I know there is revolt as a FOSS alternative to discord but it’s not federated.
Matrix and clients for it like Element have always been my go to for federated chat like discord/teams/mattersmost. The main missing feature is voice channels imho.
Which is coming. Eventually. At some point.
Man I hope so! The beta is out for element support https://call.element.io
Oh hey I remember you from my reddit post :D
Hello! Welcome to greener pastures.
I hear everyone talk about element but when i go to check it out i see it is minimum 50 users. Am i missing the smaller tier?
To clarify, that’s for them hosting the service for you, and is intended for enterprises mainly. You can self host element, since it’s open source, while only paying your own server costs, or just use an existing instance like on https://app.element.io
Self hosting might make sense on that small of a scale.
Matrix is amazing.
Matrix is federated and pretty good. It’s not ActivityPub though…
Modern IRC combined with a Mumble server works pretty well.
For smaller groups XMPP is also fine, but group calls are not widely implemented yet.
Jitsi-meet also works ok for voice chat.
Matrix is your best bet.
I also like it very much.
I hear a lot about Matrix, but the instructions for self hosting seem very complicated. If anyone has a simpler method, or script I’d be happy to use it.
This repo does a great job of simplifying it. The deployment process is completely automated with ansible, has the best documentation you could ask for https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Awesome thanks so much!
It is complicated. Most complex thing I’ve ever set up.
I don’t think there’s a simplified version, every step is needed.
I am self hosting matrix synapse, it’s actually much easier than XMPP with SSL certs generated by Caddy. Ejabberd doesn’t play well with them.
EDIT: with docker.
Revolt had us all intrigued, but without federation, it’s like a pizza without the cheese.
Enter, Matrix and Element - FOSS, decentralized, and yes, federated.
Element, built on Matrix, provides real-time communication with end-to-end encryption. But voice channels, alas, still our Achilles heel.
Yet, remember, we’re the pioneers of this brave new digital world. A federated voice solution may not exist now, but give it time. We’ve got some amazing and selfless coders chomping at the bit!
Old school Mumble, while is not federated, is still decentralized and perfect for game communication.
You’re looking for Matrix, a federated, encrypted communication protocol used by clients like Element, fluffychat, etc.
I just wish element was in the official Debian repos. It sucks having to add another repo
If you have Flatpak setup on Debian, Element can be found on and installed from Flathub!
Awww I thought this was asking about Discourse :(
sorry ^_°
Maybe thats what Spacebar is aiming for?
Looking good. though I’m not looking for self hosted solution.
fediverse but not selfhosted? i’m not sure. that might almost be opposing requirements.
@hendrik @zexu I believe that Rochko (spelling?) foresaw his software being run on many small instances versus several large players. Hence that is why I think scalability wasn’t an emphasis at the time. From the little I understand of Ruby is that it doesn’t scale very well. I think the idea behind Sidekiq is to mitigate that problem.
I mean, i don’t wanna host it. i need plug & play type thing.
Sure. I’m always kinda uncertain why people ask for libre software and then not want it for the same things i like about it. If you want something plug and play and decentralization isn’t important to you: Maybe you don’t need an alternative and Discord is the right thing for you. Otherwise it’s not the software (architecture), you just want to go to an existing instance and let someone else do the self-hosting for you.
Aether is kinda like that, but they support “free speech” and there are subs with slurs as the title. Use at your own risk, I guess.
