Discord Alternatives

cyberlyra

With the new age verification checks on Discord, lots of people are looking to make a move. But what should they move to? There are a lot of options out there -- Stoat, Revolt, Matrix/Element, RocketChat, Neremity, Jitsi, IRC... Remembering that others' mileage may vary, what is your experience with any of these apps, or others? Have you tried one or more of them? Which are easier or harder to use? What tips for installation or setup can you share? Let's help some fellow Reclaimers out!

cyberlyra

cyberlyra This post has some interesting ideas and alternatives: https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/

AndyH

cyberlyra Fluxer is getting some buzz. It looks like it can be self-hosted, has E2E encryption.

They offer paid support for self-hosters. My spider sense is tingling that this could be the one that a lot of folks gravitate to.

stemy

Nerimity works also pretty well.
Actually, Stoat and Nerimity are the closest of discord regarding the UX, and stoat is currently overloaded due to a massive influx.
Both have their downsides:
Stoat doesn't have WYSIWYG and context menu is limited to toggle spellchecker.
Nerimityforce you to host the file you upload on your own google drive if you don't pay (9.99€ one-time) to use their CDN.

clerkdecourse

Has anyone looked into TeamSpeak? https://www.teamspeak.com/en/

stemy

clerkdecourse Teamspeak is specifically designed for gaming vocal chat, it doesn't really fit the description as a discord alternative.

ReclaimersPJ

I know my kids and their cousins hang out in discord voice chat continuously.
You’d be surprised how groups use one or two feature of an entire platform

stemy

ReclaimersPJ Maybe, but there are also people using the discord text chat function (like me and my friends). For us, TS wouln't be a satisfying alternative.

ReclaimersPJ

stemy yeah, that’s totally valid and mostly how I use it.
At which point, is it like a forum or a newsgroup?

Nightoo

ReclaimersPJ

Yup, I think the main issue with Discord being hard to replace, is how it couples a sort of forum-like experience with a more instant messenger-like usability (plus a lot of tooling for more specific use-cases, e.g. a botting API, threads/channels and what not)
If you just want voice chat, than as suggested, a self-hosted Team Speak or similar is absolutely viable.
My friend group has been using exclusively Team Speak for many years until Discord came around. But most Discord communities I know are 99% text-based.

Tkill

Root.app looks interesting. It’s a newcomer and I haven’t had a chance to try it yet but they are definitely trying to create a discord-like experience. https://www.rootapp.com/

stemy

Tkill It doesn't looks like a open source software since there's no trace of any repository.
And i wouldn't advise anyone to use proprietary services for messaging.

stemy

AndyH Thanks for the discovery, this is the closest discord clone i know.
Too bad it's not mature yet.

skrlet13

I saw https://stoat.chat/ , ex Revolt

stemy

skrlet13 Yes, this alternative is mentioned in some post here above.

ntnsndr

It's not really a full replacement, but my lab uses a self-hosted Matrix space for chat and it works fairly well. Our sister app uses Zulip, which is quite popular as well, and much more feature-full.