s a throwback. Let’s take it one step further and just get back on Ventrilo and play some DOTA. (For the younger folks who don’t get the reference: https://youtu.be/aTJncWndUB8 )
I am certainly not one of the younger folks and had never seen that before. That is awesome, thank you for sharing.
Oh man, Basshunter was huge in the chronically-online gamer space in the 2000s. His other songs are pretty good too.
To put it in perspective, the fact that they’re gaming on laptops and LCD monitors was an enviable flex when his songs released.
Used to use Vent playing Eve Online 19 years ago. Worked great back then. Apparently it’s still around, but still no Linux support after all these years.
Mumble!
Tmspk egssts tuh
If you just need voice comms and basic chat mumble/murmur has worked great for me for ages.
Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.
Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?
In addition to the replies you got already, discord has screen sharing/streaming. An experience kind of like zoom (I don’t use it and dont see the appeal but maybe someone who does can elaborate more. My partner uses this feature sometimes).
I commonly will be in a call with friends, where we all stream the games we are playing independently to each other.
Another use case, one person screen shares YouTube for group watching
And one more, we will often play chess and screen share so others can watch.
This is for a group of 3-10 people typically
A group of friends use this every weekend to play party games (Like jackbox games). One person streams and everyone uses a browser to interact.
If I want to show a friend a new game, I use it as well.
Discord is not even necessarily Electron. I’m running it as Datcord, which is a Firefox based wrapper.
Discord has a searchble chat history, which is what sets it apart from IRC. Everything else can be emulated by modern IRC clients, such as emoji and embedded / unfurling images and link previews.
However imagine the chat history as if you had a bouncer that has 100% uptime and joined all possible chat channels from their creation, along with offering you search and buffer.
If not IRC, either Matrix or XMPP should be capable of this.
I’m fairly sure Discord’s popularity was due to aggressive marketing, likely during their venture capital funding rounds. Something which FOSS does not have.
Does IRC have performant voicechat?
That would be the WebRTC logic.
One of the major draws of discord is the fact that they host the servers for you, for free. Anyone can make an account, click a button, and have a discord server.
Afaik matrix does allow this (haven’t used it personally) but it’s something where I am a bit worried about hosting costs if it reaches a large scale. (Also unsure about how the matrix protocol works precisely, but if defederation is a thing which I feel like it has to be, I can see it leading to huge pains since discords use case is often about being part of a specific communitu, as opposed to twitter or reddit. Being unable to join a groip or see some messsges because of federation issues would be a major headache).
The main benefit I remember from jumping to Discord from IRC back in the day was the ability to easily see past messages. That said, I’m not sure if that’s a problem anymore on IRC since I haven’t used it in ages. Even then, I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to whip up a self-hostable fediverse competitor to Discord. It would essentially be IRC++.
It’s probably more of a critical mass issue, though not near the level of Reddit vs Lemmy or Twitter vs Bluesky vs Mastodon. Every Discord server is essentially a walled garden. A Discord server doesn’t hold much advantage over a Slack server, GroupMe, Teams, or IRC. For that reason, it would be a lot easier to move individual communities over.
An alternative would need screen share, just voip is not enough any more.
The problem is that performant screenshare (to multiple users) more or less requires infrastructure. That requires money, and it’s impossible to compete on price with services that have the VC-enshitification model.
You can get around this in a few ways, but they’re all tradeoffs that are in some way or other worse than discord.
- P2P - sacrifice latency, reliability
- direct multi-stream - sacrifice PC performance and/or bitrate
- paid infrastructure - sacrifice money
I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s simpler and by it’s very nature doesn’t require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.
Plus, don’t forget screen sharing in discord isn’t very good as is (720p30) if you’re not a paid user.
TeamSpeak recently added screen share to their TS6 beta, however it currently only works on official servers provided by TeamSpeak; they have not yet released TS6 server software, only the client. To my understanding, they are thankfully still planning on releasing it though.
What if you had OBS create a “camera” of your screen, and then use that through video chat?
Ah, the good old “screenshare not working on wayland” workaround!
Most of the discords I’m on never use screen share for anything.
All the ones I’m on, around 30, it’s the only thing it’s used for.
honestly that isnthe only thing that stopd me from going all in on teamspeak/mumble
i just need a screen sharing solution (not necessarily built into those tools)
I’m running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I’ve set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.
Did you follow a guide, or know one you could link? I’m thinking this is the path for me and my friends too.
I can try to write some stuff up, it’s not super complex. Core requirement for my setup is Docker + a domain. I recommend Linux host but you can make Docker Desktop work.
Let me write some stuff down this week.
Are you saying you can import chat history with a bridge some how? I don’t remember that being an issue, but would be very handy
I’m messaging Facebook users over Matrix via the bridge.
This sounds great. If you end up writing something for the other commenter using a Linux server and the Messenger bridge I would love to hear if there were any pitfalls to avoid!
