Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
If you just need voice comms and basic chat mumble/murmur has worked great for me for ages.
Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.
Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I’m very excited!
I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.
I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different
it’s Element/Matrix if we’re lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won’t be a “platform” you have to leave when it goes corporate.
Nheko provides an interface that is reminiscent of Discord. Fully featured and fast Matrix client.
Thank you for the recommendation. I tried element a while ago and found it lacking. Matrix must be the way forward. Disregarding IRC of course.
Revolt is F/OSS
https://github.com/revoltchat/
It’s not just a company with a clone of Discord, all the server back end, etc is open.
That doesn’t really change that it’s one company hosting it. Unless you’re willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren’t willing to join each others instances?
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https://spacebar.chat/ looks like it will eventually be good, it looks like it’s in its infancy right now though
I’m running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I’ve set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.
Did you follow a guide, or know one you could link? I’m thinking this is the path for me and my friends too.
I can try to write some stuff up, it’s not super complex. Core requirement for my setup is Docker + a domain. I recommend Linux host but you can make Docker Desktop work.
Let me write some stuff down this week.
man I wish mumble had a better interface and a chat function, it could real FOSS competition with Discord, but the lack of a chat feature is holding it back
There’s no text chat in mumble? Really? (I seem to remember otherwise, sorry)
There is text chat but it’s not persistent, or very customizable.
Its been ages for me, so I may be incorrect now. I think the chat is not persistent and I am pretty sure there is no channels. Its most definitely not set up how discord is where its more of a chat client that has voice rather than a voice client that has chat.
It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.
It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.
Unbelievably so. Mumble is… basically one setup command. Don’t even need a domain. And it needs absolutely no resources, can run on a Pi Zero.
Setting up my own Matrix server was honestly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever attempted in decades of non-professionally using computers and I’m still not sure I’d be able to properly take care of the installation if it breaks. Sooo many moving parts. All the federation-oriented projects that rely on adoption rates reaaaaally desperately need setup wizards before any other additional feature.I’ve set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.
Matrix is like “Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn’t work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that’s NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?”
that and screen sharing
An alternative would need screen share, just voip is not enough any more.
What if you had OBS create a “camera” of your screen, and then use that through video chat?
Ah, the good old “screenshare not working on wayland” workaround!
The problem is that performant screenshare (to multiple users) more or less requires infrastructure. That requires money, and it’s impossible to compete on price with services that have the VC-enshitification model.
You can get around this in a few ways, but they’re all tradeoffs that are in some way or other worse than discord.
- P2P - sacrifice latency, reliability
- direct multi-stream - sacrifice PC performance and/or bitrate
- paid infrastructure - sacrifice money
I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s simpler and by it’s very nature doesn’t require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.
Plus, don’t forget screen sharing in discord isn’t very good as is (720p30) if you’re not a paid user.
honestly that isnthe only thing that stopd me from going all in on teamspeak/mumble
i just need a screen sharing solution (not necessarily built into those tools)
It never made sense to me how popular discord was to begin with.
Other voice chat programs were crap, discord was significantly better and more consistent. Simple as. It still has features way ahead of other services. The business side is shitty but it works without anyone needing to know anything with no troubleshooting.
- persistent IRC style chat rooms
- virtual “servers” to organize said chat rooms, manage privileges, control visibility
- integration with bots for all sorts of things (moderation, user welcome, dice rollers, etc.)
- integration with games/music players/etc (I don’t use it but it’s very popular)
- privacy and moderation controls
- client allows fine grained notification controls
- voice, video, and screen casting simultaneously
- “server” templates: use an existing server config (roles, permissions, rooms, etc.) when creating a new server.
That’s just off the top of my head.
It’s enshittifying, but the value proposition is still hard to beat. I’m really hoping Matrix catches up with the feature set soon.
It used to be fast and not full of useless bloat like what you see right now. The usual enshittification.
Somebody needs to create an XMPP/Jitsi hybrid
rocketchat seems decent
Why use Element for matrix?
From what I can tell it collets and links data to you: Location, identifiers and contact information.
How is that private or better than Signal?
Because people don’t use discord for privacy. They use it for gaming, voice chat, communities and streaming.
@Nikelui is 100% right: a chat room may be private, but it’s not secure. Even in an encrypted room, every additional person you add reduces your security. I’m sure there’s some paper out there that studies this, and that the graph of # of members vs security is an inverse power ratio.
If it’s a public chat, there is no security.
However, with Matrix, if you run your own server and restrict access to your friends, at least you can be fairly certain your chat room isn’t being used to train an LLM, or to harvest information about you for advertising.
There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.
Public chats are not my concern. That’s information I’m putting out there willingly.
Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.
Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?
I don’t know. I don’t use Element; I wasn’t aware it requested location service access. I switched to FluffyChat ages ago; it only asks for notification.
But that’s just for group chat. I’ve been using Jami lately, and it does ask for location access; that’s because it has a “share location” feature, that - if you use it - shows a little map with your location to the person you’re sharing with. Maybe Element has implemented something similar?
Are you specifically referring to the mobile client of Element? i wasn’t away of anything with the desktop client that has anything to do with location.
I use Signal for private and personal messages. I use Discord solely for gaming and voicechat. A good alternative doesn’t need to be overly private (although that would be a bonus of course). It just needs to have a good UI and feature parity with Discord.
There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.
Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.
Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?
You know the app still works if you deny it loc permissions, right?
This would be the perfect time for someone to throw up a nice UI for a webrtc based voice chat platform in the browser. Nothing to install, no crazy permission/server setup. Just create a room and invite your friends. Boom, team based voice chat.
I’ve been tinkering with old BBS software :)
