Hi everyone,
I just had my account deactivated from Discord for ToS violation (I didn’t do anything wrong, I just tried to send a friend request), but that’s not the most important thing.
Now that I no longer have an account, and I’ve been wanting to leave Discord for a while for a better, self-hosted, open-source alternative, this is the best time.
I know of Matrix, XMPP servers and applications that work very well, but none of them work in the same way, or have the same feel as Discord. I see more alternatives for professional use than for gamers or communities.
Revolt exists, but last time I checked, you can’t really host it yourself, and I haven’t read good things about it. (I don’t remember the website listing all the negative aspects.)
That brings me to my two questions.
- Can you list some alternative to Discord that I probably don’t know ?
- If you want a alternative to Discord, what are your requirements to using it ? I’m not saying I can or will, but I think I can try to create one.
PS: I already trying to get my account back (but I have the same response from the support and I can’t send request to “Appeals & Age Update Requests” because of ToS violation) and even if I manage to get it back I really want to leave discord right now.
Look into mumble. It’s NOT a discord replacement but does provide a good quality, low latency, OSS voice chat. Mumble + Signal group chat is what my friends and I use for gaming. Seems to work well.
Tip: Turn on text-to-speech to get narrated announcements when users join channels. Also works for text chat shenanigans. 🤣
The “problem” is that most people only want an app that does everything, and I’m sure some of my friend don’t want to have two app to do the same thing one app can do.
I prefer to have two perfect app for one task, but not everyone want this.
Programs that do multiple things are not simple, so successfully using or understanding what they do is less likely to be possible for you. I expect that wanting to avoid interacting with many programs will lead a person to use programs that are nonfree more often than they otherwise would, so it would be more likely that a program controls the users.
Discord’s main killer feature is Discovery of who is currently voice chatting in a room.
I’ve not seen any alternative platform that has the same level of voice discovery that discord does. Discord makes it easy to have a community, oh I see Bob’s online, let’s jump in and say hi.
It really is the local bar, you can just walk up and talk to anybody. That is absolutely critical. It’s open discovery, it’s effortless communication of status.
This is a feature I really love on Discord and this is one I try to find, but like you say I dont find any alternative as good.
I would have said in fact Matrix or XMPP-based solutions but it seems you already have spotted them. Maybe Mattermost?
I need to give a try, I know by name but never use it.
I presume you can make call, good audio and screen share ?
Have you looked at spacebar
The idea Sounds awesome but it doesn’t support voicechat yet.
I never really try spacebar. I think i’m going to try.
If they make this completely federated then it will 100% take off
There indeed was an alternative called Revolt. Idk if it’s still maintained. Though I had quite bad experience with it so can’t recommend. Another alternative is Guilded which seems dead in terms of development but it has an active (and very small) user base. I think it can even be self-hosted. But ultimately you need to be ready for changes if you want to leave Discord. There’s nothing quite like it, especially in terms of convenience and popularity.
I’m pretty sure revolt.chat is still going? I am using it.
I think you confused Revolt and Guilded. Guilded is the proprietary one developed by Roblox.
No, mister/miss. I am sure I had bad experience with Revolt. Guilded seemed fine but I haven’t used it much myself.
EDIT: also Guilded originally was an independent project which then was bought by Roblox.
Yeah, my point being Guilded was always proprietary and never hostable.
I swear I must be one of the few that wants nothing that discord offers and would much rather if my core group went back to using vent.
Matrix is only a protocol. Take a look at its implementations.
But yeah, none of these are discord.
Not a gamer* but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.
*multiplayer gamer. I do play single player games.
Matrix, via Element.
I think Element has the best chance of being a viable discord alternative. Especially with matrix 2 around the corner.
Element X (their new mobile app) loads as quickly as discord and supports e2e calls as well as chat.
It is a different app than discord though. It does not feature the nice server layout that discord is kind of known for but it is planned with spaces.
I say give Element another year or two and it will be a very formidable chat program.
And I have no doubt they are doing well financially and will continue to push improvements as matrix is very widely used. I mean hell apparently Nato uses it
Element X is fast Indeed.
There are more cool organisations that use Element.
- US navy
- US space force
- French government
- German defence force
It’s more a Skype alternative at the moment though.
I haven’t seen Revolt on here yet! I’ve only played around with it seems pretty nice! https://alternativeto.net/software/revolt-chat/about/
There isn’t one.
You can combine several other services though, such as Matrix for chat, Mumble or Teamspeak for voice, and OBS + BroadcastBox for game streaming.
I can list some alternatives to Discord that you probably don’t know, and requirements for an alternative to Discord: https://degooglisons-internet.org/ https://framasoft.org/en/manifest https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/#criteria
Also consider https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/ [email protected]
Maybe rocket.chat?
Steam has free voice chat as well. Hardly open source though.
