2mo ago

Alternative to Discord ?

Hi everyone,

I just had my account deactivated from Discord for ToS violation (I didn't do anything wrong, I just tried to send a friend request), but that's not the most important thing.

Now that I no longer have an account, and I've been wanting to leave Discord for a while for a better, self-hosted, open-source alternative, this is the best time.

I know of Matrix, XMPP servers and applications that work very well, but none of them work in the same way, or have the same feel as Discord. I see more alternatives for professional use than for gamers or communities.

Revolt exists, but last time I checked, you can't really host it yourself, and I haven't read good things about it. (I don't remember the website listing all the negative aspects.)

That brings me to my two questions.

Can you list some alternative to Discord that I probably don't know ?
If you want a alternative to Discord, what are your requirements to using it ? I'm not saying I can or will, but I think I can try to create one.

PS: I already trying to get my account back (but I have the same response from the support and I can't send request to "Appeals & Age Update Requests" because of ToS violation) and even if I manage to get it back I really want to leave discord right now.

20 comments

Look into mumble. It's NOT a discord replacement but does provide a good quality, low latency, OSS voice chat. Mumble + Signal group chat is what my friends and I use for gaming. Seems to work well.
https://www.mumble.info/
Tip: Turn on text-to-speech to get narrated announcements when users join channels. Also works for text chat shenanigans. 🤣
- The "problem" is that most people only want an app that does everything, and I'm sure some of my friend don't want to have two app to do the same thing one app can do.
  I prefer to have two perfect app for one task, but not everyone want this.

Have you looked at spacebar
- If they make this completely federated then it will 100% take off
- The idea Sounds awesome but it doesn't support voicechat yet.

Discord's main killer feature is Discovery of who is currently voice chatting in a room.
I've not seen any alternative platform that has the same level of voice discovery that discord does. Discord makes it easy to have a community, oh I see Bob's online, let's jump in and say hi.
It really is the local bar, you can just walk up and talk to anybody. That is absolutely critical. It's open discovery, it's effortless communication of status.

There isn't one.
You can combine several other services though, such as Matrix for chat, Mumble or Teamspeak for voice, and OBS + BroadcastBox for game streaming.

Matrix, via Element.

i've heard pretty good things about matrix. discord is still ok imo, but i am also trying to move away from it as they feel all your messages into the summaries ai thingy.

I would have said in fact Matrix or XMPP-based solutions but it seems you already have spotted them. Maybe Mattermost?
- I need to give a try, I know by name but never use it.
  I presume you can make call, good audio and screen share ?

Matrix is only a protocol. Take a look at its implementations.
But yeah, none of these are discord.

I swear I must be one of the few that wants nothing that discord offers and would much rather if my core group went back to using vent.

It's closer to Slack, but Rocket Chat is another option.

Not a gamer* but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.
*multiplayer gamer. I do play single player games.

Matrix, XMPP, Signal, Revolt, Nerimity...

Revolt the best alternative
- It isn't really a privacy alternative yet. They are open source and can be audited, they are implementing E2EE for DMs and Chats (Discord has for DMs). If Revolt gets the E2EE right they pass to be an interesting alternative.

There indeed was an alternative called Revolt. Idk if it's still maintained. Though I had quite bad experience with it so can't recommend. Another alternative is Guilded which seems dead in terms of development but it has an active (and very small) user base. I think it can even be self-hosted. But ultimately you need to be ready for changes if you want to leave Discord. There's nothing quite like it, especially in terms of convenience and popularity.
- I’m pretty sure revolt.chat is still going? I am using it.

20 comments