Matrix/element is the best bet atm. Had a solid 40m users compared to Discord's 140m at some point, which is good proof they can scale up compared to other. Hardest part is convincing your groups to switch from Discord. But you can bridge the two in Matrix and talk between them which might help ease the transition.
Teamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.
Matrix is awful. I don't know if that's still the case but when I tried it a year ago it took me more than 30 minutes to get it working. In discord, you sign up with email (very low friction), click the + button and boom. You've got a private server you friends can join by clicking a link. It Just Works and until an alternative has this level of convenience Discord is not going away.
This is to say nothing of the insanity of public, effectively unmoderated rooms on Matrix.
Was having latency issues with Discord (1+ seconds) with people in adjacent rooms (which created a bit of an echo effect). Tried out self hosted mumble and it's been working pretty well. The older Fedora package refused to acknowledge certificates existed (despite generating them with correct permissions) but the Docker container worked fine out of the box.
> Signal is the E2EE chat app and protocol. It's FOSS software, and can be self-hosted (though with much difficulty)
I can not emphasise this point enough: it is difficult and unsupported to a degree that Signal can not be considered self-hostable to any remotely useful degree.
As an additional note, was looking at teamspeak, particularly https://community.teamspeak.com/, and noticed at the bottom the following:
"powered by discourse.org"
Not sure what forums software you're thinking of but vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse don't have the extra features the author is looking for.
He wrote: >Many of these make heavy use of Discord's voice channels, video chat, and screensharing. These servers have a hard requirement for adequate moderation tools for dealing with any bad actor willing to join the community. [...] Decent Mobile Experience [...]
A lot of admins shut down the forums software and moved to Discord because it didn't have the modern features they wanted. So to migrate off of Discord requires an alternative that duplicates most of what makes Discord valuable. That's what the topic admins wish for but the current options don't give them that.
>otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.
When you make forums you compete with forum aggregators
with more history and social clout, i.e. a reddit replacement.
If someone made better Reddit, it could have a chance, however
reddit-type aggregators crypronite is hosting their own videos/media,
which makes it prohibitively expensive for small companies without
ads and sponsored posts which in turn make them less of "forum aggregator" and
more like facebook social feeds: mainly video/image based dopamine rides
instead of actual knowledge worth keeping.
I'm enjoying Chatto, https://chatto.run/, which is due to launch soon ish. Open source, self hosting, cloud hosted option, etc. Architecture looks pretty cool.
I think I will try to push at least my more techy friends to a combination of Matrix and Teamspeak (because honestly the Matrix implementation of anything VC/Screenshare/Video is pure ass. A group call on Element right now starts a Jitsi conference. Can we be for real). On CachyOS with Wayland I additionally apparently need OBS with WebRTC for streaming because audio streaming support for Wayland seems to be some sort of circle of hell.
Matrix is kinda jank but I hope Discord enshittification will speed up client development a bit. I am just really fond of the concept of federated servers and self-owned chat history. Prevents hostage holding of chats in the future. For people who don't want to switch I will run a Discord Bridge for now but I do hope to get my main contacts off this software honestly.
For me anything that visibly looks like Discord is a non-starter because I want a product with an actual vision, not someone trying to slopcode an exact replacement of the Discord UI. Imagine if Discord just looked like Skype did in 2008. Yuck. The Matrix protocol, for all its faults, at least has some form of vision.
TBH, I hate and have always hated Discord. I'm a tech nerd and it's way too complex for me. Teamspeak worked fine for me... simple channels, voice or text chat if you want. That's all I need in an app like that. Teamspeak seems to still be around.
Matrix/element is the best bet atm. Had a solid 40m users compared to Discord's 140m at some point, which is good proof they can scale up compared to other. Hardest part is convincing your groups to switch from Discord. But you can bridge the two in Matrix and talk between them which might help ease the transition.
Teamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.
Matrix is awful. I don't know if that's still the case but when I tried it a year ago it took me more than 30 minutes to get it working. In discord, you sign up with email (very low friction), click the + button and boom. You've got a private server you friends can join by clicking a link. It Just Works and until an alternative has this level of convenience Discord is not going away.
This is to say nothing of the insanity of public, effectively unmoderated rooms on Matrix.
Was having latency issues with Discord (1+ seconds) with people in adjacent rooms (which created a bit of an echo effect). Tried out self hosted mumble and it's been working pretty well. The older Fedora package refused to acknowledge certificates existed (despite generating them with correct permissions) but the Docker container worked fine out of the box.
> Signal is the E2EE chat app and protocol. It's FOSS software, and can be self-hosted (though with much difficulty)
I can not emphasise this point enough: it is difficult and unsupported to a degree that Signal can not be considered self-hostable to any remotely useful degree.
It should be in the non-starter category.
Small correction, Stoat does have a usable native mobile app:
- Android: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-android
- iOS: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios
The iOS client is available through testglight right now, and has this in a banner on the repo:
"This app is still in early stages, and not yet ready for production."
Just for others who are evaluating it as an option.
How does "DISCOURSE.ORG" compare? Is anybody using it? Anybody using it as a "self hosted" solution?
As an additional note, was looking at teamspeak, particularly https://community.teamspeak.com/, and noticed at the bottom the following: "powered by discourse.org"
Interesting...
Discourse is more forum software than it is chat. At being forum software, it's excellent.
They do have chat-channel features now. I've had a look. Meh.
How about using forums again, which keep the history of discussions instead of loosing all that knowhow in the infinite scroll of doom?
otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
>How about using forums again,
Not sure what forums software you're thinking of but vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse don't have the extra features the author is looking for.
He wrote: >Many of these make heavy use of Discord's voice channels, video chat, and screensharing. These servers have a hard requirement for adequate moderation tools for dealing with any bad actor willing to join the community. [...] Decent Mobile Experience [...]
A lot of admins shut down the forums software and moved to Discord because it didn't have the modern features they wanted. So to migrate off of Discord requires an alternative that duplicates most of what makes Discord valuable. That's what the topic admins wish for but the current options don't give them that.
>otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.
When you make forums you compete with forum aggregators with more history and social clout, i.e. a reddit replacement. If someone made better Reddit, it could have a chance, however reddit-type aggregators crypronite is hosting their own videos/media, which makes it prohibitively expensive for small companies without ads and sponsored posts which in turn make them less of "forum aggregator" and more like facebook social feeds: mainly video/image based dopamine rides instead of actual knowledge worth keeping.
- not everything must be a unicorn.
- if you need aggregation use rss.
I'm enjoying Chatto, https://chatto.run/, which is due to launch soon ish. Open source, self hosting, cloud hosted option, etc. Architecture looks pretty cool.
I think I will try to push at least my more techy friends to a combination of Matrix and Teamspeak (because honestly the Matrix implementation of anything VC/Screenshare/Video is pure ass. A group call on Element right now starts a Jitsi conference. Can we be for real). On CachyOS with Wayland I additionally apparently need OBS with WebRTC for streaming because audio streaming support for Wayland seems to be some sort of circle of hell.
Matrix is kinda jank but I hope Discord enshittification will speed up client development a bit. I am just really fond of the concept of federated servers and self-owned chat history. Prevents hostage holding of chats in the future. For people who don't want to switch I will run a Discord Bridge for now but I do hope to get my main contacts off this software honestly.
For me anything that visibly looks like Discord is a non-starter because I want a product with an actual vision, not someone trying to slopcode an exact replacement of the Discord UI. Imagine if Discord just looked like Skype did in 2008. Yuck. The Matrix protocol, for all its faults, at least has some form of vision.
TBH, I hate and have always hated Discord. I'm a tech nerd and it's way too complex for me. Teamspeak worked fine for me... simple channels, voice or text chat if you want. That's all I need in an app like that. Teamspeak seems to still be around.