Given recent news, a lot of folks have been discussing Discord alternatives, and I don’t know much about any of them, so I’m interested in hearing more opinions. Are there any alternatives for chatrooms or instant messaging that you’ve tried? Any red flags, green flags, words to the wise, etc.?
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i’ve been following a similar thread on melonland and the alternatives that have been sticking out to me are matrix & stoat (formerly revolt) on a pure “get it running with minimal hassle” level of judgement.
in stoat its very intuitive to create a server when compared to how it is in discord, channel management and aesthetics are largely the same. with server icons and banners, and re-ordering your channels is a simple click and drag. however i think that theres a limit to how many people can be in a vc at once and theres no functional screenshare yet.
in matrix setting up the space doesn’t have the same 1:1 feel of discord from a server creation standpoint but you can create channels (rooms in matrix) in servers (spaces in matrix) just fine once you get used to the fact you have to click on the server icon every time you want to do it. in my small amount of exploration i was able to find how to do individual channel permissions but not how to create groups for channels within a server. it also does have functional screenshare, which i know to my fellow artists is very important both on a vibes and actual study-group level.
matrix also has multiple available clients made by the community meanwhile stoat only has the official ones.
this is coming from someone whos only been poking around since yesterday though, so i’m sure someone out there can give more in-depth commentary on this
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I’ve been having a lot of conversations about this the last couple days! Messaging apps and the ways they can be improved has always been an interest of mine so I’ve been keeping tabs on the space for awhile, and wrote up my ideas on the current state of alternatives here: Garden | The Paper Pilot
To briefly summarize, I think stoat is the one to go to if you need to now, but I don’t think the mass exodus is going to happen now. There isn’t a great option to pick, and I think most people who take issue with age verification will just not do it, and not really be that impacted. But there’s several projects in progress I think have a lot of potential, and will make great targets for a mass exodus when discord inevitably fucks up even bigger. Also I explain why I think a mass exodus will be quite effective when it does happen.
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Interestingly enough I’ve been recommending people Discourse for the more forum leaning community-type stuff… cause past a certain user-count, I feel like Discord-likes that try to give a forum experience in an instant messaging “shape”, kinda give me the same ick and performance stress as Social Media. With all the same attention-vortex feelings.
I’m hoping Signal or even Line Messenger or something like them gains usage on the DM side of things.
Long-while Discord was still popular and the social expectation, I felt that I liked my forums where my forums go and my DMs where my DMs go… separated. I hope in the fracturing/diaspora these Discord policy changes will cause… that maybe some folk feel the same.
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I use Matrix, XMPP and IRC. Matrix tries to imitate the Discord experience, with limited success; XMPP is an old-school messenger, while IRC is the original chat experience. It won’t be the same no matter which one you pick. You should probably try them: all are open, self-hosted platforms with servers run by volunteers. What matters to me is that Matrix and XMPP are federated (you can talk to anyone from anywhere), while IRC servers can form wider networks.
IRC also doesn’t require login; you can get an account if you like, but otherwise you can simply jump in and chat. Oh, and all three have a wide variety of native clients available on most operating systems.
Word of warning: all these alternatives have known technical issues plaguing some people. Mostly, they’re just not as slick and convenient as Discord. But they’re important.
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TBH, the only reason I even know about Line Messenger was that Square-Enix had some kind of FFXIV-related promotion going with them.
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Any alternatives being put forward need to be FOSS. Otherwise you’re just kicking the can down the road and will have to go through this again in another short while when either VC or legal restrictions kick in for whichever service is switched to.
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For now I’ve been trying Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Cinny (Matrix), the first one feels to still need a bit more cooking yet it has all the basics like VC/group VC and Matrix is overly complex for your regular user.
I have a bit of faith in Stoat, but it still needs a lot of development and even though you can selfhost, they haven’t federation or server interconnection in mind. So why would you even selfhost to begin?
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When it comes to the larger groups, I’m right there with you. More Discord servers should be forums.
With that said, I’ve also been using Discord for a long time as an instant messaging program for one-on-one chats with internet friends, so that’s why I’m looking into more similar alternatives as well.
Can you say more about that?
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Matrix has infamous issues with syncing rooms and decrypting messages; XMPP suffers from feature fragmentation. Both have poor moderation tools, reportedly. As for IRC, like someone pointed out recently, it doesn’t even support posting images directly into a channel. I use all three despite these issues, and they’re being worked on, but a lot of people have expectations, and progress has been slow.
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I quite like XMPP despite it flaws. I run my own XMPP server (related blog post) and it’s really low-maintenance and lightweight on the VPS I’m hosting it on (Currently sitting at 30MB RAM usage). It’s a bit like IRC on steroids I guess, it has integrated HTTP file uploads, profile pictures and ability to receive messages while you’re offline. And federated, of course. I used to run my own IRC bouncer but shut it down a while back ago after realising I never actually connect to it anymore.
I’ve generally only been using XMPP for 1-on-1 conversations and smaller groups though, I have not tried running a larger kind of MUC/group chat. I am unsure how well it would fare when scaling up to a community the size of a typical Discord server. Stoat would probably be better in that regard for a community to self-host for their own needs.
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I’ve set up a Matrix space as a possible refuge for a Discord community should they want to make the switch at the start of this year, and it looks like my timing was pretty good! 
I like how non-hierarchical Matrix spaces are, so you can group rooms however you like. Two communities can share rooms, people can just put together their own personal spaces just as they want. That means that you can’t set things for a whole space though because the rooms don’t “belong” to that space. So, every time a mod for a whole space joins or leaves the team, you’ll be going through eeeevery room in that space to change their user level…
But apart from that, I would recommend Matrix for a Discord-like experience and structure. Just take care when choosing your first homeserver, check out lists and guides like https://joinmatrix.org instead of beelining to your :matrix.org account just to suffer the loading times and wonder if the protocol itself is bad. It still has some rough edges, though. I spent a bit of time with some helpful people trying to sort rooms in a certain order. 
Personally, I prefer XMPP these days, but the great thing is you can use Matrix-XMPP bridges without having to fear someone’s going to ban your account for ToS violations or something.
We also tested Stoat for a bit. Didn’t really get into detail, but it seemed very unfinished.
Some questions you might want to ask:
- Do you (really) want to copy Discord?
- Do you need voice / videochat built-in?
- How much do you need moderation tools?
- What priority has performance and resource usage to you?
- How big do you want your community to be?
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for me whats going to be hard to replace is the screenshare feature. as an artist having the option to show what im working on at any time was a game changer both on a client-work and community building level, and most alternatives are (understandably) focused more on text based communication.
wondering if i should get my friends used to using some external tool when we need to run workshops or art study sessions. it’s doable it just SUCKS 
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Okay, in the end I found Fluxer yesterday. It’s pretty much an open source clone of Discord, with selfhosting + federation in the roadmap and its main instance hosted on Europe. It’s being a bit troublesome because of the sudden influx of people put what I’ve seen is pretty cool!
(And it has screen sharing too)
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Would not trust that as far as I could throw it to be honest… Seems to be solely run and developed by a 22 year old whose prior training was a Discord bug hunter and a moderator on a Minecraft server.
Repo has 92 commits. The last of which was titled “Very large guild feature”. The first commit was on 1st Jan this year.
Smells like vibe coding.
Not gonna lie, I thought the same; but apparently it has been developed for 3 years prior to this? Let’s see how it develops, I hate this date and time where you can’t trust anything. :/
So he’s been developing it in private for 3 years, by himself, with zero training or experience. None of this is selling it to me…
I’ve been looking into XMPP with my spouse; it seems reasonable for smaller friend groups, at least. Snikket has an interesting implementation with “circles” so you can self-host and replicate discord “servers” for different friend groups (which can overlap).
But I really miss IRC. It definitely has many fewer features so isn’t remotely a full replacement for how some people use Discord, but I think the lack of history is actually a benefit in some situations. I might write a blog post about why, if I can get my website working again any time soon…
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I still think IRC with the Discord bridge so those who don’t care or use discord for boobs can continue as normal.
Discord for boobs is wild 
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