Fluxer is the most promising one so far. It doesn’t have easy self-hosting yet, but it’s in development. What exists so far is pretty good though.
It’s roadmap is amazing, I’m hoping it will go far
Yeah this is what we’re waiting for too.
Looks very exciting to self host with Tailscale/Netbird.
Weird how they are good at digging up the past relationship between the matrix team prior donators with the mosad. but failed to mention not even once that matrix’s biggest advantage is its federated nature.
So imagine you have a selfhosted matrix server and you want to invite a friend over for a chat but this friend already has an account at his other friend’s server. in Matrix he doesn’t have to make an account on every server their interlocutor is in, he just sends his messages, like its done over email, or here on lemmy (fediverse). this is an advantage other software like fluxer of stoat don’t have. and I doubt they will able to add it anytime soon, as the work needed is probably huge and would need years of work to make a proper secure e2e federate messaging solution.
Guy literally told people the criteria he was using, one of which was searching for things like that because that’s the reason for the video in the first place, the Discord exodus due to deep state ties. He admits his knowledge is limited. Weird how hard it is for some people to see things from someone else’s point of view.
EDIT: changed to more accurately represent how Matrix operates.
The issue is that due to the way Matrix is structured, it essentially spreads copies of unencrypted metadata to every instance participating in those rooms, So it’s federated, but difficult to actually keep metadata from being spread around
even if you don’t federate with the main Matrix server, if any server you do federate with dies, it’ll get spread there. You’d have to be extremely cautious who you federate with to avoid that, or not federate at all, which defeats the purpose.As an alternative, Movim, which uses XMPP and is also federated, does not spread meta data around like that.
XMPP is a shitshow of its own, very fragmented architecture. different incomplete implementations. each server can chose which features (extensions) to turn on and which not) so you can’t be sure that the person you are trying to talk to on the other server can have access to the same features, like threads or voip.
I have previously read that omemo 2 implementation is insecure. my previous experience with it 4 years ago made me give up after encrypted messages were getting lost when messaging between different clients
there is no one flagship app for XMPP that works cross platefrom and has all features implemented. heck I can’t even find a windows that support voip. and their will be none. cause xmpp has lost all traction.
As for Movim, I hate using web apps. bad user experience in general. add to that I don’t remember it ever having been audited
I have previously read that omemo 2 implementation is insecure.
It’s not insecure. The origin of that myth is this blog, however the creator deleted a response left by one of the OMEMO developers, which explained that the newer versions of OMEMO were essentially open betas, and that when a final stable release is made, only then should the client developers implement a newer version.
The Blog author’s response to deleting that comment was:
“I’ll make an edit later about the protocol version thing, but I’m not interested in having questions answered. My entire horse in this race is for evangelists to f** off and leave me alone. That’s it. That’s all I want.”
Which I think shows it was done in bad faith.
You can read a longer response I left in regards to that here, if you’re interested.
there is no one flagship app for XMPP that works cross platefrom and has all features implemented.
The Movim client is installable on all platforms as a PWA, which prevents confusion. But if you use other clients, it is true that they have differing feature support.
heck I can’t even find a windows that support voip. and their will be none.
Movim is that client. It supports Group voice/video calls and screensharing w/ audio share (a recent addition, which currently requires a chromium based browser to share the audio). Sure, it’s not a native app, but neither is Discord (it’s just another Electron app).
We need a federated solution now, otherwise we’ll all just hop to another centralized platform with all the pitfalls that brings.
As for Movim, I hate using web apps. bad user experience in general.
As the video mentions, it’s worth some inconvenience for the privacy, and currently there is no other federated Discord alternative besides XMPP and Matrix (and matrix has way too many issues to even consider, IMHO).
The community adopting Movim or supporting it with donations and bug reports will help it develop and become more polished, and there are efforts to standardize a common XMPP package platform to make deployment simpler and easier. The entire landscape for Discord alternatives all have their downsides, XMPP is the only current option that could become a long-term, permanent solution.
deleted by creator
I understand the concern, and I find it fishy that the matrix team didn’t try to address that (maybe they did but I just didn’t come across that)
but on the other hand many governments and ministries like the French MOD have deployed matrix locally for their private use. not sure they want to use a software that the mossad can directly tap into
French MOD have deployed matrix locally for their private usage. not sure they want to use a software that the mossad can directly tap into
I wouldn’t put any stock into that as a metric of if it’s safe or not, since Spain and Germany were happy to [buy a contract for Pegasus, another Israeli surveillance software adopted widely by EU governments. The Netherlands is another suspected user.
EU governments were also happy to adopt Microsoft products despite the security implications, and even way back in the 80’s used Promis, which had a known US/Israeli backdoor in it (there’s a really great documentary about Promis on netflix, surprisingly, though I’d recommend sailing to watch it, yarr).
So should some of Lemmy’s, and yet here we are.
There is no known state or corporate connection to Lemmy or Piefed, unlike Matrix.
Yep, and yet almost anyone who has spent any time on Lemmy knows what I’m referring to (whether they recognize it and do so as a problem is another matter)
I have no idea what you are referring too, but I only look at my subscribed communities, so I have no idea what’s going on in the “Lemmy meta.” Being able to only see the communities I subscribe too is one of my three primary reasons for coming here.
The developer’s politics vs suspecting a platform may be developed and compromised by state actors are on an entirely different level.
It goes beyond politics into flagrantly lying about moderation actions to push narratives.
deleted by creator
Tbf, there were no alternatives at the time when most people moved here. Now there is one with Piefed, I really should move my server.
I maybe too tired to read this thread with all the people implying things and not saying anything straight… I’m very confused, can you maybe let me in on the big secret? Who did what? Lemmy creator/admin? I have no idea what is everyone talking about lol
It seems like an option, but gonna say, having seen some of their biggest contributors try to push people into switching communities over to those moderated by community hoarders also heavily into anarcho-marxism politics - not really getting rid of the problem, are we.
As someone who identifies as an Anarcho-Syndaclist, I’d kindly ask you not to lump Anarchists in with the Marxist-Leninists. Historically, Anarchists usually get fucked over by MLs just as frequently, if not more so, as by capitalists.
Every Anarchist I’ve had interactions with here has been either pretty vocal about opposition to the political and moral leanings of the people you’re referring to, or think anarchist sounds better than Marxist-Leninist, but actually hold to the ideals of the latter not the former.👍Cheers
Afaik, Matrix is also a protocol on which you can build your own thing. To me that was always the biggest draw. The current “Matrix chat” is a reference implementation of that.
A group of developers can take the Matrix protocol and make their own chat app and an organization can be built around it to do operational work and support (hosting). Discord 2 can just be Matrix underneath, not Matrix in name.Matrix is a joke of a protocol. The idea is play but there was clearly no theoretical work before implementation, so they’re running after obvious security holes now.
A lot of those things list, especially around deletion, seem like issues with federation in general. I’d love if they suggested an alternative, because quite a few of these are just general issues with encryption/privacy in any system.
The fact that we went from Teamspeak to Skype to Discord and back to Teamspeak again is wild.
I miss Dolby Axon
In my experience, Matrix has a lot of misleading functionalities that drive people into enough of a false sense of security to out themselves.
I’m curious as to what these are, as I’m setting up a matrix server right now.
Have you looked into https://element.io/en/server-suite/community ?
I run my own server for friends and family. And there are more abd more optional addons that may have made that server suite a more sane place to start when selfhosting. I have not evaluated it tho, but thought you should know about it.
Is the idea to make it easier? Cause I am also setting up matrix atm. I don’t use kubernetes though. Or is the idea that it will be maybe perfectly aligned with the element client?
Afaik there is a docker compose as well. It is probably all of the above. Alignment with elements seems like it just by the name. And easier setupbif you want all the bells and whistles you can add onto matrix.
For some that might be a bad thingnif it exclude some clients. While other wsnt the features.Why would it exclude some clients? Just protocols?
Just based on the names. But I assume things like element call is implementable by other clients as well.
Haven’t heard of it but matrix is a protocol with voice chat so I thought you just use whatever client
That may be so, but my group of 4 has been using it for voice, text, and screen share, with almost zero issues. (Except a couple sync issues that fixed itself in a day) We are working on getting off the matrix.org server soon though.
I’m surprised actually how good its been. I am sure the small glitch we had is because we are on matrix.org. need to move soon. My friend set up our room without me and didn’t understand that you don’t just use the matrix.org server …explaining how matrix works is hard to non nerds.
What misleading things? I have been running a server for almost a year and no issues at all. All features of Discord work for me in matrix with the right setup. Hard part is getting friend groups to migrate, had decent luck but its an uphill battle for sure getting people to use another app/service. Power of defaults is strong
If you thought I was referring to ease of use, that’s not what I was referring to. If you are treating it as just another Discord, then you probably don’t have to worry about what I was referring to.
Yeeah… Noble effort, really. Except people don’t give enough of a shit to actually move.
I’ve arranged for a Matrix space and Teamspeak server to be used for my friend Discord of about 100 people. 10 registered and 0 actually use the Matrix.
The bridged Matrix channel is only used for lighthearted spam from the Discord side.
The Teamspeak got like 6 registrations and 0 active users.
Most people won’t budge until they see the ID verification screen, and some not even then.
I don’t think making these other programs optional is going to work to migrate a community. You can’t say to your football team that you’re gonna start playing basketball and be disappointed when they don’t come with you.
If the discord and matrix server was fully bridge then maybe you’d are a bit more success as the community would be less fractured. If you’re friends don’t want to move from discord, and you really don’t want to be in discord, that’s a tough situation for you be in.
Delete the discord.
I have a discord with 14 friends that we’re abandoning. I created a Root community (yeah, not open source or self hosted, but it’s what I can do) and we’ve had 7 move over in the last month. The rest have 2 weeks before the discord gets deleted …
My friend group looked poised to move, disabled their nitro and such, and… Then discord pulled back and they bought nitro again.
My discord group had discussions about stopping discord use for weeks. I kept saying “if no one comes up with a better idea, I’ll go back to IRC.” The discussion didn’t move anywhere, I told them that by the end of February, I’ll go to IRC and delete my account. End of February came, I said “alright, IRC installed, I’ll be at X network, I made a channel called Y, see you there.” Then I deleted my account.
Three people followed me but they also stayed in discord. They tell me that everyone over there is surprised that I did what I told them for weeks that I would do lol.
But anyway, I’ve experienced this before. I left facebook in 2011, I lost contact with about 80% of the people I knew, because apparently calling, Whatsapp/SMS is not good enough. Then I left Whatsapp for Signal. I have 2 contacts there…
I’ve come to the conclusion that most people just don’t care about privacy and big corporations controlling shit. I wont be a part of that silly bollocks.
I did the exact same thing. Stuck to my guns, and the only person who mattered followed. I’ll take it
Yup. I don’t need 20 people to talk to. A few is enough. And I found a nice IRC channel with a lot of nice new people anyways. If the others want to stay in Discord, fine by me. Of course it helps that the people on Discord were not IRL friends that I’ve known since childhood. I lost those years ago =D
I am not as gung-ho on irc, most of my friend group just hangs out in audio channels and such.
But yeah, I cancelled my nitro after 6+ years when they clearly started enshittifying with the “quests” popups and other shite I had no interest in seeing and of course the IPO talks looming sometime last year or the year before.
Yeah it was pretty easy for me to switch to IRC because I have never liked audio/video chat stuff. I tried that once or twice with a very small group, I think I said 10 words all in all. I’m not a talker lol
That’s so frustrating.
This is the way.
Ok everyone. Hear me out. Let’s just all get in the same room and play the same game.
wish it was that easy,
My closests friendgroup dispersed around the province, one in kelowna, one in enderby, and im out on the Coast now. Discord (and now steam chat) kept us close
I kinda wish the fediverse had started with an account system which could then be integrated with various servers. It would concentrate on just keeping account configs where new services had new tab areas or such. Then you could have the services instances that would authtenticate and use the login configs for view and such. of course many instances would do multiple things but it would be so great to go to mastadon and have it interact with the same fediverse account as what I would use at lemming or peertube.
Maybe have a party of some kind?
That is a great idea. We could have pizza and snacks.
We could connect our computers via wires even.
Stoat seems to be the one my friend group is most interested in, currently I’m waiting to see which one is better in the next couple of months or so.
I spent quite a lot of effort getting Stoat up and running because they aren’t working on the selfhosted version, only to get a nice email from the German government that my server was running an outdated version of React with RCE vulnerabilities. Nuked that stack at 3am.
Also I fixed their Tenor integration to be provider agnostic so the self-hoster could choose a different gif provider like klipy (Tenor turned off their API so gif search in Stoat is broken), tried to contribute that one small change back to the main project, immediately rejected because “we have no plans for klipy support”.
Not worth the effort, IMO.
Stoat has to fix their self-hosted version before I’ll touch it again.
Did you guys also consider Fluxer? I tried Stoat first, but the main instance is really slow and there are some video features disabled due to high cost. Which is totally fair.
Fluxer seems to have more features and their main instance is a lot snappier. They’re also accepting donations via Plutonium. Which seems to be helping with the server costs.
Both are AGPLv3, with Fluxer recently saying they’re gonna remove their CLA so that it’s true Open Source.
They are selling a subscription. It isn’t really a donation if you pay a set price for services.
I’d also hold out to see their federation implementation before considering them as viable as matrix.
They do seem better than stoat, though.
Worth noting that the Plutonium subscription of Fluxer is irrelevant if you self host - you will have all features available and unlocked for free.
For me this sounds like a perfect compromise. “Discord Nitro” style monetisation is effective and compelling and like it or not a true competitor needs a revenue stream from somewhere and I have serious doubts about the viability of donation-only monetisation at this scale.
In my eyes, the only sensible way of building such a platform at scale is having it be federated. Otherwise you can host a server - and if you’re unlucky, might need accounts on five servers to access all the groups you want.
If their federation implementation comes relatively prompt and is workable, that’s great. If not, it feels like a way to bootstrap a centralised alternative to discord. Pre-enshitification discord, but it’d again be up to a single entity whether it stays that way.
I don’t mind paying for hosting, but I don’t want to jump from one centralised platform to the next.
Federation is on the 2026 roadmap for Fluxer, and while I’m sceptical they pull it off in that timeframe Hampus (the developer) has stated it to be a high priority for the project. Fluxer is also open source, which Discord never was. If it takes off and Hampus goes evil corpo it can be forked.
I’ll be interested to see their implementation, though it likely won’t replace matrix for me.
Yeah, I guess you’re right actually. You pay money and get more features. I tend to think of subscriptions for Open Source more as donations, but Fluxer is a little different.
But, yeah, like someone else said, you can self-host and not pay anything and get access to everything. Did I mention it’s fully Open Source without a CLA?!
It is, and that makes it much better than Discord, but currently they’re mostly building another monolith on the central instance. Self-hosting doesn’t mean much if the communities are all on there.
I’ll wait for federation, hope it comes soon. Till then, I see more potential in Matrix.
Good. Discord just sucks as an app and as a company.
Some of my friends have registered on Flux but still use discord. It’s sort of just there until discord makes it unbearable for them to use but discord will never do that. They’ll just slowly tighten the noose until you get comfortable.
They pay for nitro, which to me is bonkers.
when my nitro expired, I was astonished how much basic functionality was locked behind that paywall. The vanilla experience is so unpleasant.
Meanwhile on stoat, there is no subscription and most of discord’s paid features are just… features. Sure, stoat is janky as balls, but so was discord when it was new.
Genuine question: as someone who has never used Discord’s Nitro, what basic functionality am I missing out on?
There were 2.5 major ones for me:
- Higher upload limit for game clips/highlights. OBS didn’t handle transcoding the stream down to a lower resolution without hitting the GPU hard enough to make the game stuttery
- Higher stream resolution/fps. This mattered less to me as the homies aged and played games less frequently
- Use the obnoxious custom emoji reactions between servers. I could upload some real egregious shit on a test server and use it in the homie server
This is one of the reasons these “let’s replace Discord” threads are so tricky. I use Discord basically every day, and heavily twice a week for games nights with two different groups, for 6 years. I’m in there. And I have never uploaded a clip or streamed anything, so I never considered that this might be something people want, or are using the platform for. And I’ve seen a few custom emoji around, but never considered using some dude’s emoji in a different group’s chat.
So it’s wild how different people are using it, and getting one replacement to do all of it is a big ask!
lots of customization options for both the interface and your profile, but more important to most people is being able to use emojis/stickers from your subscribed servers everywhere on the platform. This might seem petty, but there’s no other software that I regularly use that requires me to pay in order to for example, change the theme of the interface.
edit: that does not include the stuff that I knew I was paying for and was on purpose paying for, like better stream quality and larger upload size and extra shit for my server.
Exactly, right? I remember streaming on discord was a pain because of all the lag and TeamSpeak + pigdin + Overwolf was so much better.
Now i use Legcord instead until my friends switch, which I hope is soon.
well, better streaming was one of the things that I was knowingly and intentionally paying for nitro for.
Very interesting. I’ve never really noticed the difference.
I’ve never been able to do a direct comparison, so maybe that part was a scam too.
It isn’t a great discord replacement but it’s a metadata blackhole with PQC and Tor support that’s surprisingly stable.
Downside is that the founder is apparently a die-hard trump supporter. Which doesn’t mean the app is bad, but still would leave me wondering if one should contribute to its’ success via network effect, or perhaps ignore it.
Jack Dorsey money too. But the code and whitepapers look good. IMHO take over the discourse. It’s mostly dumb rightwing conspiracy nuts and libertarians right now but it’s not very popular, lemmy.world could easily take over and relegate the early adopting groups to obscurity.
He mentioned IRC but skipped it, probably thinking it’s still text only. However there are now web clients that can display inline images, url preview, persistent chat and push notifications. To me it’s the most KISS solution, as it’s super easy to setup and self-host.
In order for this to work, one needs an IRC server and a place to host the web client’s server. That’s it. I use The Lounge but there are others like Convos or ObsidianIRC.
It’s still text only. When I hear text only I already assume it supports all you mentioned.
Text is not ASCII only :)
Beyond text only comes voice calls, video calls and screen share, which are paramount for my discord use case. Me and my friends like to game while sharing our screens, so I game in my main monitor and have a matrix of screens on the second. It creates a LAN party feeling and it’s important to maintain connection after some moved out of town.
Text is not ASCII only :)
If you want to be technical, IRC supports Unicode so it’s just not ASCII only. Convos is also supposed to support voice chats.
That’s what I meant tho, you were under the assumption that the author thought that IRC meant text only, and said that IRC supports rich text with images and links and the like. And my point is that that’s still text, that text isn’t ASCII only, technically.
In any case, I did look the video support that Convos offers, and it seems like an external integration with jitsi (camera button opens a jitsi conference externally and shares the link in chat). Better than nothing for sure, yer subpar for the use case we are looking for.
Thanks for the suggestion though!
Why is it a web client? I’d much rather have a local client.
I still use Hexchat
It’s much easier to code this way and it’s cross platform. There are some experimental programs like Srain based on GTK. I tried it and it’s promising but it’s unfortunately too experimental for me so far and it’s lacking some features like persistent chat, so one would still need a bouncer which is an additional layer to setup.
Currently hosting a couple of zulip instances for communities that had been on discord. I really like the way it handles topics/threading and they make hosting a breeze. I reported in an upgrade recently and it was < 30 minutes between me reporting it and getting code to solve my issue pushed to the repos. Wild.
10/10 recommend if voice/video are not a focus.
Zulip is confusing as hell to use.
How?
I manage two Zulip servers so I’m interested of knowing how it is perceived by outsiders.
To me (to us) it is quite simple, you write in the topic with the correct title, fediverse stuff goes in fediverse stuff, video games in video games, etc etc.
If someone makes a mistake, any user on a PC can move the message to the correct topic (doesn’t work with the mobile app).
Because you end up with 5 gazillion threads and trying to find the one you were conversing in previously is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Ok I see what you mean.
In very active and populated servers I can see that becoming a problem yes.
I generally use the “combined view” so I see every threads at the same time and reply in the correct one automatically.
But then there’s no context
deleted by creator
They only delayed them. They’re still hoping to force ID verification for accessing specific content later this year.
They are boiling the frog, just like whatsapp did in 2021 remember the uproar about whatsapp data sharing with business accounts and stuff, whatsapp played the long game delayed the change, let the anger die and everyone just stayed.
Reddit took the tough approach in 2023. they didn’t budge. people stopped boycotting and went back to reddit shortly after.
Boycotts don’t work
Boycotts work 100% of the time of people actually follow through on them. We’ve seen this time and time again. Most recently with Jimmy Kimmel.
Not really. They’re still harvesting/monitoring everyone’s chats and are moving forward with age verification, to include behavior-based age verification. They’re just hiring a different scummy vendor to handle the age checks.
I dont see why people would downvote an honest question. Probably going to discourage more people from asking questions. Is that what we want?
Nope it’s delayed them.
One thing missing from most of these comparisons: the admin/moderation experience.
Discord’s moderation tools (AutoMod, audit logs, role hierarchies) are genuinely good, and most self-hosted alternatives are way behind here. If you’re running a community server, this matters a lot.
My ranking for communities (not just friend groups):
- Matrix (Synapse/Conduit) — best moderation tools of the self-hosted options, rooms/spaces model works well
- Revolt — closest Discord clone, but moderation is still basic
- Mumble/TeamSpeak — voice-only, but rock solid for gaming guilds that don’t need text
For just friends? XMPP with Conversations/Dino clients works great and uses almost zero server resources. I run an ejabberd instance on a $5 VPS alongside 5 other services.
