- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
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Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
I don’t really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
I also want this suite of things. I stream movies to friends, share games I’m playing…
These are core features to me now in a robust chat client
By reducing a complex topic down to one score that has “features” as only one of many factors, so that “openness” and “safety” push it to the top.
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can’t even tell the difference.
looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
I’ll keep you company in the minority, since that’s what I want too
Live chat is all I ever use but you never know
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?I’m thinking of something else, I think.
You’re thinking of Guilded.
Looks like Roblox forced everyone using Guilded to suddenly have a Roblox account in 2024, and then Guilder officially shut down about 2 months ago (end of 2025).
I would bet on the screen sharing not being that big of a requirement for most people. Voice and text chats though? Yeah, that’s the minimum.
Jitsi, simplex, mumble, matrix, lemmy.
We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything
yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations
Yea… Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn’t great at…
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It’s not search indexable or archivable. It’s more or less a memory hole.
Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.
I hope you’re not implying an old forum search was any good
Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence “search indexable”
I’m not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.
Not denying that it’s shit, I don’t know anyone who’s actually happy with it. But old forums also weren’t built nicely.
You say search indexable as if it’s a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:- moved somewhere
- renamed, so now the link is dead
- was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
- was edited to remove crucial information
- was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
- someone got butthurt so it’s now defaced
- all of the above and more.
So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can’t access it.
The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time
That’s why I also mentioned archivable. Public forums can be archived. If I hit one of those issues I look for archived pages. Deleted discord comments are just silently gone and deleted servers are lost forever
At some point, when you’re combing through archives looking for the exact version of a closed forum post that contains exact info you have, you understand that this system also sucks.
Back when Google was a decent search engine you could just search “something site:someforum.com” since the built in search was so ass
Something Reddit has in common with old forums
Google didn’t remove site:something from their search functionality. Yet.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
If the old service is less convenient that fucking Discord, it’s not better.
The information is as inaccessible now, just in different ways.
We never had a good solution. We had different bad solutions, each bad in it’s unique way.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
oh yeah!
I just set up mybb board a few weeks ago for old times sake. Brought back so many memories.
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he’s going to include Discourse…)
Some other alternatives not reviewed:
- Spacebar
- TeamSpeak
- Root
Spacebar sounded really promising when I checked them out years ago.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are: Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
Unfortunately, seems like it’s still not at a point where it could cover basic Discord functionality.
Edit: I should be clear, I’m not trying to discourage it. I really hope it succeeds to the goal of parity with Discord! Love to hear from someone who has used it a bit.
Yeah, it was immediately clear based on the scoring that he was super biased toward Discourse. It’s not a Discord alternative, and had no place in that list at all.
I mean, it certainly is an alternative to all three morons using discord as some sort of forum for an app or similar. The same way discord is the worst for easily searchable info like a forum is basically the converse for discourse. And exactly the opposite for real time chat obviously.
He at least mentions outright it’s a forum tool. The real problem is having to include it because people misuse discord.
Kind of like anyone using SharePoint for anything. It’s not meant for it.
Why is SimpleX not mentioned anywhere in the article or the comments here? I thought it is similar to Discord. Am I wrong?
Is SimpleX based on Matrix? I have this recollection that it is, but I don’t if it’s a false memory or not.
Looking at its Wikipedia entry, it looks like a reasonable alternative, I hadn’t looked into it before.
Have you had the chance to try it out?
Not a single reference to Zulip either (edit: I meant in the comments on this thread)
Personally, I really want Matrix to succed though, hope this discord diaspora (?) gives them enough push to smooth their problems.Either they edited it to add Zulip or you missed it.
shit I meant in the thread, I get my comment was confusing
Zulip is literally the 5th thing in the article.
yeah my bad, I meant here in the comments, I was thinking of the thread more than the article itself
No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.
God, I hated that terminology when I needed to talk with people about discord.
I can only assume it’s on purpose so average users really understand it wrong to avoid the associated negative view. Clever, really. But absolutely evil.
This wasn’t intended to be misleading. The term “Server” as in a Discord Server is because, be fore Discord were the days of Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. For many of us gamers used to have to run or pay for their own actual server to have that kind of functionality. Then we’d combine direct calling with Skype for small groups and video. The term made sense at the time, but hasn’t held up to the test of time. Basically Discord solved a problems of having to pay for those servers, and having to use two separate programs.
I’m a it professional (working in enterprise DCs) and have been running ts2 and murmur myself. It was misleading from the beginning and while I do understand your point I can not see a company doing this in good faith, I am too old for that.
The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
I highly doubt that when you start a “Discord server”, there’s any new machinery spun up. There is a near 100% chance it’s just an entry in a database. Nobody’s running a server just for him. So I don’t think there’s even reason to be charitable.
Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that
If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
Apparently that’s already in the backend since december, they’re just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it
If they enable that and iron out the iOS app, it’d be a surefire migration for my whole crew.
I can’t even create an account on Stoat yet. New account confirmation emails take hours to arrive and by the time they do, they are already expired.
This is not a discord alternative yet and not be for a long time most likely.
They’re having issues with their email provider due to the hug of death effect, they did not expect to get so much traffic so fast
I understand, but they are losing the train I guess. People are giving up easily when they need a solution fast.
Their loss. They have at least a month to migrate, probably more before most users get forced to verify, there is no rush. That and an ad-free hobby-run project like Stoat doesn’t gain anything from a massive user increase unless it correlates to an increase in devs or money.
I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.
it is open source https://github.com/stoatchat/
I wish their Android version didn’t require Google Play Services. Real bummer.
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
They should use some of the funds for UX.
For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXACTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.
Not whatever they’re doing now.
copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY
Please don’t. Please for the love of god don’t
I think that is one of the problems. People want an exact copy of discord but don’t ask if discord even has the perfect layout and if it should be copied directly. Anyway there are clients like cinny which look similar and other chat platforms like stroat(previously revolt) and spacebar which look exactly like discord and they are not doing massively well either so shrugs.
Look at Cinny if you’re looking for a Discord-like experience
Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, that’s why it’s in the position it’s in today, yet it gets ranked lower than… Rocket chat??
If we’re objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.
Discord got popular because it’s centralized and pretty
I switched initially because it was lighter on resources then Skype
Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. “Rooms” (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, b
I don’t think that’s true anymore. it has been encrypted by default for quite a few years now
It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.
You don’t have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.
i haven’t seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.
Pripietary…
i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.
My friend group also jumped to that first, unless it’s federated though it’s not going to be “like discord” enough in the long run.
Part of what makes discord so good to many is that it’s one app where you can connect to various different friend groups/modding groups/artists/etc…
Matrix does allow that with its federation model, ts6 does not 🤷
i HATE when i have to connect to other discords for that purpose. finding information on discord is the worse of all possible outcomes. if i am running into trouble i much prefer a searchable forum. as for different friend groups, i think team speak has the ability to save multiple friend groups servers.
Idk what you people are smoking, forums built in search functionality was always ass.
However results showing up in search indexes were fantastic. I have a whole rant about that in another thread already. My rant: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/23704903
the rant was basically summed up as: “i think forums are archaic and i feel the ability to search them was bad
i think that discord has a much better system because the devs can answer people’s questions directly.”
except my experience with these discords results in: me asking the question, a bot or some person states that the devs no longer answers questions due to having to answer the same questions over and over and to use the search function. the search function pulls up every time the key word is mentioned but not the context or resolution, and i end up having to read the time line, including random people chiming in with their own questions and now i am tracking who is talking to which person in tandem on the same chat, and some times they cross, some times other people come in to give their 2 bits, sometimes it’s starts an argument or is wrong, it irrelevant. an absolute fucking nightmare.
with a forum, i am usually directed there via a google search, it’s a sub division of the topics forum specifically created by the person with the question, the responses of everyone are for the topics exclusive benefit, and if there is arguments or wrong info, everyone can easily point it out without missing it in real time. and when the topic is either resolved, or given up on the topic ends. it’s not used for other people’s problems at any point.
Absolutely incorrect, incredible
you are as helpful as a discord support chat, congratulations, you can sit there and be smug that it suddenly means you are right in your own head
I’m working bro, just read the first bit and saw how you completely misinterpreted my points
Edit: Have some time now, here’s my response.
*the rant was basically summed up as: “i think forums are archaic and i feel the ability to search them was bad
i think that discord has a much better system because the devs can answer people’s questions directly.”*
Completely wrong, I literally said the exact opposite in fact, what we need is a better discord wherein there is no lock in where you have to have a discord account to be able to search for things with an engine.
The search functionality literally in forums is and was bad, your point about how bad discord search is, is exactly the same thing I experienced on forums with their built in search functions, Google worked great by comparison of often getting me to the most relevant portion of a thread. Sure I still had to sometimes look forward and backwards a bit but it worked well enough.
I also never said anything about devs being able to answer peoples questions directly, I did however say it being a real-time chat made it much easier. Obviously the devs would hopefully be active whether it was async or not, but that’s not a platform feature lmao.
I do not see how you so wildly misinterpreted what I said to be the exact opposite.
except my experience with these discords results in: me asking the question, a bot or some person states that the devs no longer answers questions due to having to answer the same questions over and over and to use the search function. the search function pulls up every time the key word is mentioned but not the context or resolution, and i end up having to read the time line, including random people chiming in with their own questions and now i am tracking who is talking to which person in tandem on the same chat, and some times they cross, some times other people come in to give their 2 bits, sometimes it’s starts an argument or is wrong, it irrelevant. an absolute fucking nightmare.
This is the same experience I mentioned before with built in forum search being bad, also discord users/servers do not use functionality like the forum feature or threading hardly ever, many don’t even know those features exist, I’d like those to be an option in any discord-like replacement as they help alleviate those issues a good bit on their own.
Specifically, you can group things by topics or threads, it still has some poor ux tho that could be much better, but overall I think search engines are simply better then basically any search tooling these platforms build for themselves.
with a forum, i am usually directed there via a google search, it’s a sub division of the topics forum specifically created by the person with the question, the responses of everyone are for the topics exclusive benefit, and if there is arguments or wrong info, everyone can easily point it out without missing it in real time. and when the topic is either resolved, or given up on the topic ends. it’s not used for other people’s problems at any point.
Again, there is functionality in discord with similar features, people just don’t use them out of laziness or not being aware they exist.
I work at a major corporation as a senior tech specialist working with lower representatives actually speaking to clients, real time communication is leaps and bounds preferable to async communication in my 7 years in this role. {Edit2: We had to train the representatives to keep their discussion of their kssue in one thread, it was not inherent knowledge, used slack initially and now have to use teams which was definitely a step down but at least it has threading at all. Same with teaching them to search the channel, so often the answers are there if you search for them.}
I’ll clarify since you seem to think I’m a discord lover, I literally canceled my nitro a year ago when rumblings of IPO was coming because I knew what followed, I looked into replacements like Revolt (now stoat) and Matrix and tried to convince all my friends to move off discord.
I’m not a fan of discords direction, however I am intimately familiar with it, and can speak to its strengths and weaknesses as I have seen them, and prior to that, a lot of experience with forums, from being a user to hosting my own, my goal is to hopefully share that with others to maybe be able to steer a future FOSS/federated version that is more open and usable.
I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000’s IM landscape. Soon we’ll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn’t support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.
Hey… Trillian was awesome.
Lmao that is the exact program that came to mind.
Dont do pidgin too dirty…
Pidgin was good; it did what needed to be done and wasn’t that bad at it.
The last service I was using it for was a self-hosted XMPP server for a small group of friends that were all refugees of other defunct services. We ended up finally moving to Slack or Discord (the group bifurcated along game-playing lines).
Now I’ve got to find something new yet again!
I’m running with signal for just plain ol bsing. And then maybe steam just for voice chat gaming. Discords been dumped its actually been a refreshing week of something different.
I tried pidgin and it didn’t land with me. I always went back to Trillian.
Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
I absolutely love matrixs UI, but I wish they would make the device verification configurable. aware it’s a million times easier to say then implement though.
The enshitification of the internet as a whole killed so many forums. I used to scour forums (and still regularly visit old forums) for info, but now it’s on discord or some bs facebook group. I miss old school forums and wikis and I fail to understand why everybody got away from them :c how on earth is an endless scroll of a FB page remotely conductive to finding information vs searching for the right thread on a forum?! I have no experience using discord so can’t speak for them but seeing all these articles makes me think I never will either.
Trying to find relevant information that’s supposed to be in a Discord server is one of the most hair-pulling aggravating experiences I’ve ever had on a computer. I mean seriously, any aspiring software developer of any kind should outright feel ashamed if they are relying on Discord for anything related to their project. Code repository sites are free, made for that purpose, and already offer everything necessary for collaboration. If communications are necessary, that’s what email is for - everyone has it already.
And yeah I also hate the over-dependence on Facebook. If a companies “site” is their fb page, they don’t get my business.
These things are successful not because they’re good. It’s because they’re easy and convenient. That’s the biggest thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to alternatives.
Ugh yea I have thought about trying to get away from FB, but a few years ago I moved to a more rural area than I was before and it’s incredible how many places -the regional dump among them - don’t have a website it’s just Facebook pages if you want info like if theres closures due to weather or operating hours.
I get that, I had to keep my FB when I lived in a rural area just to pay rent. Lazy.
Switching to a self-hosted good old Teamspeak 6. Their screen sharing is very good, and audio quality is far above Discord. Overall it’s still need some polish but is okay.
Isn’t that closed source tho?
Maybe, but let’s deal with one crisis at a time
But isn’t that the wrong approach?
If you want to choose something better, shouldn’t be ‘enshittificationability’ be the main point you want to address? That is the reason discord is doing most of the bad stuff. Proprietary software is about enshittification.
No.
The main point that needs to be addressed is the requirement to upload your face or government ID. This exodus has nothing to do with Discord not being Open Source.
If you’d rather stay on Discord and give them your face while you await the “perfect” solution to materialize you are free to do so. But I think everyone else just needs something purpose ready that doesn’t ask for their face. Then when a fully functional, self hosted, open source solution appears they can reasses.
I mean the issue at hand is discord enshittifying, TeamSpeak has been around for a lot longer and didn’t do that (even when they were in discords position market wise) which also mlght be because their funding model is actually sustainable.
Sure they might enshittify later down the line anway but it’s an alternative that’s here now and solves the ossue at hand
True. At least it’s self-hosted. I just hope some real alternative to Discord comes soon.
Should still be a massive upgrade to discord in terms of how much you’re getting shafted
Teamspeak sounds familiar, I think I had issues with them once before. Is it the one bundled with that OverWolf malware?
I think TS3 is bundled with Overwolf, but not TS6. I can be wrong.
Is screen sharing available for self hosting? Last I checked (6 months ago) the TS server version wasn’t publicly available yet.
If it is I’ll give it another go!
The interface indicates that sharing can be done via P2P or server. Since I cannot select the server option, and both my friends and I have stable internet connections, I left it on P2P. I successfully tested streaming in 1440p/60fps on Warframe and Nioh 3, and the stream was remarkably smooth, even during scenes with heavy visual effects.
P2p streaming hasn’t worked for me on the Linux client
I made a test with a friend who is on Nobara. He streamed and watched a stream: everything worked flawlessly.
What client version and server version? I’m running the latest docker container and whatever is in the arch repos
Client : 6.0.0-beta3.4 Server : 6.0.0-beta8
On Nobara, my friend used the flatpak version.
Hm those versions seem to match what I have going, is there special configuration for a TURN server or anything that you had to do?
That’s great to hear and pretty cool that it can be done as P2P. I’ll definitely give it a go now!
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
