Discord Alternatives, Ranked
taggart-tech.com558 points by pseudalopex a day ago
558 points by pseudalopex a day ago
I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives.
Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.
Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.
Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.
Ditto on Mattermost.
Discourse is a forum.
Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.
>Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people
Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls
They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.
Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
Going back to something you said earlier:
> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.
I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers
By definition it should obvious the million-user server is a popular feature since it has a million user.
Any multiplayer game that doesn't have an integrated matchmaking have _big_ discord servers. Basically most paradox games, civ5 and civ6, probably others. All the organising that used to happen on forums now happens on discord servers
Agreed 100%, can confirm same here. All true.
Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.
This may be a good time to consider whether one program should really be handling all those things, or if it's putting too many eggs in one basket and asking too much of any one program. Discord seems comparable to a Chinese superapp, made to trap its users and become an irreplaceable part of their everyday lives. I think I understand it's hard to give up some of these features once you're used to them, but it seems worth doing. Personally I use a mix of IRC, XMPP, and Matrix, mostly IRC (internet people) and Matrix (IRL friends/family), though. I believe XMPP and Matrix both have some sort of voice or video chat support across some clients and servers, but if someone were to try to call me through them, it would seem "weird" to say the least. I usually get people on Mumble if we're gonna play a game and want a voice chat going. It's rock-solid, everyone I play games with seems fine with it. When we're done voice chatting, we close Mumble, a bit like hanging up a phone call.
As for video calls and screen sharing, not something that's been super normalized in my circle. Some of us stream to Twitch with OBS, but it's rare to say "hey come watch my computer screen for an hour in a 1-on-1 call". There is just one guy who seems like a heavy Discord user who seemed to want to do this sometimes. I showed him Jitsi to placate him, we can both join a session in a browser without accounts and I can see his screen. I wasn't a big fan of that, though, I'd rather just not let that be normalized, personally. A screenshot, video clip, describing it to me, letting it go, any of that seems better than being trapped in a screensharing/video call of uncertain length.
The benefit of one big app is a consistent identity. Seeing that an account was created years ago, and how long it's been a member of the current server, helps identify spam and scams. When a user you're familiar with provides a link to another Discord server, its more trustworthy.
Discord has also done a good job protecting identity; better than DNS has :) I use lots of other apps with "real" identity, Discord is good for centralizing non-work, non-family activity.
The private servers I'm in always have a few people screen sharing whenever a voice chat is active. They're either sharing their gameplay (semi-privately, hence no Twitch) or they're co-watching movies. Oh and every so often, screen sharing is used for getting someone's opinion on image editing or a song in they're making. I've also given people remote tech support which is way easier to do when their screen is visible.
But it's worth noting that as an older Gen Z, this is just how people hang out nowadays, so we'll be watching anime together in the server until we fall asleep or whatever. That's why screen sharing isn't as useful as screenshots and video clips.
The particular problem with most of humanity is we value convenience over just about everything else.
Superapps are just going to just keep winning because of this.
You can use as many different apps for yourself but good luck sustaining a community/team/org that requires learning 5 apps for participation, especially when not all users are savvy.
In order to sustain an ecosystem instead of mega-app, that ecosystem needs to be really smoothly integrated, and I know of no good examples of this
This a good point that I hadn't considered. At least in my experience, DMs are a useful but secondary feature that mostly are useful because it's not uncommon to make connections with people from interacting in the servers themselves. I had been mentally modeling Discord as a chat app, but in a lot of ways it feels more accurate to think of it almost like Facebook with just groups and DMs, only the groups are realtime chat. Over that years I've heard various people talk about using only groups and maybe events as the last things they still used Facebook for, and I deactivated my account years ago but still use Messenger because of the years of contacts I had already built up on it (and the fact that it still is possible to use with a deactivated Facebook account), which provides at least some anecdotal evidence that Discord is basically providing the stickiest features of Facebook.
They discussed community and moderation features. The functionality and safety scores considered them.
Many groups use Discord as a Slack alternative or forum.
Discord's single sign on is convenient. But the list's point was any central platform is a risk.
All the people I know who joined big servers, have nitro and do it for their emotes. My impression of really big servers is that they also skew really, really young.
That said, I agree that not having to create a new account is a huge barrier of entry removed. A lot of the servers I’m in would probably not be a thing, or at least be even smaller, if everyone had to create an account to join.
Nothing open source and self hostable will be a "platform" then. Being dependent on a central platform/identity server is the way they control you and increase the friction of leaving.
I think the client side could still be a "platform" like pidgin, allowing login and simultaneous participatiin in multiple servers, without needing to be fully centralized.
What disappoints me about this list is the lack of consideration for video calls and screenshare.
Everyone talking about this seems to completely forget WHY everyone's using Discord: It's fun.
Discord has animated (custom) emoji, loops videos properly, silly bots, and fantastic voice chat with screen/game streaming to a HUGE amount of simultaneous users. The end user can pick and choose who they want to watch on-the-fly while remaining in the same voice channel.
The entire concept of a business using Discord for anything other than customer engagement is completely orthogonal to the very basis of the platform. It was built for gamers! It caters to GAMERS.
Repeat after me: DISCORD IS FOR GAMERS! People who want to have fun playing games with their friends. Any other use of Discord is secondary.
If you want to replace Discord with an alternative you must target gamers. What do gamers want? They want to have fun! They want a frictionless voice chat and super easy screen streaming. They want silly emoji and looping gifs in chat.
They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!
I swear, more teenagers (and younger) will scam the age verification system to see adult content than actual adults using Discord. Because the adults aren't there to see "adult content".
This is an interesting angle, actually. For me, IRC is the most fun out of the big three (free software chat protocols) of IRC, XMPP, Matrix. The variety of bots and their commands (I never see bots on XMPP or Matrix, kinda odd), being able to post shell command output into my chat window easily (e.g. `/exec -o figlet meme`), the culture around stuff like slapping people with a fish, pasting popular ascii stuff like the shrugging guy or the denko face. I don't really have anything like that stuff on the other platforms. They seem a bit sterile by comparison now that I think about it. I wonder how much is technical and how much is cultural. It's probably way easier to write an IRC bot than bots for the others.
They dont just not care that it's centralized, that's the only option they would ever entertain. A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization.
>A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization.
no, people hate friction.
it just so happens that most/all decentralized things have more friction than centralized ones.
99% of people do not give 1 shit in either direction of centralized vs. decentralized. they just want an app that is easy and "just works".
True, but I haven't found any good decentralized options for almost anything that don't have enough friction to scare the average user away. I'm talking about decentralized options that are actually decentralized, not "potentially decentralized in theory but no one uses them in a decentralized way".
I do see a future where we crack the code to a smooth flow that does allow for decentralized networks, but it does suck for most people currently.
Email is decentralized is it not? It's pretty frictionless to create a new email address with whichever provider. You can have as many as you want. Some are free, others you pay for. You can even run your own email server (if you want to deal with the pain that entails).
I think we're so used to email we forget how well it works.
People don't hate decentralization itself, they hate the poor UX (and sometimes lack of features) that decentralization usually entails.
/slap was perfectly enough fun for me without sacrificing the freedom of my peers and myself.
I use Discord all day and it's not for gaming. It's to involve myself in specific communities. And I'm not looking to migrate to a platform that caters specifically to gamers, because it will eventually make the same anti-user tradeoffs that Discord has made over the years, as ad money and payment processors and stakeholders continue to boil the frog.
This sudden news is very unwelcome. Unless something changes, I will begin the process of leaving each server, making whatever off-channel connections I need, then deleting my account, and either choosing or developing an alternative which suits my needs.
> They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!
Yes, and that's the problem. Manufactured consent cannot be used as a justification for further manufactured consent.
Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use. Presumably you're already using Signal and getting mainstream contacts to start using it too. You probably have a basic profile that at least includes your real name, and might also have your picture. Maybe you're even one of the 7 people in the world that use the Stories feature in it. Well good news, now all of that is also unconditionally available to anyone in any group you ever join, including any future changes you ever make to that info, unrevocably forever into the future.
Signal has a fun dark pattern where it unrevocably grants permissions for anyone you allow to contact you to see everything in your profile for the rest of time. It has only a single trust level with contacts effectively: full trust. This is unacceptable in any tool you use for online community, unless you exclusively use it for online community and can decline to provide any info in this full-trust level. Unfortunately Signal also makes very sure you can't have a second account, by tying your account to a phone number, and only allowing one Signal instance per mobile device.
Is Signal good? Yes, but only exclusively for communication with people you already trust.
EDIT: typos
I dislike Signal as I need to identify myself through info that is protected. Like a phone number for example.
Not a privacy app in my opinion. Sure, might be good for some use cases... but overall there are better solutions.
Completely not my experience:
I have lots of Signal contacts I cannot phone, since the phone number is never shared by default. Not even the signal contact is shareable. It is way too privacy focused to work easily.
i.e. I cannot even match two people I have in contacts unless one of them sends me their hidden username. Then they can talk to one another.
And people in my contacts don't use their full name. In groups, they often share the first name, making it confusing as hell. And many use an arbitrary nickname, most often the abbreviated first name I think but sometimes truly random stuff, and might even change that yearly with no mapping in my history to tell me who they were.
Keep an eye on Whitenoise. It's basically taken the technology behind Signal and placed it atop Nostr, so rather than signing up with a phone number, you do it with an npub (pubkey). Still in very early days so the features aren't all there yet, and battery use could be better, but they've got the basics of it working already.
Why the downvotes? A messaging app that requires a personally identifiable token is inherently not good for privacy…
The part about stories is not true. When sending a story you can choose who to send it to. To make it easier you can even put people in groups
How could Signal be considered privacy-conscious ? The first thing they do is ask for your phone number.
Signal has profiles nowadays that can be used to connect with people without sharing phone numbers. The latter are only used for signup and discarded immediately after.
I don't know how Signal works and I never used it, but could I signup with a phone number and keep using it with another number, on the same phone?
Yes. The phone number is just for activation, once activated, you can swap the SIM and carry on. Or have the SIM that receives the activation text in another phone, or be virtual, or whatever.
I doubt they are discarded when push notifications exist
push notifications are not related to phone number, but rather to a randomly generated token in app.
WhatsApp sends a copy of all your messages to ICE. Signal doesn't.
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-spy-...
Millennials and older generations witnessed this happening bit by bit, some of us tried to fight it, but ultimately it’s everywhere now, and apparently it’s been so ubiquitous for so long that people aren’t even aware of it anymore.
I am the person who asked for the source.
1) I do not believe for a second that Meta would actually implement something that would remove their own ability to read those messages.
2) We do not have any proof that their claimed e2e chat service is actually compromised.
The matter of fact tone of the parent made me think there was some actual proof or at least something more than speculation. That's why I asked for a source.
I am not sure I understand what you’re saying.
If meta can read those messages, then they’re most definitely not e2e encrypted.
Given the historical record, you would be a fool to assume that any service run by a public company isn’t fully tapped by US intelligence agencies. They’ve been tapping anything and everything they can get their hands on, why stop at whatsapp?
Let me flip it around: what proof do you actually have that it is e2e encrypted? Zuckerberg pinky promised?
You didn't actually flip it around at all.
They're stating they doubt Meta would ever allow full e2ee, which is not evidence but simply speculation.
AND
They asked for a source/evidence to prove their hunch is more than speculative.
What standard of proof is required here? It’s not criminal court.
The original post I replied to simply asked for proof, without also stating they doubt meta would ever allow e2ee.
My post is more directed at other readers who might take the absence of a smoking gun as an assumption of safety.
whatsapp is facebook; do you need any other "source"?
i'd be surprised if they didn't have straight out government logins...
Of course I need another source. I think you're right too but this is just speculation. I thought you had access to some actual information.
They're getting sued for it.
> They’re getting sued for it
If this is the case you’re referring to, then I don’t know that it is proof of your assertion, in fact maybe the opposite: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/31/us-author...
Anyone can sue anyone for anything. I have no doubt the US government has access to whatever data it wants from all businesses, but a lawsuit is not evidence of anything.
Because they have an huge PR campaign and a lot of money to invest in keeping their place.
You can have multiple instances of signal on a mobile device, and you can use VoiP or eSIMs to register. Signal with an online persona revealing no identifying information, registered to a cash purchased eSIM on an ungoogled android is as good as your getting. Why do you think so many jurisdictions are trying to ban both GrapheneOS and Signal.
In europe you need identification to buy a sim or esim.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9ziqfi/european_cou...
To be clear, your linked map shows that it is not a blanket "in europe". Around 20 European countries don't need an ID to get a SIM card and 30 do.
For those learning about political nuance against the backdrop of current propaganda, it is worth noting that the UK and Ireland do not require registration and that the populous are significantly politically opposed to it; and then Russia requires registration and has one of the most linked up registrations.
Which is very backwards/nannystateish, same nonsense in AU. Thankfully anyone can buy one anonymously in the US and just use that even if it's more expensive.
Didn't know that the UK, the Netherlands, or Portugal aren't part of Europe...
Also, you can buy phone numbers with monero for 0.08$ https://smspool.net.
And what happens when the next guy buys that same number and registers on Signal?
Phone numbers are recurring costs. And to keep a truly private one you must keep paying without ever disclosing personal info and that is really hard. Signal is a privacy nightmare for long term use.
There is a week long registration lock protected by a PIN. Your contact list is protected by that PIN as well. They cannot access your chats. All your contacts will get a notification that the contact has changed when they go to talk to your phone number or get a message from your number.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
This is good and means no one can impersonate you using your phone number, but doesn't solve the recurring costs issue, you still need to buy a new number when someone registers yours, and every financial transaction puts you at more privacy risk. And is terrible UX, imagine having to add your contacts new numbers every other week.
People generally already have phone numbers. In the markets Signal is targeting its rare for people to not already have a phone number. It would be quite strange for someone to be paying for a phone number just to use Signal, and if you don't already have one then yes I'd suggest Signal isn't the choice for you.
Not only that, but its a unique identifier people generally have already had and generally have already shared and historically been OK with sharing with people they want to talk to. That's a part of the reason why Signal originally chose that way of finding contacts, people were already connected in that way. It makes on boarding people massively easier and greatly reduces the friction of people actually using it. A messaging platform is pretty useless if I can't easily find my friends on it.
> And is terrible UX, imagine having to add your contacts new numbers every other week
Practically nobody is getting a new phone number every other week. And once again, if you are the kind of person getting a new phone number every other week, I'd agree Signal probably isn't the platform for you.
If you don't have a phone number or your number changes all the time, I agree Signal isn't the choice for you. If you already have a phone number, are OK with what having a phone number means in terms of privacy, and that phone number is pretty stable, then Signal isn't a bad choice to use to message on.
It does mean theoretically some large organization (like a government with a warrant) can potentially see "John Doe has this phone number, this phone number is related to Signal, therefore John Doe possibly uses Signal", but personally I'm not too worried about that tiny bit of information leakage. Besides, with enough effort one could probably ID that looking at internet traffic patterns unless you're really that paranoid about controlling your network routing. Especially when that means I'm able to actually convince family to use the platform, as they're used to just looking up people by phone numbers and don't want to have to deal with managing yet another unique identifier on yet another platform. If they had to register another account and manage yet another identity, they wouldn't use it, and thus I'd be stuck just talking SMS with them which results in worse privacy outcomes for our conversations.
You can do all of that but you shouldn't have to when using a privacy-focused messenger, and most people won't so they'll be exposed and suffer the consequences if they use Signal expecting a certain level of privacy (and pseudo-anonymity).
It's a terrible anti-feature and the only reason they're not being punished for it is because there aren't many alternatives to pick from.
That's privacy for someone who cares deeply and will get it somehow no matter what, not default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant. (Which WhatsApp does pretty well for example.)
> default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant. (Which WhatsApp does pretty well for example.)
Can you elaborate on what default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant WhatsApp offers, that Signal does not?
I don't know, I'm not familiar with Signal. But features such as described above with worse privacy than the basic chatting functionality detract from it, it's not just that it would be a bonus if it were better, because that's exactly how effort comes in, having to know about it, and the typical layman user just blindly uses it.
Take Telegram for example, where only explicitly 'secret' chats are e2ee, you have to go out of your way, it's not the easy path.
Of course it's revealing information. If I know that two users that are identified by their phone numbers are talking to each other every day, this is a clear connection you can exploit. Metadata is only useless if you have no imagination.
I didn't think I'd ever be part of any group of 7 people in the world, but today is that day, I guess.
And I know one more of those people already!
5 more to go.
> Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use
And it ranks near Discord in terms of removing the single point of failure.
Discord became popular because it was free group/team voice chat. Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak all needed servers/clients, paid hosting etc.
Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost.
People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
> People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
I think it's probably that Discord has such a range of use cases.
I only ever use Discord for open source projects that have communities there. Discord supports a whole load of stuff around voice chat etc, but I've genuinely never used it.
Open source projects I've seen mainly just use it as a text chat, so they could in theory switch to something else with only a tiny fraction of the features.
It also needs users, the network effect aka lock in is gigantic with discord, I don't see discord ever going away. Or anything else gaining traction.
Yes, Discord will obviously never lose its network effect edge and get supplanted. That's simply what always happens with network effects.
Now excuse me while I go post to my Facebook about my new MSN Messenger and ICQ addresses.
Exactly, I’m in like 50 discord groups, that’s literally the only reason I use it. Those groups don’t exist elsewhere so there’s no other option.
But I remember when Discord began, I was actually the person who got around 10~ people onboarded onto the platform back in 2015-2018, because I simply thought it was the best way to communicate with a group of people or single person, in multiple ways like text, voice and video, with extremely low friction to do all of these things. Eventually the hold-outs joined too on their own volition, and that was because of network effects.
A platform does not start growing because of network effects, that's what keeps a platform alive and growing later on, but it starts its growth because people really prefer it to the alternatives (which back then for me was Skype and TeamSpeak).
Nowadays I'm not too happy with Discord anymore, some of it because of enshittification, but most of it is me being spoiled by what we already have, and being used to having this huge centralized (as in, can handle lots of different activities without switching to another platform) social tool that does everything I want it to, without me having to think about it at all.
Thing is, the alternatives, are not as good as Discord, and it really isn't close enough for me. Matrix would be the one I would love most to succeed, but everytime I used Matrix and Element, it's been a massive struggle, encryption constantly breaks (still), joining rooms still fails, rooms are spread about randomly, either standalone or in the new Spaces, searching for rooms is usually broken except on the large matrix.org instance, recently a bunch of rooms migrated because the event syncing completely failed and the decentralized state was broken. Not to mention the contant CSAM attacks (Does anyone know why this happens so much on Matrix? Is it really only because of the bad moderation and the fact that it auto-downloads the illegal images? Just feels so disappointing...).
I really hope we get a really good Discord alternative, maybe even an open-source and decentralized one, if possible. I would really rather not jump onto another proprietary platform.
Discord for sure has way more features and use than IRC.
On the other hand, IRC lets me /ignore a user and my client renders channels without ever showing a hint of that user's existence.
Meanwhile, in Discord both ignoring and blocking a user still shows a "3 ignored messages" or "1 blocked message", etc.
There are always going to be pros and cons to one or the other.
And video calls + screen sharing.
No alternative platform does this.
Teamspeak6 does have screen sharing.
I've been using it with my group of friends for a about a month now. Its quite solid in my opinion, uses a peer to peer system with an option to host a central server for video.
It's also images, videos and message boards.
And screen sharing, like actually good screen sharing unlike Microsoft teams That is a huge feature for many people
It's also a UI that makes covert (bot) advertising basically useless. Any form of communication that is not one-on-one-real-time has a bad UI and is heavily deprioritized.
[flagged]
First laugh of the morning. Thanks.
It's better to laugh than to get censored, thank god, this is not Iran
As someone who has been on Discord since the beginning, runs Discord communities and writes Discord bots, here's my list of three things that I believe would make a viable Discord competitor:
- Free without requiring self-hosting;
- Absolutely frictionless community access - here's an invite link, you can start chatting immediately;
- High quality voice calls with screen sharing.
I don't think there is a competitor that hits all three points right now. Screen sharing in particular is often disregarded by developers who have limited interaction with Discord and don't truly understand the platform. It was not an original feature, but it is Discord's killer feature. Because screen sharing is also impromptu videogame streaming.
One of the main problems in suggesting Discord alternatives is that Discord itself is an amalgamation of several apps.
For some a Discord alternative needs to be a voicecall, for others it‘s game streaming, and for others it‘s just a chat, a bulletinboard or newsgroup, while they never used the Voice features.
> We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform.
Doesn't Matrix essentially satisfy all of them?
Although the bulletinboard/newsgroup feature is something that I don't know but I feel as if that can be on matrix as well.
Yes, I know Matrix is hard to host but I don't imagine discord if they release their source code to be easy either.
So for a discord-like experience, I really prefer matrix.
My only real experience with matrix was joining a community server for some program because I had a problem and couldn't get more info elsewhere. Started off that I couldn't read any past messages, I guess because encryption? Alright, so I asked my question. Come back the next day, and because my browser deletes cookies on close, I couldn't log in because I had no logged in device to confirm the login with, or something like this. Gave up. Maybe there was some recovery codes on sign up that I missed, but I always save those.
Discord is real time chat, I thought matrix was not? And discord comes for gaming, voice chat is a key feature
Matrix is real time chat and it also supports voice chat, but I have not used it so I do not know if voice is good enough yet.
I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned Campfire [1].
It's open source, trivial to self-host, and can support an arbitrary number of rooms and users.
Sure, it doesn't have all of Discord's bells and whistles (for better or worse), but then neither do some of the alternatives mentioned in the article.
I've been on the lookout for Discord alternatives for my friend group for a while, and this is the first one that really looks promising to me. All the others are too expensive (Mattermost, Rocket) or introduce too much friction (IRC, Matrix). This looks like it could work!
I've been running a campfire chat with a few hundred users for a couple of years now. It's one of my favorite pieces of software simply because I don't spend any time thinking about it.
Best for: anything but real-time chat, really.
Maybe the best way to think of Discourse is as an anti-Discord. It's everything Discord isn't: asynchronous, open source, and self-hostable.
Then why is it the highest rated "Discord alternative"?
The thing is: None can compete with the Discord in its core features. They either have good chat or good voice, but not a combination of both.
Discord replaced Ventrilo, TeampSpeak and Mumble simply because it merged Slack/IRC-style chatting with an easy to use voice chat that took less resources than skype and less setup than any of the self-hosted version or cheaper than a hosted version.
Low-latency voice chats combined with Slack, I don't know why no one has an alternative for that.
I'm sad to see XMPP missing from this list. I wonder if the author was simply unaware of it or simply ignored it.
IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is still in the works). And of course all these protocol features work fine with federation.
XMPP's biggest failure is that there is no client which is on advanced on most of it's compliance suites. So if someone uses Windows for example, they're pretty much locked to "Well, you can chat, but no video/voice calls for you". I really hope this changes because XMPP does look interesting.
Gajim works on Windows and is the best non-mobile client.
But Gajim doesn't support the defacto standard calls extension. And now even the support for the older extension has been removed. Dino is a better experience, for the limited feature set that it supports (which does include calls and group calls).
Same here, I was hoping to see it listed in the article. XMPP is close to being right there in being able to compete with Discord. It just needs a good client with Spaces support (XEP-0503), along side user roles with permissions, and server side voice channels.
> It just needs a good client
Generally an XMPP issue :/
The protocol is amazing and selfhostable servers (I use prosody) are great. But The only client I enjoy is conversations, and that’s mobile while my main usage is always desktop. There are decent clients, but none I’d say are great.
The problem with XMPP is that it's a suite of RFCs.
It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely.
XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people.
(I am still a proponent of XMPP, but the working groups need to get their shit together to unify protocol support across clients)
This has been brought up on HN before, and people smarter than me identified that this view is about 10 years out of date. Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently that include all of the things any other similar tools do. It sounds like only very niche old/minimal XMPP clients don't support encryption by default for example, and virtually all servers have supported it for many years.
Is there a recommended or "blessed" server and client combo for someone who just wants to migrate their friends off discord?
The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.
>Is there a recommended or "blessed" server and client
Not sure about servers, but for clients there's Gajim, Dino, and Conversations. Not much else is super relevant these days. Profanity exists but is significantly worse than irssi or weechat despite looking superficially similar. Kaidan is a KDE/Qt alternative to Gajim but I'm not sure if it's usable yet. It may be worth switching when it's fleshed out to escape the bugs and slowness of the GTK-based clients.
The targeted audience of this website is, for now, developers. Communicating is hard.
https://joinjabber.org/ is/was an attempt at something more user-focused. It is not linked to the XMPP Software Foundation. BTW, joining the XSF and participating in discussion around protocol evolution, communication strategy and these sort of things is free, and only requires asking for write permission on the XSF wiki to add an application page. Everything happens in the open (mailing lists, chat rooms). We value democratic processes.
If you stick with mobile use, there is Snikket[0], which provides a branded server+mobile app ecosystem that should "just work". YMMV; I haven't tried it myself.
[0]: https://snikket.org
Monocles chat is best one for Android, it is the most complete chatting app for todays standards, unlike Conversations it has swipe to reply, last seen, emoji reactions etc. The only issue is making account there, need to use other homeserver like @conversations.im if you don't want to pay for their @monocles.eu . For IOS the only option is Monal. For web I find conversejs better than mov.im as movim doesn't encrypt sent pictures in chat at all, and encryption of text messages is sometimes broken depending on how you set it up in settings of account and in chat, as it needs to be activated on both places, so conversejs is better, but less enjoyable UI than movim
The ironic part is that those software description files are meaningless. AstraChat claims Advanced in all categories, but it's a proprietary commercial software, so nobody ran any kind of test suite to verify this.
That software list, how it's done and how it's ranked is literally confirming my initial point of critique :D
Last time I tried out several chat clients, most of them were alpha software, had lots of bugs appearing in normal conversation flows, well, or were so broken that they broke compatibility in subminor version updates to their very same client apps.
I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
> I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
This is exactly what the Compliance Suits are for, and the XMPP Software Fundation is taking care of telling all the clients what they misses directly on the official website, for example: https://xmpp.org/software/movim/
There is the XMPP Compliance Tester[0] by the author of Conversations. It does a good job at testing servers. On the client side I'm not aware of any kind of benchmark.
My point is about why clients like AstraChat can be listed with "Advanced" in the overview, but then in the details page it has nothing. See https://xmpp.org/software/astrachat-xmpp-client/
This should not be allowed.
Because the declaration file of the clients says that it is actually compatible with everything in this section.
You can't run scripts on all the XEPs declared, some of them are purely redaction or bound to specific UI/UX behaviors. This is based on trust that the developers actually implemented things as stated.
Not being able to automate something is not the same as not being able to verify at all. It sounds like the parent commenter is arguing that at least some of the clients listed are not worthy of this trust because (either intentionally or due to developer error) they don't actually hold up to scrutiny. Obviously they're just one person and their opinion might not be representative but it's hard to argue that if some random user is expected to have enough time to try out various clients and figure out which ones work or don't that the official people in charge of making the recommendations of clients should probably be able to find the time to as well even if it's just a volunteer that they, well, you know...trust.
Hasn't social media like HN, Reddit, fediverse, etc. become the real clearinghouse of information about those sorts of questions? I can see how it would be nice for xmpp.org to be an authoritative source of truth, but user response/consensus seems more relevant these days, at least to me.
Conversations is a great Android client (also brings their own backend instance if you don't want to host your own), I don't know about iOS or server though.
> Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently
If the answer to "it's confusing" is "there are apparently standardised sets", it sounds like it is, indeed, confusing :-).
This is what I mean by "it needs a good client". It needs a single implementation that works consistently across platforms and has the features and UX people care about. The groundwork is there, and is better than Matrix. It's a matter of writing software to implement the useful subset of the specs.
Xmpp clients are completely awful on Linux desktop, and can't do voice and video chat correctly with clients on Android like Conversations
You can with dino. I wish I had the time to work on getting A/V calls back in gajim. It could be worth asking an NLNet grant for that…
Yes it works but it lacks QOL features like automatic compression of videos or images when sending attachments. A bit too barebones.
There is not a single good XMPP client for macOS or iOS either. There are a couple of minimally functional ones that are aesthetically dreadful, but nothing that would come even close to replicating what people would expect even from Signal or WhatsApp, let alone a monster like Discord. Certainly nothing that I could ask friends or family to use.
I have had success getting apple-loving friends to use https://monal-im.org/
https://snikket.org/ are working on a new iOS client too (no release so far).
I tried XMPP recently and was surprised to see just how barren it was. The tech might be good but if nobody is using it after all these years, what's the point?
It is used in a non-federated context as the underlying in a lot of places (NATO, Zoom, british Military, Grindr, Jisti…). Federated usage is mostly private chats that don't really want to advertise that they do use it. It is sad because public groups also just work, but I know clients are missing a few features that would improve usability/UX. Some people are working on that, cf https://movim.eu/ for instance.
Isn't this the sort of moment that pushes users off of Discord into alternatives? Maybe pragmatic/opportunistic users should establish new channels or servers and advertise them when the shoe drops on Discord.
To be an alternative it had to be an alternative. Not "we had a great community with image uploads, voice chats, client parity across all platforms, miltiple servers set up in one click, songle login, game integrations etc., so now we move to this broken disjointed landscape of inconsistently implemented features"
Most users don't need every single one of those features. It reminds me of the conversations about lemmy and the fediverse after the reddit api uproar. The alternative link aggregators didn't need to do everything well, just the core things well enough to build a community that sustains engagement and becomes discoverable. But it failed at the major pieces: performance, scalability, media handling, moderation, governance, and federation. In contrast, I would argue xmpp covers a strong subset of commonly used discord features well enough to provide the chat/social component to many existing communities.
Most users only need 20 percent or so of your features, but among a large enough group of users they all want a different 20 percent so it kinda adds up. Or so the old saying goes.
I think this will be a pretty similar case because discord straddles "small personal servers with ten friends" and "large official servers with 500 users for a particular game" and "tech support forum for an open source project", and one user might be in all of those servers pretty easily.
Most Discord alternatives fail not on tech, but on polish.
Signal → private but bad for communities
Matrix → flexible but rough UX
XMPP → powerful but fragmented
Discord → centralized but frictionless
Users pick frictionless every time. We probably don’t need new apps or protocols we need a client that works well.
You should be able to create an account once and then join several servers (real servers) with the same account.
That's called email
Email is a good model to emulate, but it's not the system people want for group chats.
If you have to create a new password / answer an authentication check for every server you join that's a ton more friction than discord already.
Yeah but that's exactly what email doesn't do, right? Create account, send email to anyone on any server is the use case it was invented to solve. There are tons of issues with frictionless here if you don't want spam, obviously.
> Matrix → flexible but rough UX
Matrix's UI/UX is actually really flexible with multiple clients.
You aren't struck with Element, you can even use TUI clients or any clients.
For the web, the one which I really love is cinny.
Cinny is really awesome, its UI/UX is better than discord imo.
I recommend people to check out the matrix ecosystem of clients to see what they like, because I also liked the fractal gnu app & it has tons of clients.
> Imagine a Matrix client […] e2ee […]
The biggest immediate win that we can achieve for our users is to remove all (!) technical jargon from our landing pages and product ui.
This is a problem throughout all FOSS. For example in KDE:
> Do x when Plasma starts.
Wtf do I care what Plasma is. Oh, you mean my computer? Yeah makes sense.
Raycast: You can search files, have a calculator, a translator…
KRunner: You can run terminal commands and convert characters to hexadecimal.
It is so obvious that these products are designed by developers for developers. From my experience, this friction is everything. You cannot expect people to intuitively figure it out.
For the average user, multiple clients is more a weakness than a strength.
More friction!
Is it really though? The average user doesn't need to know about all other clients, how it all works, etc. They just "open this website, register, and you're in!"
It's not like the registration process necessarily involves typing in the server IP and port number, picking and setting up an advanced TUI client or something else.
If you're saying the user either has to put up with a shit client (friction) or go looking for other clients (friction) (and know they have to do that (friction!)) then yes it's friction.
The Lounge is open website, type name, you're in. Matrix definitely is not.
It's beneficial for the average user to know that other clients exist at the very least; it's rather common in the matrix space I'm in that someone asks "how do I do X" without clarifying which client they use, and as such the question is unanswerable (or, worse, someone may answer with info about a different client; or they use some client that noone else does and as such noone can help them).
As some specific example, it's happened a couple times that someone's using a client that doesn't support rendering spoilers as spoilered, and as such they made unspoilered replies of something that should've been spoilered (and of course many clients (incl. the Elements) don't even have a sane way to type spoilers).
Is it just element or matrix.org, but it feels so slow to me?
I would recommend using Nheko instead, and not registering on the overloaded flagship server. I have an old matrix.org account as a backup but I try to use smaller servers mostly.
Element’s pretty not-great. FluffyChat is worth a go, despite the extremely silly name; much less clunky experience.
All of those alternatives don't have voice chat in the way discord has (or Teamspeak/Mumble).
IRC → perfection, impossible to improve
No message history while not logged in.
IRCv3 (and many clients are supporting fair chunks of IRCv3's feature set) supports offline state and message history.
That's a feature
I would love to know why it's considered a feature for you.
I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
Because I prefer online conversations to work like IRL ones: Ephemeral. Sure each individual might keep their own log if they want but the server itself doesn’t and setting aside all the issues with modern datasets being used for training all sorts of algorithms, just the concept of stepping into a digital room without all the baggage of the last twenty hours of conversation is _mentally refreshing_. It also changes people’s behaviour for the better IME.
Saving logs is gross, chats should be ephemeral. In any case there's HistServ and IRCv3 /chathistory nowadays, so if you really want it you can have it.
That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.
But on IRC you had your own log, and sometimes the server made the full logs public. It was just cumbersome to access. What I said and you said in my presets was still logged.
It's a muddy middle ground where neither you are I are satisfied. Far from perfect.
I wanted to disagree but I really miss IRC internet. Saving everything we ever said online was a mistake. We need to focus on ephemeral chat making a comeback.
Saving logs has been essential for work, in the past, because we were always to write real documentation when necessary. Mind you, this was local to our machine.
isn't IRC only Text? What about the Voice Chat?
IRC does not even have offline messages, unless you pay / host a bouncer. Which you first have to know about.
I'm not sure if any client has solve this, but what about image / video / file hosting? You can't just drag 'n drop a image into a chat. You have to host it on a 3rd party site and link it.
I do wonder how server management is now adays. In Discord you can host your own server with a few clicks and make it easy to adjust permissions and controls invites. I would assume IRC is also lacking behind. But would love to hear more about the current state.
Discord has invite links, where people without the app or account can quickly join. In IRC you have the IRC:// link, but that does not work for people who don't have a client installed. Then you can do a web client link, but that is not optimal for people who already have their favorite client set up :)
In Discord you can't "host" your own "server". You can create a room (internally called a guild, misleadingly referred to as "server" in ui and by a lot of people) on THE discord server, their server, and that room can be split into channels. But the room and the server belongs to discord.
You are correct. I used Discord terminology where a "server" is a group of channels.
First and foremost, IRC is a protocol. Everything you name here are mostly issues that are not a protocol problem, but client and service issues which can be solved.
But are they solved? In a single combined client.
Otherwise it's not really an alternative. It does not matter if it's technically a protocol. Users don't care about if it's a protocol, IRC clients had over 10 years to catch up.
What a uselessly pedantic response.
Are they solved, in practice, in the real world? For users in general? No? Then what's the point of discussing it right now?
Yes, GP already said it was perfection
Except the reason for Discords initial success, and the literal only reason I have it installed, is for voice chat when playing certain online games.
I love IRC, I even wrote my own IRC client in the 90s, but it’s clearly not going to be suitable for gaming in this context.
IRC for main chat, Mumble for voice chat when gaming. Been solid for decades. I have at least 3 functional Mumble servers saved (including my own) in my client, most of them are associated with an IRC community. I occasionally hear "Anyone down for some Quake? Hop on Mumble." or something to that effect. Mumble is pretty easy to host, so if you're using it with a small to medium group of friends, I'd say just throw up a server on your LAN somewhere. It's got decent mobile clients on F-Droid as well if you need one.
Not all gamers are techies though.
Some of my gaming buddies on Discord needed help getting that properly working. Asking them to set up and use both IRC and Mumble would be a step too far.
This is a common trap HN falls into. Stuff that’s easy and practical for people of our capabilities can be a nightmarish hellscape for other people.
The title is about "Discord alternatives", the major core metric is:
> Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Feels like these are two different things.
What I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Discord can do quite a lot, which results in people using it in different ways.
I'm quite active on multiple discord server and yet never use voice / video. But I get why people use it.
If OP is looking for a platform not to replace Discord 1 to 1, but overall to have a community why not do a broader comparison. Then everyone can for themself see what fits their personal needs.
> I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Same. I'm somewhat sad that a lot of the FOSS community got stuck with IRC level of technology and ease of use :( I whish for more projects would subscribe to a low barrier of entry mantra.
Learning reg-ex to ban a member is .. ughh
> Anyway this thing [Revolt/Stoat] is so far from being ready for prime time, I only include it here to call out the project. I wish them the best and hope for good things, especially since you can self-host the server. But a lack of stability and features prevent this from being useful for anything beyond experimentation. Maybe someday.
Curious what prompted this verdict. My only experience with Revolt/Stoat has been with the Handmade Cities instance, but said experience hasn't been anywhere near as bad as this writeup seems to suggest.
I think matrix / element are already working and very usable BUT what is needed is that big push to add the polish. I agree with others here, the matrix project would do well to realise that it’s a great contender for being a discord replacement and set about bulking up with some of the most loved features on discord.
A polished ui and a couple of fav discord features onto the product milestone plan and I think matrix adoption would start to really pick up.
Some interesting things are cooking on the Matrix front. The "Matrix state of the union" talk at FOSDEM is a compact recap: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/URX89L-matrix-state-o...
Matrix is the only one that offers the killer feature of Discord, which is being able to join many communities from a single login.
Sadly Matrix has never had a good UX for me. IMO they spent too many complexity tokens on e2ee and there are simply not enough left.
Actually, the true killer feature for discord back in the day was something much dumber, but still heavily related to on-boarding and community transference.
You could join a discord server with a single link.
Account creation could come later.
Considering the competition at its heyday was Teamspeak or Skype, the mere fact you could just actually see the hell you were getting into without some stupid ass "Hol' Up!" instantly made it popular with basically everyone who didn't even know what it was.
My account is dated June 2015 which is apparently a month after it launched, and both me and every single one of the early adopters in that channel that is still up to this day have this same story to tell. We used it because we didn't even have to login at all in the first place when we first got it.
Account creation is the first thing you gotta do when trying to join a server complete with a silly captcha. At least on the server I just tried.
IIRC, admins of a server can configure it to require different levels of authentication, from anonymous all the way to requiring a verified phone number (the latter of which I have so far refused to join).
The killer feature of discord was always "open this link for our guild voice and let's go into the dungeon". And this is a brand advantage: you can try that with self hosted tools but discord "feels safe" to click.
The only thing TeamSpeak has on it is multi level voice for complex command chains. But you pay for that with enormous sign up friction.
There's no viable frictionless chat alternative. Maybe jitsi. And if you try to make one? You'll get regulated and have to do the same thing.
> being able to join many communities from a single login.
That's one of the features I hate most about Discord, the difficulty of having separate identities in separate places! You can set a "display name" for convenience, but everyone can see your root identity.
Yes, it like reddit is a community of sub-communities.
The whole fediverse wants to offer that, but I have no idea why single sign on fails mostly to make waves for them. Perhaps it is just user adoption, or technical complexity about privacy protection vs. ease of use.
What is your greatest UX concern that you would like to see fixed?
randomly telling me that my connection is not secure and as a result randomly hiding messages. and then, if I try to fix it somehow, it will tell me it's nearly impossible or that they'll delete my whole history. the security model is hostile towards user.
when coming back to a community after a long period of time i have to follow a trail of links to rooms that say they have been upgraded and the current one abandoned until i reach the current one. thats stupid, confusing and time wasting
It is up to the room admin to upgrade or not, I still have some v1 rooms. Some features like knocking require a newer version, though.
for me, I'd say: occasional cryptic error messages that prevent conversation, even using encrypted DM across multiple devices
I'm quite surprised to not see teamspeak 6 on here. From what I've seen, it has all the features discord has now, including screen sharing, video calls, channels like discord, and it's also designed for gamers. It's been mentioned in some replies, but not any top-level comments yet. Is TS6 missing some discord features? (maybe calendar events, and their bot ecosystem is a lot smaller)
This entire list is Slack alternatives, not Discord alternatives. Discord is first-and-foremost a gaming voice chat platform. Teamspeak is the OG in that space and should've been the top of this list.
Its in beta and you can't get more than a 32 slot server.
Anecdotally it felt a little uncooked.
https://github.com/teamspeak/teamspeak6-server?tab=readme-ov...
If the age verification/mandatory ID is the result of new laws, how exactly would switching to an alternative server help? Wouldn't they be forced to implement the same measures as well sooner or later?
If you self-host and stay small enough, this is moot. Discord is also rolling out age verification to the whole world, while only a small number of governments have currently enacted laws that require this.
What most people here seem to forget, is once a social platform gains traction and especially attention from the main masses, it undoubtedly require checks and balances.
Predators, racism, gore, pedophilia, harassment, stalking and so on..
No matter how high you value security, these are matters that hurt real people today. If you attract the mainstream, you must deal with it.
I am in favor of kicking children, teenagers, and people with vulnerable minds and mental illnesses off the Internet.
Then you won't have to make the decisions that most people suffer from.
Please don't kick people with mental illnesses off the internet. I barely have anyone to talk to as it is
Good one !
The number of people with mental illness is estimated at over 20% of adults in the U.S.
I strongly doubt that was a joke.
Not to take away from the seriousness of the moment, but I feel compelled to share my feeling shere: My inner teenager was hoping to see TeamSpeak and Ventrilo listed just to honor the good old days. Between 2005-2008 it felt as if Ventrilo had about 90% of the market, with TeamSpeak having the rest. I guess the hopeful message is that nothing lasts forever and alternatives come and go.
Mumble is similarly old (3 or 4 years newer), and free software unlike the other two (the trick to longevity). Still around and updated. I used it just a couple days ago.
I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble.
I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.
> small minority
Huh. I’d have said majority. It was always my impression that a) gamers make up the vast majority of discord users (with all their gamification and gaming features), and b) that gamers mainly care about voice chat (which is what people almost always talk about when it comes to discord and gaming).
That may be true but the sense I get from Gen Z folks who I've talked to is that for them Discord is almost more of a social network for interacting with a community. Their activity might be centered around gaming but they're using Discord to find people they don't already know to play with, talk about the game, etc. For those folks, Mumble will not be even close to an alternative to discord.
Myself, though, I basically only use it to talk to the same guys I've been gaming with since we met in middle school 20-some years ago, and for that Mumble seems perfect.
> I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server
That makes you an even smaller minority unfortunately. Most people are not going to set up a home server.
It's semantics, really. Run the server executable on any computer in your house. Done. If you don't leave your computer on 24/7, the Mumble server isn't up 24/7. Oh well. If you use it to talk to friends, you'll presumably have your computer on when you want to use it yourself anyway.
Mumble servers used to be just a few dollars a year (haven't looked in a long time). But even that is enough friction to prevent adoption. Plus it doesn't support any of the non-voice features.
My take: Discord will slowly enter the arena with the likes of Google, MS, Meta, Apple, Valve for their massive user network. The amount of resources needed to sustain free offerings for so long make it a nearly insurmountable moat for others to compete.
Even if one could reproduce their tech (which I doubt, they are top-tier), individuals would drown under hosting costs. They've positioned themselves incredibly well.
Discord's technical moat is not that large. They've done well, but it's not the same as something like Google or Microsoft or valve.
I know people frown upon it but I think XMPP is the way to go. It "just" require a good discord like client with voice and screen share.
IRC is the only alternative that runs on random potatos and survives lawfare.
One has still yet to convince me of anything IRC has over XMPP.
Waaaaaaay better clients (this is the big one), chat logs that are easier to search through with standard unix tools, avoids issues with OMEMO breaking (which stops people chatting at all, breaking the main usage of the program). Saying this as a regular user of both. I spend way more time on IRC and I enjoy irssi much more than Gajim, Dino, or Conversations. I do think XMPP has potential, though.
Yeah I'm planning to send both matrix and xmpp through bitlbee so I can use a terminal client as well (I know matrix has one technically but it is reeeeally crufty). I don't understand why every modern chat client has to be 99% empty whitespace separated by squircles.
matrix.org used to feature weechat-matrix among the recommended clients, but last I looked it wasn't there anymore. Dead project, probably. A shame.
Great writeup! Looks like this is going to be relevant very soon.
> Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do
Absolutely, but it's also important to keep in mind that the tool has a big impact on culture by virtue of what behaviors it encourages and what limitations it has. "The medium is the message" is very true here, so think carefully about which tool you hop onto.
Don’t see it mentioned here but I’m looking at Delta Chat as an option. It seems like a solid option if you want text only. Built on mail protocols, encrypted, allows for decentralization. Need to play with it more before I say I really like it but the first day of use it’s been better than Matrix. Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who’s used it.
I'm looking at modern browser APIs and wondering why no one else is trying certain things.
getDeviceMedia and getUserMedia are very powerful these days. I haven't actually tested it but I believe a chromium browser would have no issue capturing the hw accelerated output from a game. You can pipe these media streams directly to WebRTC peers for playback on the other side. A server with a simple selective forwarding unit could enable larger scale meetings (100s of participants). All of this can happen in <1000 lines of JS and server code. Most of the heavy lifting happens in the browser engine. Concerns like automating browser permissions, global hot keys, etc. can be handled via electron or platform specific options like WebView2.
Mobile clients are a bit cursed right now. The best solution is to maintain a standard client in the app stores. Forcing everyone to sign their own mobile apps is way too much friction. And you do need native for this on mobile. Browser only / PWA has no chance in hell of providing a smooth UX on iOS or Android.
The most important colon is missing: user-adoption
Tiny nitpick: you actually can pin messages in Signal group chats. It's a pretty recent addition though.
Apart from that, I would have been interested in more details about the author's experience with ~Revolt~ Stoat. To my naive eyes it looks pretty nice. I really like the nuanced takes about the other platforms in this article, so I'd guess the author has some good reasons to dismiss Stoat like that.
One that didn't make the list that I'm excited for is Root. It's come a long way in a short time and already has quite a bit of the features Discord has. The apps and bots are also being set up to be way more powerful than Discord as well.
Zulip actually looks pretty good if they made it a little sexier.
my team tried it for a couple weeks. couldn't stand the threaded "only see what's important" style of chat. it's undoubtedly our least fav part of microsoft teams---the channels and the threads, we all operate in the chat tab and the channels tab has been relegated to announcement posts no one reads. huge shame zulip can't just like... have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation. some people have gone way too for trying to efficiency max or "cut out the noise" but chronological chat and a competent search feature will always be the goat.
> have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation
It does. https://zulip.com/help/general-chat-channels
But even without that, in a normal threaded channel, you can see all messages in all topics chronologically. IIRC that's the default view when you click a channel in the sidebar.
Here's an example: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/138-user-questions the messages are grouped into runs of the same topic, but it's the whole channel.
mother of god. its perhaps time to revisit zulip. now if I could perhaps disable the topic group heading this would make perfect sense and effectively be a chatroom.
We've been using it successfully for a long time too. Real nice bunch of fellas. They did remove mobile notifications without a subscription recently and the price is quite high ONLY for notifications. I do not fault them for doing it but it made recommending them a tiny bit more difficult. The other major issues IMO are the super basic mobile client and lack of any kind of native voice/video chat. You get a button that provides a link to a chat service of your choice. For example you pick a Jitsi Meet instance and Zulip gives you button to create and share the url easily. That's it. I wish there were something a little better integrated.
I opened issues which were technically not feasile, it turns out. The server seems to do way too much logic to make this a better app, with offline first or even just "having a search that works" clients.
See also my and other users feedback about their UI in: Zulips values (24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953815
What's the best alternative for folks who just want to voice and text chat with a small circle of people? Say, less than 50.
The Telegram drop off for doing something really bad recently? I have not seen a single person mention it as an alternative. I don't really use discord that much except for the few friends I have that are not on telegram. Actually all of my family and friends are on telegram, even my grandmother is on telegram. When playing games with friends we just do a group call in telegram. I don't even see it on this list though.
probably because it is classified as a "messaging app" and while it has a ton of features it still misses the "structure" of a discord alternative
i just wonder why TeamSpeak is not there
Ctrl+F "voice" only gives 1 result. You can tell the author doesn't use Discord for voice chat in games. So no Teamspeak or Mumble.
Isn’t Telegram at least plausibly a tool of Russian surveillance? My understanding was that its attempts to distance itself from the regime were laughable and only made the relationship more obvious.
I think that’s why it’s rarely mentioned.
We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform.
Here is a quick promo video as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekOxAg7leXM
Maybe there's a niche for Valve/Steam to step into here. They already have your data, and many people use Discord for gaming related chat.
You can already make steam friend group chats, it was just a bit janky when I last used it like 5 years ago
I primarily use Discord but also have a long-running Steam group chat.
Steam group chats are still janky and by no means a Discord replacement. It feels like an MVP that they lost interest in shortly after adding the feature.
It's fine for a couple people with no real need for moderation but beyond that I don't think it's currently viable.
CurseForge (Overwolf?) tried with Curse Voice before Discord even existed, but it never made it big. Probably because Discord started taking over when Skype fell off (i.e. Discord had good timing, Curse Voice did not).
I've seen a lot of gamers mention this, but I'd wonder why it hasn't happened yet especially as there's a set of gamers that seem to love centralizing on steam already. One massive downside I can see is that the various public social areas of steam like the game forums are already a cesspool (and have been since they were vBulletin based) and I don't see that improving with more users in near real-time chat.
Discord getting used as a knowledge base or download source for some areas is already seen as a convenience for those involved or a single point of failure by many 'outside', I wouldn't want to see more of PC gaming moving to one place.
What's the point of the licensing on these chat servers charging per-user when self hosting?
A LOT of open source software offers features tiers with per user pricing even when self-hosting.
They do need to fund development, but SSO is almost always in the top two level pricings :(
It already has quite big communities https://simplex.chat/directory/
The founder of it is on here https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epoberezkin
I'm building an open-source, high-quality chat app called Inline. It aims to solve issues with Slack and Discord for work communication. Happy to answer any questions.
Website doesn't have any info about the product. I don't know which features are there going to be. Screenshots would be cool as well to evaluate UX. Frankly the github readme is more useful than the website in that regard.
You're correct. TBH I didn't want to spend time on the website more than a waitlist, instead focused on building the app. I intended the Github readme to show more about the project and I post updates with screenshots on Twitter/X. I'm putting up a docs page today to incrementally add more information about the roadmap, vision, Bot SDK, API docs, etc. Anything in particular you're curious about?
Basically there’s no viable alternative.
Honorable mentions worthy of your support:
https://wiki.bitmessage.org/index.php/Main_Page
https://vituperative.github.io/i2pchat/
Bring this back!, for sentimental reasons:
https://dcplusplus.sourceforge.io/webhelp/chat_commands.html
Email + IRC (there are daemons that support chat history). Bouncers exist. Logging. This should be standard for OSS projects, not some private, unsearchable, data-mining platform.
This is what happens when we reach for convenience over openness.
As someone who spent countless hours on IRC when I was younger and enjoyed 99% of it to the fullest... I'd kindly suggest refraining from pushing IRC any further. It has had its run, and while I know it still exists, it's nowhere near what it once was and it's not coming back.
Times have changed and people have different expectations. Nobody (except very few) is going to use multiple services and set up a bouncer just to get the basics working. It's better to spend time building a good replacement that keeps up with current needs than trying to push these old systems onto people, especially younger ones.
I'm all for alternatives as long they're based on open protocols and truly open apps -- not some where a corporate entity gets to dictate how many users one may have or how many lines you get to store. It should also be fairly easy to connect to and not every open-source project needs E2E encryption. Matrix is probably okay, but I found it (and the apps) fairly cumbersome.
IRC obviously has its limitations, but it shines as an example of simplicity and maintainability with no corporate strings attached.
The corollary to times changing is that periodically what's old is new again. We can't have our cake and eat it too; if the gripe is that for-profit services become enshittified, then necessarily FOSS should be given a shot, but adding to that I'd say some of these platforms re-invent the wheel or add a coat of paint. What you can do with Discord you can already accomplish with a mix of IRC, vbulletin forums, email, Mastodon, and and others in decoupled fashion.
I take the point that a one-stop-shop is nice and probably viable leveraging this tech. At the same time, users already use a slew of different social media platforms that are usually redundant or overlap in some way. For most their mode of consumption is "the algorithm", endless feed of videos. Discord's core offering is not that, it's an orchestration of chat, video-chat, forums, notifications. It's a swiss-army knife.
What we really need to get rid of is platforms. vBulletin sells you software. It's up to you what you choose to use it for. Platforms like Discord and Reddit need to have final say on a lot of things because they need investor/advertiser cash at some point. And by 'get rid of' I mean avoid using them in settings that would be severely impacted by a platform's decision. For example, I don't want to have to upload my ID just to ask a question on the DaisyUI discord server.
In my experience with the few communities I've dabbled in, it's more reaching for popularity than convenience. If I indulged myself with some grumpiness I'd say that's another source of enshitification that's rarely mentionned.
If anything, this should be a wake-up call at least for those managing tech-oriented communities. I don't expect gamer or normies to do anything about it, but hackers definitely should.
can someone please try running the experiment of "but what if just forking&spinning up an OSS clone, scaling up to take in the migrants, acquire network effects, collect roughly same subscription revenue, but run on just, like, 10 people?"
Discord has a financially and politically vulnerable posture that is downstream of having to operate a very large team, raise funding, be exposed to investor market pressure. However, it is also one of the rare instances of successful consumer freemium subscription monetization. A clone does not have to pay the tuition of "what makes this specific space compelling, and want-to-pay-for"; it just have to _exists_, passively soaking up migrants from each platform shift.
ITT WTB 3rd place for my frens.
how is discords freemium successful when they are trying to put Nitro in your face at every step? trying so hard to me that sounds like not enough people pay
> scaling up to take in the migrants, acquire network effects, collect roughly same subscription revenue, but run on just, like, 10 people?"
That's how discord started, too. And then they scaled up. You probably need 10 people to handle infrastructure alone.
How about good’ol IRC?
Fun, until you want to share an image and have to upload it to a 3rd party, have to explain what a bouncer is to someone who just wants offline messages and AFAIK voice and video chat is not possible.
Client dependent, but channel overview per server is also not that good.
No voice chat.
IRC + Mumble is a good combo in my experience. I only fire up Mumble as-needed since I tend to prefer text chat.
i agree, but you need your people to have 2 logins. Great for friend groups, not working in scale.
Neither one strictly requires a login AFAIK, actually. You can chat with an unregistered nick on IRC, and Mumble has certs, but I think they're optional and don't have associated passwords.
Don't forget Flotilla Social!
TeamSpeak also has a newer client, but its design decisions are a little odd. Still worth checking out though.
I would love an updated KDX/Hotline server running an a RasPi or similar at home. This was a solved problem 20 years ago. The migration to online based platforms will always lead to network effects and enshittification, for very little gain.
There are updated clients and servers for Hotline.
https://hlwiki.com/index.php/Clients
https://hlwiki.com/index.php/Servers
But the number of users on any particular server these days is extremely small.
There is zero chance that the target users for Discord is going to try anything more complicated than Discord, so basically all the entries in this list. I recoil in horror thinking about me explaining Matrix even to the most tech savvy friends I use Discord with and I really really hope people would stop recommending it.
The target user group for Discord actually is children and teens. Look at that UI and how it‘s trying to sell you „swag“.
Then, Discord is not uncomplicated. From „Servers“ not being servers, multiple account onboarding levels, to what happens when Discord believes you are a bot or are using a blacklisted IP.
I don't think I'm active on any "server" that is predominately used by Teens.
I believe you underestimate the average age.
Something I noticed recently is that explaining Matrix to someone is offputting, but I got my dad to just use it and it seems fine for him. Maybe they don't need to know how it works. You start talking federation and stuff and people's eyes glaze over. Simple instructions to sign up and get a desktop and mobile client are probably a better idea. Bury the technical info for those who really care.
I use matrix with several non-technical friends. Its UI/UX has improved greatly over the last two years or so.
Any other Zed users annoyed that they've removed the Help section from GitHub discussions to a sodding discord, please do chime in here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/48737
I don't understand the appeal of any of those, least of all Discord itself. It's unsearcheable, focused on immediacy, confusing and full of blinking things. The old Reddit interface (or current HN one!) are unsurpassed IMHO.
That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space.
Discord's key value proposition is that it's a trusted zero friction voice chat with a lot of features.
The workflow that made it huge: organizer creates a server for a game, creates a short link for a voice channel. The organizer then goes to play their game, shares the short link with their group.
The members click the link, write whatever they want as the name, click join and are in the voice chat. Say hi and go into the dungeon to have fun.
Need more? Just share your screen with one click. Streamer mode kicks in and hides all pii in the discord interface. Easy global bindings for push to talk.
If the outing is fun some of them will create profiles and stay in the server and play together again.
It's all very organic and easy, while being trusted as a brand so people don't have to hesitate to click your jitsi.weirdgamer.tk link.
I agree with the previous commenter - I hate Discord for all the same reasons. But you said: "That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space." and this is the bit that frustrates me... I must be the target market because several services I use try to get you to use Discord for support, and some will only provide support via Discord.
Yes! If Discord's appeal is that it's a tool/space to just have fun together in the moment, then fine! but that's exactly the opposite of a support system.
I get all the hate, I just wanted to explain why it's also loved.
It's a great, great tool and I really wish they'd offer a business tier that opts out of all the data leak features.
Most people are on Discord, joining servers has very little friction (no separate accounts), there's decent bots and mod tools and such, ability to create as many channels per server as you want (e.g. for discussions, media, music, whatever) and participate in text based conversations more or less live. It's also easy to jump into a VC and chat while you play games with friends, share screen, stuff like that.
Most alternatives suck for that purpose. There is search for server members and the "blinking things" keep you up to date with where the new stuff is and I presume give you dopamine hits. It's simply not old school forum software and considerations that'd make sites like that good don't enter the equation at all - which also makes attempts at turning Discord into a support forum for any "organized" group or project misguided at best, but also great for the more casual gaming/interest oriented communities.
It does have a weird source of friction. The need to find an invite to the "server". Sometimes you'll find one but it will be dead. There's no way to search to find a server then join it as far as I know.
Me and my buddies still use team speak. Anyone else?
Have you tried Mumble? That's what me and my buddies use. We've been playing Barony lately.
I like this page about how a paid forum is the best alternative to a free chat app. Trying to imagine saying “if you don’t like the whole ICQ numbers thing just buy a vBulletin license” in 2002
Discourse was free to self host in 2024.[1] This changed?
[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-discourse-still-free-to-self...
No score for usability?
why not just IRC?
A lot of people here don't understand Discord was born as an alternative to Teamspeak, Mumble and Ventrilo, which main purpose is voicechat rooms while playing video games. They were difficult to maintain since you had to install your own servers. Discord swept with them with the ease of setup and generous free tiers.
If you don't use it with that purpose, there's tons of alternatives.
I think you're right, but Discord also replaced IRC for a lot of people/communities, and I don't think they all make use of the voice chat feature. It may be there's no perfect alternative for everyone, but we could still "save" a large group.
In most discord groups I see voice is just this weird feature no one uses.
Even when people insist on organizing a telecon they usually use zoom, teams, or google meet instead.
I really do not like discourse. Mail lists are better because you stay in the loop, plus Gmail is better for searching emails than discourse searches itself.
How do you search messages from before you joined the mailing list?
You check the mailing list archives - those usually have a web based interface.
Admittedly I was being facetious: OP said mailing lists are better than a forum, but for searching the archive you need a forum-like interface anyway.
Its a bit easier as it can be read-only & static generated. Though there are some attempts to make it possible to reply using the Web interface, like HyperKitty /Mailman 3.
> signal for secrecy
What kind of secret system uses a phone number tied to your ID as a user name?
When you rank something with numbers, I’d love it to be more like 1 of 5 (1/5) even when you said it before. When you are reading at that line, I had to recalibrate, if that is 4 (out of 10), which is what most people try to rank against.
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This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat.
I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s
Matrix/Element has video rooms as a Lab function and for a while it had voice rooms too. Not sure what happened to them, but either way with MatrixRTC coming out the technical underpinnings are all there, clients just need to put it all together.
Someone mentioned (I believe?) after talking to Element/Matrix at FOSSDEM this year that the organization has been struggling a lot to get this going. Apparently issues with thier project organization forking and funding the last few years has made one of thier primary contributors, who already had fully functional and working video/voice, all but give up on the project because the upstream forming means it's now forked from a commercial/defunct version of the original code(?)
Mumble for voice is unironically great. For video, maybe Jitsi. I don't often have a need to video chat, personally.
It would be nice if Valve filled in the gaps here. They already got a lot of community features built into Steam.
Steam itself is proprietary, and I imagine they'd expand the existing Steam chat and not do something separate like Proton. I don't think jumping into the arms of another company managing a centralized proprietary social platform is a good idea, even if Valve tend to be "good guys".
Steam Group Chats are sort of there; no video chat but text chats and drop-in voice chats like Discord. On the other hand they're basically ephemeral, with messages disappearing from history at some given point.
I also can't figure out a way to access them outside of the Steam client and in DOTA where I believe they're tied to the in-game guild system.
Outside of Dota, it's called "Group Chats" (below your friends list) and it looks very similar to a basic Discord interface. You may have to join a dota guild in order to see it, although everyone in my guild just uses discord.
Why can't anybody just add a button to host a fully P2P WebRTC call? Like everyone did back when Slack didn't have anything, but in one click?
In the case of voice chat in servers used for gaming, my experience has been that the persistent channels for voice are actually kind of important, it removes any friction from dropping in and out of voice chat, and allows others to easily see 'hey, there is someone in this voice channel, maybe i should join'
But that can be easily faked in client UI. Something like, clicking an empty channel internally hosts a call, hosting/joining the call causes the client to post a hidden "@user is in #call" message, etc.
I did this as a side project awhile ago it was very fun.
https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc
I didn't bother adding much styling to the website because I was only interested in the network side of things.
Yeah it’s so odd that none of the open-source alternatives have this feature. No video calls are not an option. We need video/voice rooms!
If an option doesn't have that then it's not a Discord alternative for me or many of my friends.
You might be interested in https://kloak.app I believe. It's a privacy-first alternative. It's still in early alpha days, but have most of the things set up. Oh, and we’ve got voice channels with screen sharing in beta too.
How do you plan on funding it? Also, the landing page mentions "You own your community data" but it just looks like you own it and allow us to access it?
Seems to me you're just re-building discord.
"Messages are stored on our servers and are technically accessible at the database level , we won't pretend otherwise. Kloak doesn't require email, phone, or personal info to create an account, your identity isn't tied to your messages the way it would be on other platforms.
Our goal is to implement end-to-end encryption for DMs so that even we can't read message content. But we're not there yet, since after all we need to make sure the platform is safe and not to shield illegal content being sent."
This is a message from one of their founders I found while exploring the app.
Aside from Discord, nobody has gotten this right since Yahoo! Live and Tinychat. Both are dead.
Yeah I really don't get that. The biggest benefit, by far, of Discord is that it combines both text and voice chat into one! How can one seriously put forth a replacement which can't match the features Discord had on day 1?
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What about good old IRC?