With the recent news about discord asking for face or ID scan, what other alternatives are there that we can recommend to our less tech-savvy friends?
I’ve been using Matrix for over a decade. It has its problems with stability, but it’s getting better over time, especially with the newer Matrix 2.0 and Element X clients.
- Open source (clients and server)
- Federated
- Self hostable
- Optional E2EE for rooms, and I believe by default for PMs/DMs, along with forward secrecy
- Integration and bridging with other services, although it’s not as seamless as I would like
- Has group calling/VC, but I don’t use that enough to judge how good it is. Should also be able to integrate with Jitsi Meet as an alternative.
- Supports Spaces similar to Discord “servers”, but not as seamless as Discord. Each room (equivalent to a Discord channel) is its own separate thing.
If an alternative isn’t open source and doesn’t support federation and E2EE, I wouldn’t even consider it.
We’ve been using Element (Matrix) for our household group chats and it has worked perfectly. That said, I do have a whole ass IT professional in-house to set up a dedicated server so I cannot speak to ease and such.
I think most people don’t want to self host though. I can’t speak to the ease of signing up and using the available public servers.
In terms of functionality as a chat program it’s great.
I can’t speak to the ease of signing up and using the available public servers.
I can speak to this. It has been fine. Your mileage may vary by server/host of course.
Looked around for a while now, these are the alternatives I found.
- Zulip: More like a Slack alternative for an organization/team/group, can be self hosted, seems to be pretty mature and well made. Has good client apps. No screen sharing/voice chat.
- Stoat: Seems to be mostly similar to Discord, doesn’t seem mature though, self hosting documentation doesn’t seem refined, could be okay if you use their server, not sure about mobile apps
- Spacebar: 1:1 Discord clone, voice chat features seem to be incomplete but seems pretty good otherwise, I tried to install their server but it doesn’t run for me…
- Matrix: Feature complete, but kinda buggy, may work well enough for some but my friends complained for poor UX
- Mattermost: Gotta self host or pay, there seems to be some weird limitation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861331 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594673
- IRC: maybe not for non-techies, but IRCv3 has some “modern” features and Goguma(Android)/TheLounge(Web) looks quite decent
- XMPP: Seems like it should be good, but I’m having trouble setting it up so can’t tell
- Tailchat: UI looks just like Discord, but I just heard of it now so haven’t tried
Ive spent hours configuring stoat and spacebar and I have to say they are absolutely not ready for self hosting. They also lack vital features my friends and I use, like high quality screensharing or video.
I’m trying my hand at matrix, but it’s rife with problems too. If you want high throughput video, you need to set up Jitsi alongside. I haven’t been having a good time.
So Stoat has screensharing but only with low quality? Looking into self hosting it
It seems to be a bit “bleeding edge” at the moment, and the instructions for self-hosting are not really sufficient (at least for me).
I did the same search today and found out that teamspeak just got updated to a more “modern” UI and feature set. While it is still proprietary software, it’s more feature complete than a lot of the other FOSS alternatives.
it seems like they’re using matrix under the hood
From what im seeing matrix and stoat. And both have their issues. But this feels kinda like the reddit api moment.
I want to say Stoat… However I’m struggling to even create an account… And I have much more patience than my less-savvy friends.
If like me, you care less about servers and the “social media” aspect, and are just searching for group messaging, voice/video chat with screen-sharing capabilities, then Signal Desktop will suffice. That is what I’m preparing to suggest. You can now also sign up without a phone number which is a bonus.
That should work fine, at least until Stoat matures. As a bonus, doubles down as a replacement to Whatsapp: two birds, one stone.
Stoat are experiencing problems due to the large increase in numbers, marking them as spam. Until this is fixed, just contact their official support e-mail and they’ll get you set up manually.
I know. I contacted them, but I still cannot sign in. I am getting “try again later” error messages when signing in for the first time. When checking the browser console, it says InvalidCredentials, despite me being certain I am using the correct ones.
I got an error massage first as well. Replied with a screenshot and the 2nd link they sent me worked.
Matrix is the canonical fediverse replacement. I’ve also seen recommendations for zulip recently.
Yes matrix is decentralized like the fediverse. As far as I can tell none of these other suggestions people are making use decentralized technology (though I might be wrong about that)
There is Shoot which is actually part of the fediverse (uses ActivityPub).
Spacebar is sort of, but you just host it yourself
I get what you’re saying, but I’d personally call any FOSS alternative that can be self hosted by community members decentralized.
(So Teamspeak wouldn’t count because of centralized updates and proprietary code, but all the others would despite having “official” servers)
I would say Stoat, but right now they’re getting hit with the mega hug of death and it usually takes a few hours for the email confirmation to show up, and every time I saw it I was too busy to see it before it expired.
No their email verification has never worked right. They have insanely strict filters on it to “prevent spammers”.
The only similar enough one that’s also free is matrix. At least what I’ve found so far.
https://sharedown.kaffekod.nu/05c3716c-05fd-46f0-a90d-efdc6ee8c8a4 link will work for about a week.
I’m considering IRC and teamspeak3 instead
Does Matrix do voice yet? If not, it’s not a discord alternative - it’s an IRC alternative
Yes, our team uses it as a Skype/teams replacement, we pay $20 per month for a server on etke.cc in Germany. Their implementation, however, doesn’t seem to do group videocalls with screensharing, just group voice.
We are not federated because it is just an internal service that we need.
As far as I understand it, they kind of do but you need to install a third party app and use it through the Element interface. But I don’t know for sure.
I have updated the list: https://sharedown.kaffekod.nu/05c3716c-05fd-46f0-a90d-efdc6ee8c8a4
I’d recommend Matrix. It’s not perfect, but I dislike the alternatives more. Btw if you decide to give it a try, don’t use matrix.org, it’s too large of an instance which makes it slow and kind of ruins the decentralization aspect of it. tchncs.de seems like a good choice. I’d also love to give anyone in need of a matrix server a registration token, though registrations are not open on gregtech.eu, so contact me for a key if you’d like.
I think i’ve heard of mumla and big blue button, don’t know how much that fits your needs.
Stoat would be nice except its still a silo, you can self host your own silo but it doesnt federate, cant even use their offical app with self hosted instances. Upryzing seems like it might be going in a good direction but too early to know for sure.
Xmpp or matrix are the only truely decentralized options and neither is up for doing all the tasks discord gets used for.
The problem is many folks dont grasp the concept of doing one thing well over doing lots of things just sort of okay.
My suggestion to friends is figure out what discord features you actually care about and find apps that do those things. Muble for audio, obs to screen share, xmpp or matrix to chat, etc.
Like 90% of users, I care about voice chatting with my friends, having persistent chat sessions, being able to share videos and links, being able to share files, being able to share screens, and stream to my friends.
Yes. ALL of these features are important. Not “oh but you can chat using this app, and share files with this app, and stream with this other app”. No. All those features listed. In a single app.
Until an alternative pops up that offers all of that, I refuse to accept the other “alternatives” listed as viable. They are not. There is a reason people moved from things like mumble and teamspeak to discord. Because discord offered more services at a higher level of convenience. I despise what discord is doing, but pretending like having to use multiple different programs to try and poorly accomplish what discord offers on its own would somehow be appealing to the majority of users is insane.
“Oh but these are decentraliz-” I. Do. Not. Give. A. Shit. Nor do the vast majority of discord users. Decentralization is fine and good, but it is so far down the list of priorities that it’s worthless to talk about.
Man, people really prioritize convenience over all else, huh? We are fucking doomed.
Dont some of these alternatives check all of those boxes? Eg Stoat and Matrix have persistent chat, file sharing, screensharing, and streaming dont they?
stoat aims for that but isn’t stable. matrix needs jitsi for screen sharing and streaming, that’s not like the smooth experience with discord. also i’m unsure about persistent chat in the long term, i’ve used matrix for a while and the rooms tend to not last for long amd get ‘upgraded’ or something (had to click on some button that said something around ‘this chatroom has moved’… and couldn’t search from the old chatlog properly)
My suggestion to friends is figure out what discord features you actually care about and find apps that do those things. Muble for audio, obs to screen share, xmpp or matrix to chat, etc.
Agree with the sentiment, but OBS to screen share? How does one do that?
OBS allows you to stream video (hence its ubiquitous use by streamers on sites like Twitch), so you could simply configure OBS to stream for a smaller audience (your friends) instead using whatever web hook or additional program needed.
Are you suggesting I should be setting up “private” streams via Twitch or YouTube when I want to do a pair programming session?
That’s not a solution.
No, what I am saying because that functionality exists within OBS, it can be redirected/repurposed to directly stream the video through another application/protocol entirely (although if that’s already release ready is up for debate).
The proof of capability is there from the pre-existing Youtube/Twitch use cases, but there’s no reason that OBS couldn’t work as well for something like Matrix (but the groundwork may not be ready yet).
discord screen shares are very low latency and well integrated… is it possible to do something similar with obs? genuinely asking.
I would imagine the limiting factors would be bandwidth and compute - I imagine discord offloads some of the processing on their servers to make sharing such a smooth experience, while services like Twitch intentionally introduce delay to make stream sniping more difficult.
So for OBS, the most difficult part of having a low latency stream to another person is having a strong, speedy connection, and a beefy enough gpu/cpu to handle the encoding quality necessary.
have tried running am rtmp server, for some reason even on my local network and very low res/quality it was awfully slow sadly… :/
