Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use.
Presumably you're already using Signal and getting mainstream contacts to start using it too. You probably have a basic profile that at least includes your real name, and might also have your picture. Maybe you're even one of the 7 people in the world that use the Stories feature in it. Well good news, now all of that is also unconditionally available to anyone in any group you ever join, including any future changes you ever make to that info, unrevocably forever into the future.
Signal has a fun dark pattern where it unrevocably grants permissions for anyone you allow to contact you to see everything in your profile for the rest of time. It has only a single trust level with contacts effectively: full trust.
This is unacceptable in any tool you use for online community, unless you exclusively use it for online community and can decline to provide any info in this full-trust level. Unfortunately Signal also makes very sure you can't have a second account, by tying your account to a phone number, and only allowing one Signal instance per mobile device.
Is Signal good? Yes, but only exclusively for communication with people you already trust.
Keep an eye on Whitenoise. It's basically taken the technology behind Signal and placed it atop Nostr, so rather than signing up with a phone number, you do it with an npub (pubkey). Still in very early days so the features aren't all there yet, and battery use could be better, but they've got the basics of it working already.
Signal has profiles nowadays that can be used to connect with people without sharing phone numbers. The latter are only used for signup and discarded immediately after.
Yes. The phone number is just for activation, once activated, you can swap the SIM and carry on. Or have the SIM that receives the activation text in another phone, or be virtual, or whatever.
You can have multiple instances of signal on a mobile device, and you can use VoiP or eSIMs to register. Signal with an online persona revealing no identifying information, registered to a cash purchased eSIM on an ungoogled android is as good as your getting. Why do you think so many jurisdictions are trying to ban both GrapheneOS and Signal.
To be clear, your linked map shows that it is not a blanket "in europe". Around 20 European countries don't need an ID to get a SIM card and 30 do.
For those learning about political nuance against the backdrop of current propaganda, it is worth noting that the UK and Ireland do not require registration and that the populous are significantly politically opposed to it; and then Russia requires registration and has one of the most linked up registrations.
You can do all of that but you shouldn't have to when using a privacy-focused messenger, and most people won't so they'll be exposed and suffer the consequences if they use Signal expecting a certain level of privacy (and pseudo-anonymity).
It's a terrible anti-feature and the only reason they're not being punished for it is because there aren't many alternatives to pick from.
That's privacy for someone who cares deeply and will get it somehow no matter what, not default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant. (Which WhatsApp does pretty well for example.)
I don't know, I'm not familiar with Signal. But features such as described above with worse privacy than the basic chatting functionality detract from it, it's not just that it would be a bonus if it were better, because that's exactly how effort comes in, having to know about it, and the typical layman user just blindly uses it.
Take Telegram for example, where only explicitly 'secret' chats are e2ee, you have to go out of your way, it's not the easy path.
Of course it's revealing information. If I know that two users that are identified by their phone numbers are talking to each other every day, this is a clear connection you can exploit. Metadata is only useless if you have no imagination.
Discord's rise mirrors Google's: both platforms gained traction because the CIA and NSA required sophisticated tools to facilitate their intelligence gathering
One of the main problems in suggesting Discord alternatives is that Discord itself is an amalgamation of several apps.
For some a Discord alternative needs to be a voicecall, for others it‘s game streaming, and for others it‘s just a chat, a bulletinboard or newsgroup, while they never used the Voice features.
> We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform.
Doesn't Matrix essentially satisfy all of them?
Although the bulletinboard/newsgroup feature is something that I don't know but I feel as if that can be on matrix as well.
Yes, I know Matrix is hard to host but I don't imagine discord if they release their source code to be easy either.
So for a discord-like experience, I really prefer matrix.
My only real experience with matrix was joining a community server for some program because I had a problem and couldn't get more info elsewhere. Started off that I couldn't read any past messages, I guess because encryption? Alright, so I asked my question. Come back the next day, and because my browser deletes cookies on close, I couldn't log in because I had no logged in device to confirm the login with, or something like this. Gave up. Maybe there was some recovery codes on sign up that I missed, but I always save those.
I'm sad to see XMPP missing from this list. I wonder if the author was simply unaware of it or simply ignored it.
IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is still in the works). And of course all these protocol features work fine with federation.
Same here, I was hoping to see it listed in the article. XMPP is close to being right there in being able to compete with Discord. It just needs a good client with Spaces support (XEP-0503), along side user roles with permissions, and server side voice channels.
The protocol is amazing and selfhostable servers (I use prosody) are great. But The only client I enjoy is conversations, and that’s mobile while my main usage is always desktop. There are decent clients, but none I’d say are great.
The problem with XMPP is that it's a suite of RFCs.
It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely.
XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people.
(I am still a proponent of XMPP, but the working groups need to get their shit together to unify protocol support across clients)
This has been brought up on HN before, and people smarter than me identified that this view is about 10 years out of date.
Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently that include all of the things any other similar tools do. It sounds like only very niche old/minimal XMPP clients don't support encryption by default for example, and virtually all servers have supported it for many years.
Is there a recommended or "blessed" server and client combo for someone who just wants to migrate their friends off discord?
The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.
Monocles chat is best one for Android, it is the most complete chatting app for todays standards, unlike Conversations it has swipe to reply, last seen, emoji reactions etc. The only issue is making account there, need to use other homeserver like @conversations.im if you don't want to pay for their @monocles.eu .
For IOS the only option is Monal.
For web I find conversejs better than mov.im as movim doesn't encrypt sent pictures in chat at all, and encryption of text messages is sometimes broken depending on how you set it up in settings of account and in chat, as it needs to be activated on both places, so conversejs is better, but less enjoyable UI than movim
The targeted audience of this website is, for now, developers. Communicating is hard.
https://joinjabber.org/ is/was an attempt at something more user-focused. It is not linked to the XMPP Software Foundation. BTW, joining the XSF and participating in discussion around protocol evolution, communication strategy and these sort of things is free, and only requires asking for write permission on the XSF wiki to add an application page. Everything happens in the open (mailing lists, chat rooms). We value democratic processes.
Conversations is a great Android client (also brings their own backend instance if you don't want to host your own), I don't know about iOS or server though.
The ironic part is that those software description files are meaningless. AstraChat claims Advanced in all categories, but it's a proprietary commercial software, so nobody ran any kind of test suite to verify this.
That software list, how it's done and how it's ranked is literally confirming my initial point of critique :D
Last time I tried out several chat clients, most of them were alpha software, had lots of bugs appearing in normal conversation flows, well, or were so broken that they broke compatibility in subminor version updates to their very same client apps.
I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
> I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
This is exactly what the Compliance Suits are for, and the XMPP Software Fundation is taking care of telling all the clients what they misses directly on the official website, for example: https://xmpp.org/software/movim/
Because the declaration file of the clients says that it is actually compatible with everything in this section.
You can't run scripts on all the XEPs declared, some of them are purely redaction or bound to specific UI/UX behaviors. This is based on trust that the developers actually implemented things as stated.
Hasn't social media like HN, Reddit, fediverse, etc. become the real clearinghouse of information about those sorts of questions? I can see how it would be nice for xmpp.org to be an authoritative source of truth, but user response/consensus seems more relevant these days, at least to me.
There is not a single good XMPP client for macOS or iOS either. There are a couple of minimally functional ones that are aesthetically dreadful, but nothing that would come even close to replicating what people would expect even from Signal or WhatsApp, let alone a monster like Discord. Certainly nothing that I could ask friends or family to use.
I tried XMPP recently and was surprised to see just how barren it was. The tech might be good but if nobody is using it after all these years, what's the point?
It is used in a non-federated context as the underlying in a lot of places (NATO, Zoom, british Military, Grindr, Jisti…). Federated usage is mostly private chats that don't really want to advertise that they do use it. It is sad because public groups also just work, but I know clients are missing a few features that would improve usability/UX. Some people are working on that, cf https://movim.eu/ for instance.
Isn't this the sort of moment that pushes users off of Discord into alternatives? Maybe pragmatic/opportunistic users should establish new channels or servers and advertise them when the shoe drops on Discord.
To be an alternative it had to be an alternative. Not "we had a great community with image uploads, voice chats, client parity across all platforms, miltiple servers set up in one click, songle login, game integrations etc., so now we move to this broken disjointed landscape of inconsistently implemented features"
Most users don't need every single one of those features. It reminds me of the conversations about lemmy and the fediverse after the reddit api uproar. The alternative link aggregators didn't need to do everything well, just the core things well enough to build a community that sustains engagement and becomes discoverable. But it failed at the major pieces: performance, scalability, media handling, moderation, governance, and federation. In contrast, I would argue xmpp covers a strong subset of commonly used discord features well enough to provide the chat/social component to many existing communities.
Matrix's UI/UX is actually really flexible with multiple clients.
You aren't struck with Element, you can even use TUI clients or any clients.
For the web, the one which I really love is cinny.
Cinny is really awesome, its UI/UX is better than discord imo.
I recommend people to check out the matrix ecosystem of clients to see what they like, because I also liked the fractal gnu app & it has tons of clients.
I would love to know why it's considered a feature for you.
I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
Because I prefer online conversations to work like IRL ones: Ephemeral. Sure each individual might keep their own log if they want but the server itself doesn’t and setting aside all the issues with modern datasets being used for training all sorts of algorithms, just the concept of stepping into a digital room without all the baggage of the last twenty hours of conversation is _mentally refreshing_. It also changes people’s behaviour for the better IME.
Saving logs is gross, chats should be ephemeral. In any case there's HistServ and IRCv3 /chathistory nowadays, so if you really want it you can have it.
That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.
But on IRC you had your own log, and sometimes the server made the full logs public. It was just cumbersome to access. What I said and you said in my presets was still logged.
It's a muddy middle ground where neither you are I are satisfied. Far from perfect.
I wanted to disagree but I really miss IRC internet. Saving everything we ever said online was a mistake. We need to focus on ephemeral chat making a comeback.
IRC does not even have offline messages, unless you pay / host a bouncer. Which you first have to know about.
I'm not sure if any client has solve this, but what about image / video / file hosting? You can't just drag 'n drop a image into a chat. You have to host it on a 3rd party site and link it.
I do wonder how server management is now adays. In Discord you can host your own server with a few clicks and make it easy to adjust permissions and controls invites. I would assume IRC is also lacking behind. But would love to hear more about the current state.
Discord has invite links, where people without the app or account can quickly join. In IRC you have the IRC:// link, but that does not work for people who don't have a client installed. Then you can do a web client link, but that is not optimal for people who already have their favorite client set up :)
In Discord you can't "host" your own "server". You can create a room (internally called a guild, misleadingly referred to as "server" in ui and by a lot of people) on THE discord server, their server, and that room can be split into channels. But the room and the server belongs to discord.
First and foremost, IRC is a protocol. Everything you name here are mostly issues that are not a protocol problem, but client and service issues which can be solved.
Otherwise it's not really an alternative. It does not matter if it's technically a protocol. Users don't care about if it's a protocol, IRC clients had over 10 years to catch up.
The title is about "Discord alternatives", the major core metric is:
> Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Feels like these are two different things.
What I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Discord can do quite a lot, which results in people using it in different ways.
I'm quite active on multiple discord server and yet never use voice / video. But I get why people use it.
If OP is looking for a platform not to replace Discord 1 to 1, but overall to have a community why not do a broader comparison. Then everyone can for themself see what fits their personal needs.
> I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Same. I'm somewhat sad that a lot of the FOSS community got stuck with IRC level of technology and ease of use :( I whish for more projects would subscribe to a low barrier of entry mantra.
> Anyway this thing [Revolt/Stoat] is so far from being ready for prime time, I only include it here to call out the project. I wish them the best and hope for good things, especially since you can self-host the server. But a lack of stability and features prevent this from being useful for anything beyond experimentation. Maybe someday.
Curious what prompted this verdict. My only experience with Revolt/Stoat has been with the Handmade Cities instance, but said experience hasn't been anywhere near as bad as this writeup seems to suggest.
Actually, the true killer feature for discord back in the day was something much dumber, but still heavily related to on-boarding and community transference.
You could join a discord server with a single link.
Account creation could come later.
Considering the competition at its heyday was Teamspeak or Skype, the mere fact you could just actually see the hell you were getting into without some stupid ass "Hol' Up!" instantly made it popular with basically everyone who didn't even know what it was.
My account is dated June 2015 which is apparently a month after it launched, and both me and every single one of the early adopters in that channel that is still up to this day have this same story to tell. We used it because we didn't even have to login at all in the first place when we first got it.
The killer feature of discord was always "open this link for our guild voice and let's go into the dungeon". And this is a brand advantage: you can try that with self hosted tools but discord "feels safe" to click.
The only thing TeamSpeak has on it is multi level voice for complex command chains. But you pay for that with enormous sign up friction.
There's no viable frictionless chat alternative. Maybe jitsi. And if you try to make one? You'll get regulated and have to do the same thing.
randomly telling me that my connection is not secure and as a result randomly hiding messages. and then, if I try to fix it somehow, it will tell me it's nearly impossible or that they'll delete my whole history. the security model is hostile towards user.
when coming back to a community after a long period of time i have to follow a trail of links to rooms that say they have been upgraded and the current one abandoned until i reach the current one. thats stupid, confusing and time wasting
What most people here seem to forget, is once a social platform gains traction and especially attention from the main masses, it undoubtedly require checks and balances.
Predators, racism, gore, pedophilia, harassment, stalking and so on..
No matter how high you value security, these are matters that hurt real people today. If you attract the mainstream, you must deal with it.
One that didn't make the list that I'm excited for is Root. It's come a long way in a short time and already has quite a bit of the features Discord has. The apps and bots are also being set up to be way more powerful than Discord as well.
Email + IRC (there are daemons that support chat history). Bouncers exist. Logging. This should be standard for OSS projects, not some private, unsearchable, data-mining platform.
This is what happens when we reach for convenience over openness.
As someone who spent countless hours on IRC when I was younger and enjoyed 99% of it to the fullest... I'd kindly suggest refraining from pushing IRC any further. It has had its run, and while I know it still exists, it's nowhere near what it once was and it's not coming back.
Times have changed and people have different expectations. Nobody (except very few) is going to use multiple services and set up a bouncer just to get the basics working. It's better to spend time building a good replacement that keeps up with current needs than trying to push these old systems onto people, especially younger ones.
In my experience with the few communities I've dabbled in, it's more reaching for popularity than convenience. If I indulged myself with some grumpiness I'd say that's another source of enshitification that's rarely mentionned.
I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble.
I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.
Huh. I’d have said majority. It was always my impression that a) gamers make up the vast majority of discord users (with all their gamification and gaming features), and b) that gamers mainly care about voice chat (which is what people almost always talk about when it comes to discord and gaming).
I don't understand the appeal of any of those, least of all Discord itself. It's unsearcheable, focused on immediacy, confusing and full of blinking things. The old Reddit interface (or current HN one!) are unsurpassed IMHO.
Most people are on Discord, joining servers has very little friction (no separate accounts), there's decent bots and mod tools and such, ability to create as many channels per server as you want (e.g. for discussions, media, music, whatever) and participate in text based conversations more or less live. It's also easy to jump into a VC and chat while you play games with friends, share screen, stuff like that.
Most alternatives suck for that purpose. There is search for server members and the "blinking things" keep you up to date with where the new stuff is and I presume give you dopamine hits. It's simply not old school forum software and considerations that'd make sites like that good don't enter the equation at all - which also makes attempts at turning Discord into a support forum for any "organized" group or project misguided at best, but also great for the more casual gaming/interest oriented communities.
It does have a weird source of friction. The need to find an invite to the "server". Sometimes you'll find one but it will be dead. There's no way to search to find a server then join it as far as I know.
That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space.
Discord's key value proposition is that it's a trusted zero friction voice chat with a lot of features.
The workflow that made it huge: organizer creates a server for a game, creates a short link for a voice channel. The organizer then goes to play their game, shares the short link with their group.
The members click the link, write whatever they want as the name, click join and are in the voice chat. Say hi and go into the dungeon to have fun.
Need more? Just share your screen with one click. Streamer mode kicks in and hides all pii in the discord interface. Easy global bindings for push to talk.
If the outing is fun some of them will create profiles and stay in the server and play together again.
It's all very organic and easy, while being trusted as a brand so people don't have to hesitate to click your jitsi.weirdgamer.tk link.
I agree with the previous commenter - I hate Discord for all the same reasons. But you said: "That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space." and this is the bit that frustrates me... I must be the target market because several services I use try to get you to use Discord for support, and some will only provide support via Discord.
I'm building an open-source, high-quality chat app called Inline. It aims to solve issues with Slack and Discord for work communication. Happy to answer any questions.
Website doesn't have any info about the product. I don't know which features are there going to be. Screenshots would be cool as well to evaluate UX.
Frankly the github readme is more useful than the website in that regard.
Tiny nitpick: you actually can pin messages in Signal group chats. It's a pretty recent addition though.
Apart from that, I would have been interested in more details about the author's experience with ~Revolt~ Stoat. To my naive eyes it looks pretty nice. I really like the nuanced takes about the other platforms in this article, so I'd guess the author has some good reasons to dismiss Stoat like that.
Great writeup! Looks like this is going to be relevant very soon.
> Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do
Absolutely, but it's also important to keep in mind that the tool has a big impact on culture by virtue of what behaviors it encourages and what limitations it has. "The medium is the message" is very true here, so think carefully about which tool you hop onto.
We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform.
I primarily use Discord but also have a long-running Steam group chat.
Steam group chats are still janky and by no means a Discord replacement. It feels like an MVP that they lost interest in shortly after adding the feature.
It's fine for a couple people with no real need for moderation but beyond that I don't think it's currently viable.
I've seen a lot of gamers mention this, but I'd wonder why it hasn't happened yet especially as there's a set of gamers that seem to love centralizing on steam already. One massive downside I can see is that the various public social areas of steam like the game forums are already a cesspool (and have been since they were vBulletin based) and I don't see that improving with more users in near real-time chat.
Discord getting used as a knowledge base or download source for some areas is already seen as a convenience for those involved or a single point of failure by many 'outside', I wouldn't want to see more of PC gaming moving to one place.
I'm looking at modern browser APIs and wondering why no one else is trying certain things.
getDeviceMedia and getUserMedia are very powerful these days. I haven't actually tested it but I believe a chromium browser would have no issue capturing the hw accelerated output from a game. You can pipe these media streams directly to WebRTC peers for playback on the other side. A server with a simple selective forwarding unit could enable larger scale meetings (100s of participants). All of this can happen in <1000 lines of JS and server code. Most of the heavy lifting happens in the browser engine. Concerns like automating browser permissions, global hot keys, etc. can be handled via electron or platform specific options like WebView2.
Mobile clients are a bit cursed right now. The best solution is to maintain a standard client in the app stores. Forcing everyone to sign their own mobile apps is way too much friction. And you do need native for this on mobile. Browser only / PWA has no chance in hell of providing a smooth UX on iOS or Android.
We've been using it successfully for a long time too. Real nice bunch of fellas. They did remove mobile notifications without a subscription recently and the price is quite high ONLY for notifications. I do not fault them for doing it but it made recommending them a tiny bit more difficult. The other major issues IMO are the super basic mobile client and lack of any kind of native voice/video chat. You get a button that provides a link to a chat service of your choice. For example you pick a Jitsi Meet instance and Zulip gives you button to create and share the url easily. That's it. I wish there were something a little better integrated.
my team tried it for a couple weeks. couldn't stand the threaded "only see what's important" style of chat. it's undoubtedly our least fav part of microsoft teams---the channels and the threads, we all operate in the chat tab and the channels tab has been relegated to announcement posts no one reads. huge shame zulip can't just like... have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation.
some people have gone way too for trying to efficiency max or "cut out the noise" but chronological chat and a competent search feature will always be the goat.
But even without that, in a normal threaded channel, you can see all messages in all topics chronologically. IIRC that's the default view when you click a channel in the sidebar.
mother of god. its perhaps time to revisit zulip. now if I could perhaps disable the topic group heading this would make perfect sense and effectively be a chatroom.
can someone please try running the experiment of "but what if just forking&spinning up an OSS clone, scaling up to take in the migrants, acquire network effects, collect roughly same subscription revenue, but run on just, like, 10 people?"
Discord has a financially and politically vulnerable posture that is downstream of having to operate a very large team, raise funding, be exposed to investor market pressure. However, it is also one of the rare instances of successful consumer freemium subscription monetization. A clone does not have to pay the tuition of "what makes this specific space compelling, and want-to-pay-for"; it just have to _exists_, passively soaking up migrants from each platform shift.
how is discords freemium successful when they are trying to put Nitro in your face at every step? trying so hard to me that sounds like not enough people pay
Fun, until you want to share an image and have to upload it to a 3rd party, have to explain what a bouncer is to someone who just wants offline messages and AFAIK voice and video chat is not possible.
Client dependent, but channel overview per server is also not that good.
There is zero chance that the target users for Discord is going to try anything more complicated than Discord, so basically all the entries in this list. I recoil in horror thinking about me explaining Matrix even to the most tech savvy friends I use Discord with and I really really hope people would stop recommending it.
The target user group for Discord actually is children and teens. Look at that UI and how it‘s trying to sell you „swag“.
Then, Discord is not uncomplicated. From „Servers“ not being servers, multiple account onboarding levels, to what happens when Discord believes you are a bot or are using a blacklisted IP.
I really do not like discourse. Mail lists are better because you stay in the loop, plus Gmail is better for searching emails than discourse searches itself.
When you rank something with numbers, I’d love it to be more like 1 of 5 (1/5) even when you said it before. When you are reading at that line, I had to recalibrate, if that is 4 (out of 10), which is what most people try to rank against.
I would love an updated KDX/Hotline server running an a RasPi or similar at home. This was a solved problem 20 years ago. The migration to online based platforms will always lead to network effects and enshittification, for very little gain.
I like this page about how a paid forum is the best alternative to a free chat app. Trying to imagine saying “if you don’t like the whole ICQ numbers thing just buy a vBulletin license” in 2002
This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat.
I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s
Steam Group Chats are sort of there; no video chat but text chats and drop-in voice chats like Discord. On the other hand they're basically ephemeral, with messages disappearing from history at some given point.
I also can't figure out a way to access them outside of the Steam client and in DOTA where I believe they're tied to the in-game guild system.
Matrix/Element has video rooms as a Lab function and for a while it had voice rooms too. Not sure what happened to them, but either way with MatrixRTC coming out the technical underpinnings are all there, clients just need to put it all together.
Someone mentioned (I believe?) after talking to Element/Matrix at FOSSDEM this year that the organization has been struggling a lot to get this going. Apparently issues with thier project organization forking and funding the last few years has made one of thier primary contributors, who already had fully functional and working video/voice, all but give up on the project because the upstream forming means it's now forked from a commercial/defunct version of the original code(?)
In the case of voice chat in servers used for gaming, my experience has been that the persistent channels for voice are actually kind of important, it removes any friction from dropping in and out of voice chat, and allows others to easily see 'hey, there is someone in this voice channel, maybe i should join'
Yeah I really don't get that. The biggest benefit, by far, of Discord is that it combines both text and voice chat into one! How can one seriously put forth a replacement which can't match the features Discord had on day 1?
You might be interested in https://kloak.app I believe. It's a privacy-first alternative. It's still in early alpha days, but have most of the things set up. Oh, and we’ve got voice channels with screen sharing in beta too.
How do you plan on funding it? Also, the landing page mentions "You own your community data" but it just looks like you own it and allow us to access it?
"Messages are stored on our servers and are technically accessible at the database level , we won't pretend otherwise. Kloak doesn't require email, phone, or personal info to create an account, your identity isn't tied to your messages the way it would be on other platforms.
Our goal is to implement end-to-end encryption for DMs so that even we can't read message content. But we're not there yet, since after all we need to make sure the platform is safe and not to shield illegal content being sent."
This is a message from one of their founders I found while exploring the app.
Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use. Presumably you're already using Signal and getting mainstream contacts to start using it too. You probably have a basic profile that at least includes your real name, and might also have your picture. Maybe you're even one of the 7 people in the world that use the Stories feature in it. Well good news, now all of that is also unconditionally available to anyone in any group you ever join, including any future changes you ever make to that info, unrevocably forever into the future.
Signal has a fun dark pattern where it unrevocably grants permissions for anyone you allow to contact you to see everything in your profile for the rest of time. It has only a single trust level with contacts effectively: full trust. This is unacceptable in any tool you use for online community, unless you exclusively use it for online community and can decline to provide any info in this full-trust level. Unfortunately Signal also makes very sure you can't have a second account, by tying your account to a phone number, and only allowing one Signal instance per mobile device.
Is Signal good? Yes, but only exclusively for communication with people you already trust.
EDIT: typos
I dislike Signal as I need to identify myself through info that is protected. Like a phone number for example.
Not a privacy app in my opinion. Sure, might be good for some use cases... but overall there are better solutions.
Keep an eye on Whitenoise. It's basically taken the technology behind Signal and placed it atop Nostr, so rather than signing up with a phone number, you do it with an npub (pubkey). Still in very early days so the features aren't all there yet, and battery use could be better, but they've got the basics of it working already.
Why the downvotes? A messaging app that requires a personally identifiable token is inherently not good for privacy…
The part about stories is not true. When sending a story you can choose who to send it to. To make it easier you can even put people in groups
How could Signal be considered privacy-conscious ? The first thing they do is ask for your phone number.
Signal has profiles nowadays that can be used to connect with people without sharing phone numbers. The latter are only used for signup and discarded immediately after.
I don't know how Signal works and I never used it, but could I signup with a phone number and keep using it with another number, on the same phone?
Yes. The phone number is just for activation, once activated, you can swap the SIM and carry on. Or have the SIM that receives the activation text in another phone, or be virtual, or whatever.
I doubt they are discarded when push notifications exist
WhatsApp sends a copy of all your messages to ICE. Signal doesn't.
Source?
whatsapp is facebook; do you need any other "source"?
i'd be surprised if they didn't have straight out government logins...
Of course I need another source. I think you're right too but this is just speculation. I thought you had access to some actual information.
They're getting sued for it.
Because they have an huge PR campaign and a lot of money to invest in keeping their place.
Give Signal a burner phone.
I didn't think I'd ever be part of any group of 7 people in the world, but today is that day, I guess.
And I know one more of those people already!
5 more to go.
You can have multiple instances of signal on a mobile device, and you can use VoiP or eSIMs to register. Signal with an online persona revealing no identifying information, registered to a cash purchased eSIM on an ungoogled android is as good as your getting. Why do you think so many jurisdictions are trying to ban both GrapheneOS and Signal.
In europe you need identification to buy a sim or esim.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9ziqfi/european_cou...
To be clear, your linked map shows that it is not a blanket "in europe". Around 20 European countries don't need an ID to get a SIM card and 30 do.
For those learning about political nuance against the backdrop of current propaganda, it is worth noting that the UK and Ireland do not require registration and that the populous are significantly politically opposed to it; and then Russia requires registration and has one of the most linked up registrations.
Didn't know that the UK, the Netherlands, or Portugal aren't part of Europe...
Also, you can buy phone numbers with monero for 0.08$ https://smspool.net.
You can do all of that but you shouldn't have to when using a privacy-focused messenger, and most people won't so they'll be exposed and suffer the consequences if they use Signal expecting a certain level of privacy (and pseudo-anonymity).
It's a terrible anti-feature and the only reason they're not being punished for it is because there aren't many alternatives to pick from.
That's privacy for someone who cares deeply and will get it somehow no matter what, not default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant. (Which WhatsApp does pretty well for example.)
> default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant. (Which WhatsApp does pretty well for example.)
Can you elaborate on what default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant WhatsApp offers, that Signal does not?
I don't know, I'm not familiar with Signal. But features such as described above with worse privacy than the basic chatting functionality detract from it, it's not just that it would be a bonus if it were better, because that's exactly how effort comes in, having to know about it, and the typical layman user just blindly uses it.
Take Telegram for example, where only explicitly 'secret' chats are e2ee, you have to go out of your way, it's not the easy path.
Of course it's revealing information. If I know that two users that are identified by their phone numbers are talking to each other every day, this is a clear connection you can exploit. Metadata is only useless if you have no imagination.
> Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use
And it ranks near Discord in terms of removing the single point of failure.
Discord became popular because it was free group/team voice chat. Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak all needed servers/clients, paid hosting etc.
Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost.
People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
It also needs users, the network effect aka lock in is gigantic with discord, I don't see discord ever going away. Or anything else gaining traction.
Exactly, I’m in like 50 discord groups, that’s literally the only reason I use it. Those groups don’t exist elsewhere so there’s no other option.
It's also images, videos and message boards.
And screen sharing, like actually good screen sharing unlike Microsoft teams That is a huge feature for many people
What's wrong with Microsoft teams screen sharing?
Discord's rise mirrors Google's: both platforms gained traction because the CIA and NSA required sophisticated tools to facilitate their intelligence gathering
It's very well documented for Google:
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
A little bit harder to find evidence for Discord, they have learned from their mistakes with Google/Facebook
They are now moving on to "pseudo privacy" with projects like Signal
The are just building a "safe" playground that they still happen to own
It feels private to us, but it's still just another part of the same old toolkit
EDIT:
Look up project PRISM folks, there is no conspiracy here, don't be this naive
One of the main problems in suggesting Discord alternatives is that Discord itself is an amalgamation of several apps.
For some a Discord alternative needs to be a voicecall, for others it‘s game streaming, and for others it‘s just a chat, a bulletinboard or newsgroup, while they never used the Voice features.
> We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform.
Doesn't Matrix essentially satisfy all of them?
Although the bulletinboard/newsgroup feature is something that I don't know but I feel as if that can be on matrix as well.
Yes, I know Matrix is hard to host but I don't imagine discord if they release their source code to be easy either.
So for a discord-like experience, I really prefer matrix.
My only real experience with matrix was joining a community server for some program because I had a problem and couldn't get more info elsewhere. Started off that I couldn't read any past messages, I guess because encryption? Alright, so I asked my question. Come back the next day, and because my browser deletes cookies on close, I couldn't log in because I had no logged in device to confirm the login with, or something like this. Gave up. Maybe there was some recovery codes on sign up that I missed, but I always save those.
Discord is real time chat, I thought matrix was not? And discord comes for gaming, voice chat is a key feature
I'm sad to see XMPP missing from this list. I wonder if the author was simply unaware of it or simply ignored it.
IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is still in the works). And of course all these protocol features work fine with federation.
Same here, I was hoping to see it listed in the article. XMPP is close to being right there in being able to compete with Discord. It just needs a good client with Spaces support (XEP-0503), along side user roles with permissions, and server side voice channels.
> It just needs a good client
Generally an XMPP issue :/
The protocol is amazing and selfhostable servers (I use prosody) are great. But The only client I enjoy is conversations, and that’s mobile while my main usage is always desktop. There are decent clients, but none I’d say are great.
The problem with XMPP is that it's a suite of RFCs.
It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely.
XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people.
(I am still a proponent of XMPP, but the working groups need to get their shit together to unify protocol support across clients)
This has been brought up on HN before, and people smarter than me identified that this view is about 10 years out of date. Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently that include all of the things any other similar tools do. It sounds like only very niche old/minimal XMPP clients don't support encryption by default for example, and virtually all servers have supported it for many years.
Is there a recommended or "blessed" server and client combo for someone who just wants to migrate their friends off discord?
The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.
Monocles chat is best one for Android, it is the most complete chatting app for todays standards, unlike Conversations it has swipe to reply, last seen, emoji reactions etc. The only issue is making account there, need to use other homeserver like @conversations.im if you don't want to pay for their @monocles.eu . For IOS the only option is Monal. For web I find conversejs better than mov.im as movim doesn't encrypt sent pictures in chat at all, and encryption of text messages is sometimes broken depending on how you set it up in settings of account and in chat, as it needs to be activated on both places, so conversejs is better, but less enjoyable UI than movim
The targeted audience of this website is, for now, developers. Communicating is hard.
https://joinjabber.org/ is/was an attempt at something more user-focused. It is not linked to the XMPP Software Foundation. BTW, joining the XSF and participating in discussion around protocol evolution, communication strategy and these sort of things is free, and only requires asking for write permission on the XSF wiki to add an application page. Everything happens in the open (mailing lists, chat rooms). We value democratic processes.
Conversations is a great Android client (also brings their own backend instance if you don't want to host your own), I don't know about iOS or server though.
https://monal-im.org/ is my personal recommendation for iOS.
The ironic part is that those software description files are meaningless. AstraChat claims Advanced in all categories, but it's a proprietary commercial software, so nobody ran any kind of test suite to verify this.
That software list, how it's done and how it's ranked is literally confirming my initial point of critique :D
Last time I tried out several chat clients, most of them were alpha software, had lots of bugs appearing in normal conversation flows, well, or were so broken that they broke compatibility in subminor version updates to their very same client apps.
I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
> I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
This is exactly what the Compliance Suits are for, and the XMPP Software Fundation is taking care of telling all the clients what they misses directly on the official website, for example: https://xmpp.org/software/movim/
My point is about why clients like AstraChat can be listed with "Advanced" in the overview, but then in the details page it has nothing. See https://xmpp.org/software/astrachat-xmpp-client/
This should not be allowed.
Because the declaration file of the clients says that it is actually compatible with everything in this section.
You can't run scripts on all the XEPs declared, some of them are purely redaction or bound to specific UI/UX behaviors. This is based on trust that the developers actually implemented things as stated.
Hasn't social media like HN, Reddit, fediverse, etc. become the real clearinghouse of information about those sorts of questions? I can see how it would be nice for xmpp.org to be an authoritative source of truth, but user response/consensus seems more relevant these days, at least to me.
And unlike Matrix(/Element), it works most of the time.
> Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently
If the answer to "it's confusing" is "there are apparently standardised sets", it sounds like it is, indeed, confusing :-).
Xmpp clients are completely awful on Linux desktop, and can't do voice and video chat correctly with clients on Android like Conversations
There is not a single good XMPP client for macOS or iOS either. There are a couple of minimally functional ones that are aesthetically dreadful, but nothing that would come even close to replicating what people would expect even from Signal or WhatsApp, let alone a monster like Discord. Certainly nothing that I could ask friends or family to use.
You can with dino. I wish I had the time to work on getting A/V calls back in gajim. It could be worth asking an NLNet grant for that…
https://dino.im/
Yes it works but it lacks QOL features like automatic compression of videos or images when sending attachments. A bit too barebones.
In addition to Dino, you could use movim as a PWA.
And they are both compatible, unlike Element and ElementX ;)
I tried XMPP recently and was surprised to see just how barren it was. The tech might be good but if nobody is using it after all these years, what's the point?
It is used in a non-federated context as the underlying in a lot of places (NATO, Zoom, british Military, Grindr, Jisti…). Federated usage is mostly private chats that don't really want to advertise that they do use it. It is sad because public groups also just work, but I know clients are missing a few features that would improve usability/UX. Some people are working on that, cf https://movim.eu/ for instance.
Isn't this the sort of moment that pushes users off of Discord into alternatives? Maybe pragmatic/opportunistic users should establish new channels or servers and advertise them when the shoe drops on Discord.
To be an alternative it had to be an alternative. Not "we had a great community with image uploads, voice chats, client parity across all platforms, miltiple servers set up in one click, songle login, game integrations etc., so now we move to this broken disjointed landscape of inconsistently implemented features"
Most users don't need every single one of those features. It reminds me of the conversations about lemmy and the fediverse after the reddit api uproar. The alternative link aggregators didn't need to do everything well, just the core things well enough to build a community that sustains engagement and becomes discoverable. But it failed at the major pieces: performance, scalability, media handling, moderation, governance, and federation. In contrast, I would argue xmpp covers a strong subset of commonly used discord features well enough to provide the chat/social component to many existing communities.
Most Discord alternatives fail not on tech, but on polish.
Signal → private but bad for communities
Matrix → flexible but rough UX
XMPP → powerful but fragmented
Discord → centralized but frictionless
Users pick frictionless every time. We probably don’t need new apps or protocols we need a client that works well.
You should be able to create an account once and then join several servers (real servers) with the same account.
> Matrix → flexible but rough UX
Matrix's UI/UX is actually really flexible with multiple clients.
You aren't struck with Element, you can even use TUI clients or any clients.
For the web, the one which I really love is cinny.
Cinny is really awesome, its UI/UX is better than discord imo.
I recommend people to check out the matrix ecosystem of clients to see what they like, because I also liked the fractal gnu app & it has tons of clients.
https://cinny.in/
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
More friction!
IRC → perfection, impossible to improve
No message history while not logged in.
IRCv3 (and many clients are supporting fair chunks of IRCv3's feature set) supports offline state and message history.
That's a feature
I would love to know why it's considered a feature for you.
I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
Because I prefer online conversations to work like IRL ones: Ephemeral. Sure each individual might keep their own log if they want but the server itself doesn’t and setting aside all the issues with modern datasets being used for training all sorts of algorithms, just the concept of stepping into a digital room without all the baggage of the last twenty hours of conversation is _mentally refreshing_. It also changes people’s behaviour for the better IME.
Saving logs is gross, chats should be ephemeral. In any case there's HistServ and IRCv3 /chathistory nowadays, so if you really want it you can have it.
That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.
But on IRC you had your own log, and sometimes the server made the full logs public. It was just cumbersome to access. What I said and you said in my presets was still logged.
It's a muddy middle ground where neither you are I are satisfied. Far from perfect.
I wanted to disagree but I really miss IRC internet. Saving everything we ever said online was a mistake. We need to focus on ephemeral chat making a comeback.
isn't IRC only Text? What about the Voice Chat?
IRC does not even have offline messages, unless you pay / host a bouncer. Which you first have to know about.
I'm not sure if any client has solve this, but what about image / video / file hosting? You can't just drag 'n drop a image into a chat. You have to host it on a 3rd party site and link it.
I do wonder how server management is now adays. In Discord you can host your own server with a few clicks and make it easy to adjust permissions and controls invites. I would assume IRC is also lacking behind. But would love to hear more about the current state.
Discord has invite links, where people without the app or account can quickly join. In IRC you have the IRC:// link, but that does not work for people who don't have a client installed. Then you can do a web client link, but that is not optimal for people who already have their favorite client set up :)
In Discord you can't "host" your own "server". You can create a room (internally called a guild, misleadingly referred to as "server" in ui and by a lot of people) on THE discord server, their server, and that room can be split into channels. But the room and the server belongs to discord.
You are correct. I used Discord terminology where a "server" is a group of channels.
First and foremost, IRC is a protocol. Everything you name here are mostly issues that are not a protocol problem, but client and service issues which can be solved.
But are they solved? In a single combined client.
Otherwise it's not really an alternative. It does not matter if it's technically a protocol. Users don't care about if it's a protocol, IRC clients had over 10 years to catch up.
That's why you have Mumble.
https://www.mumble.info/
Share a meme?
Use the channel's DC-hub.
Yes, GP already said it was perfection
Except the reason for Discords initial success, and the literal only reason I have it installed, is for voice chat when playing certain online games.
I love IRC, I even wrote my own IRC client in the 90s, but it’s clearly not going to be suitable for gaming in this context.
Is it just element or matrix.org, but it feels so slow to me?
Element’s pretty not-great. FluffyChat is worth a go, despite the extremely silly name; much less clunky experience.
All of those alternatives don't have voice chat in the way discord has (or Teamspeak/Mumble).
The title is about "Discord alternatives", the major core metric is:
> Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Feels like these are two different things.
What I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Discord can do quite a lot, which results in people using it in different ways.
I'm quite active on multiple discord server and yet never use voice / video. But I get why people use it.
If OP is looking for a platform not to replace Discord 1 to 1, but overall to have a community why not do a broader comparison. Then everyone can for themself see what fits their personal needs.
> I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Same. I'm somewhat sad that a lot of the FOSS community got stuck with IRC level of technology and ease of use :( I whish for more projects would subscribe to a low barrier of entry mantra.
Learning reg-ex to ban a member is .. ughh
IRC is the only alternative that runs on random potatos and survives lawfare.
One has still yet to convince me of anything IRC has over XMPP.
> Anyway this thing [Revolt/Stoat] is so far from being ready for prime time, I only include it here to call out the project. I wish them the best and hope for good things, especially since you can self-host the server. But a lack of stability and features prevent this from being useful for anything beyond experimentation. Maybe someday.
Curious what prompted this verdict. My only experience with Revolt/Stoat has been with the Handmade Cities instance, but said experience hasn't been anywhere near as bad as this writeup seems to suggest.
Matrix is the only one that offers the killer feature of Discord, which is being able to join many communities from a single login.
Sadly Matrix has never had a good UX for me. IMO they spent too many complexity tokens on e2ee and there are simply not enough left.
Actually, the true killer feature for discord back in the day was something much dumber, but still heavily related to on-boarding and community transference.
You could join a discord server with a single link.
Account creation could come later.
Considering the competition at its heyday was Teamspeak or Skype, the mere fact you could just actually see the hell you were getting into without some stupid ass "Hol' Up!" instantly made it popular with basically everyone who didn't even know what it was.
My account is dated June 2015 which is apparently a month after it launched, and both me and every single one of the early adopters in that channel that is still up to this day have this same story to tell. We used it because we didn't even have to login at all in the first place when we first got it.
The killer feature of discord was always "open this link for our guild voice and let's go into the dungeon". And this is a brand advantage: you can try that with self hosted tools but discord "feels safe" to click.
The only thing TeamSpeak has on it is multi level voice for complex command chains. But you pay for that with enormous sign up friction.
There's no viable frictionless chat alternative. Maybe jitsi. And if you try to make one? You'll get regulated and have to do the same thing.
What is your greatest UX concern that you would like to see fixed?
randomly telling me that my connection is not secure and as a result randomly hiding messages. and then, if I try to fix it somehow, it will tell me it's nearly impossible or that they'll delete my whole history. the security model is hostile towards user.
when coming back to a community after a long period of time i have to follow a trail of links to rooms that say they have been upgraded and the current one abandoned until i reach the current one. thats stupid, confusing and time wasting
for me, I'd say: occasional cryptic error messages that prevent conversation, even using encrypted DM across multiple devices
What most people here seem to forget, is once a social platform gains traction and especially attention from the main masses, it undoubtedly require checks and balances.
Predators, racism, gore, pedophilia, harassment, stalking and so on..
No matter how high you value security, these are matters that hurt real people today. If you attract the mainstream, you must deal with it.
I am in favor of kicking children, teenagers, and people with vulnerable minds and mental illnesses off the Internet.
Then you won't have to make the decisions that most people suffer from.
Please don't kick people with mental illnesses off the internet. I barely have anyone to talk to as it is
Good one !
One that didn't make the list that I'm excited for is Root. It's come a long way in a short time and already has quite a bit of the features Discord has. The apps and bots are also being set up to be way more powerful than Discord as well.
https://www.rootapp.com/
Seemed as closed as Discord ?
Email + IRC (there are daemons that support chat history). Bouncers exist. Logging. This should be standard for OSS projects, not some private, unsearchable, data-mining platform.
This is what happens when we reach for convenience over openness.
As someone who spent countless hours on IRC when I was younger and enjoyed 99% of it to the fullest... I'd kindly suggest refraining from pushing IRC any further. It has had its run, and while I know it still exists, it's nowhere near what it once was and it's not coming back.
Times have changed and people have different expectations. Nobody (except very few) is going to use multiple services and set up a bouncer just to get the basics working. It's better to spend time building a good replacement that keeps up with current needs than trying to push these old systems onto people, especially younger ones.
In my experience with the few communities I've dabbled in, it's more reaching for popularity than convenience. If I indulged myself with some grumpiness I'd say that's another source of enshitification that's rarely mentionned.
I know people frown upon it but I think XMPP is the way to go. It "just" require a good discord like client with voice and screen share.
I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble.
I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.
> small minority
Huh. I’d have said majority. It was always my impression that a) gamers make up the vast majority of discord users (with all their gamification and gaming features), and b) that gamers mainly care about voice chat (which is what people almost always talk about when it comes to discord and gaming).
> I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server
That makes you an even smaller minority unfortunately. Most people are not going to set up a home server.
I don't understand the appeal of any of those, least of all Discord itself. It's unsearcheable, focused on immediacy, confusing and full of blinking things. The old Reddit interface (or current HN one!) are unsurpassed IMHO.
Most people are on Discord, joining servers has very little friction (no separate accounts), there's decent bots and mod tools and such, ability to create as many channels per server as you want (e.g. for discussions, media, music, whatever) and participate in text based conversations more or less live. It's also easy to jump into a VC and chat while you play games with friends, share screen, stuff like that.
Most alternatives suck for that purpose. There is search for server members and the "blinking things" keep you up to date with where the new stuff is and I presume give you dopamine hits. It's simply not old school forum software and considerations that'd make sites like that good don't enter the equation at all - which also makes attempts at turning Discord into a support forum for any "organized" group or project misguided at best, but also great for the more casual gaming/interest oriented communities.
It does have a weird source of friction. The need to find an invite to the "server". Sometimes you'll find one but it will be dead. There's no way to search to find a server then join it as far as I know.
That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space.
Discord's key value proposition is that it's a trusted zero friction voice chat with a lot of features.
The workflow that made it huge: organizer creates a server for a game, creates a short link for a voice channel. The organizer then goes to play their game, shares the short link with their group.
The members click the link, write whatever they want as the name, click join and are in the voice chat. Say hi and go into the dungeon to have fun.
Need more? Just share your screen with one click. Streamer mode kicks in and hides all pii in the discord interface. Easy global bindings for push to talk.
If the outing is fun some of them will create profiles and stay in the server and play together again.
It's all very organic and easy, while being trusted as a brand so people don't have to hesitate to click your jitsi.weirdgamer.tk link.
I agree with the previous commenter - I hate Discord for all the same reasons. But you said: "That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space." and this is the bit that frustrates me... I must be the target market because several services I use try to get you to use Discord for support, and some will only provide support via Discord.
I get all the hate, I just wanted to explain why it's also loved.
It's a great, great tool and I really wish they'd offer a business tier that opts out of all the data leak features.
I'm building an open-source, high-quality chat app called Inline. It aims to solve issues with Slack and Discord for work communication. Happy to answer any questions.
https://github.com/inline-chat/inline https://inline.chat
Website doesn't have any info about the product. I don't know which features are there going to be. Screenshots would be cool as well to evaluate UX. Frankly the github readme is more useful than the website in that regard.
https://simplex.chat/
It already has quite big communities https://simplex.chat/directory/
The founder of it is on here https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epoberezkin
Tiny nitpick: you actually can pin messages in Signal group chats. It's a pretty recent addition though.
Apart from that, I would have been interested in more details about the author's experience with ~Revolt~ Stoat. To my naive eyes it looks pretty nice. I really like the nuanced takes about the other platforms in this article, so I'd guess the author has some good reasons to dismiss Stoat like that.
Great writeup! Looks like this is going to be relevant very soon.
> Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do
Absolutely, but it's also important to keep in mind that the tool has a big impact on culture by virtue of what behaviors it encourages and what limitations it has. "The medium is the message" is very true here, so think carefully about which tool you hop onto.
We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform.
Here is a quick promo video as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekOxAg7leXM
It is closed source, right?
For now, yes
Maybe there's a niche for Valve/Steam to step into here. They already have your data, and many people use Discord for gaming related chat.
You can already make steam friend group chats, it was just a bit janky when I last used it like 5 years ago
I primarily use Discord but also have a long-running Steam group chat.
Steam group chats are still janky and by no means a Discord replacement. It feels like an MVP that they lost interest in shortly after adding the feature.
It's fine for a couple people with no real need for moderation but beyond that I don't think it's currently viable.
I've seen a lot of gamers mention this, but I'd wonder why it hasn't happened yet especially as there's a set of gamers that seem to love centralizing on steam already. One massive downside I can see is that the various public social areas of steam like the game forums are already a cesspool (and have been since they were vBulletin based) and I don't see that improving with more users in near real-time chat.
Discord getting used as a knowledge base or download source for some areas is already seen as a convenience for those involved or a single point of failure by many 'outside', I wouldn't want to see more of PC gaming moving to one place.
I'm looking at modern browser APIs and wondering why no one else is trying certain things.
getDeviceMedia and getUserMedia are very powerful these days. I haven't actually tested it but I believe a chromium browser would have no issue capturing the hw accelerated output from a game. You can pipe these media streams directly to WebRTC peers for playback on the other side. A server with a simple selective forwarding unit could enable larger scale meetings (100s of participants). All of this can happen in <1000 lines of JS and server code. Most of the heavy lifting happens in the browser engine. Concerns like automating browser permissions, global hot keys, etc. can be handled via electron or platform specific options like WebView2.
Mobile clients are a bit cursed right now. The best solution is to maintain a standard client in the app stores. Forcing everyone to sign their own mobile apps is way too much friction. And you do need native for this on mobile. Browser only / PWA has no chance in hell of providing a smooth UX on iOS or Android.
why not just IRC?
Zulip actually looks pretty good if they made it a little sexier.
We've been using it successfully for a long time too. Real nice bunch of fellas. They did remove mobile notifications without a subscription recently and the price is quite high ONLY for notifications. I do not fault them for doing it but it made recommending them a tiny bit more difficult. The other major issues IMO are the super basic mobile client and lack of any kind of native voice/video chat. You get a button that provides a link to a chat service of your choice. For example you pick a Jitsi Meet instance and Zulip gives you button to create and share the url easily. That's it. I wish there were something a little better integrated.
my team tried it for a couple weeks. couldn't stand the threaded "only see what's important" style of chat. it's undoubtedly our least fav part of microsoft teams---the channels and the threads, we all operate in the chat tab and the channels tab has been relegated to announcement posts no one reads. huge shame zulip can't just like... have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation. some people have gone way too for trying to efficiency max or "cut out the noise" but chronological chat and a competent search feature will always be the goat.
> have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation
It does. https://zulip.com/help/general-chat-channels
But even without that, in a normal threaded channel, you can see all messages in all topics chronologically. IIRC that's the default view when you click a channel in the sidebar.
Here's an example: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/138-user-questions the messages are grouped into runs of the same topic, but it's the whole channel.
mother of god. its perhaps time to revisit zulip. now if I could perhaps disable the topic group heading this would make perfect sense and effectively be a chatroom.
Sounds like it doesn't look good, then?
What's the point of the licensing on these chat servers charging per-user when self hosting?
A LOT of open source software offers features tiers with per user pricing even when self-hosting.
They do need to fund development, but SSO is almost always in the top two level pricings :(
Honorable mentions worthy of your support:
https://wiki.bitmessage.org/index.php/Main_Page
https://vituperative.github.io/i2pchat/
Bring this back!, for sentimental reasons:
https://dcplusplus.sourceforge.io/webhelp/chat_commands.html
can someone please try running the experiment of "but what if just forking&spinning up an OSS clone, scaling up to take in the migrants, acquire network effects, collect roughly same subscription revenue, but run on just, like, 10 people?"
Discord has a financially and politically vulnerable posture that is downstream of having to operate a very large team, raise funding, be exposed to investor market pressure. However, it is also one of the rare instances of successful consumer freemium subscription monetization. A clone does not have to pay the tuition of "what makes this specific space compelling, and want-to-pay-for"; it just have to _exists_, passively soaking up migrants from each platform shift.
ITT WTB 3rd place for my frens.
how is discords freemium successful when they are trying to put Nitro in your face at every step? trying so hard to me that sounds like not enough people pay
> scaling up to take in the migrants, acquire network effects, collect roughly same subscription revenue, but run on just, like, 10 people?"
That's how discord started, too. And then they scaled up. You probably need 10 people to handle infrastructure alone.
Me and my buddies still use team speak. Anyone else?
How about good’ol IRC?
Fun, until you want to share an image and have to upload it to a 3rd party, have to explain what a bouncer is to someone who just wants offline messages and AFAIK voice and video chat is not possible.
Client dependent, but channel overview per server is also not that good.
There is zero chance that the target users for Discord is going to try anything more complicated than Discord, so basically all the entries in this list. I recoil in horror thinking about me explaining Matrix even to the most tech savvy friends I use Discord with and I really really hope people would stop recommending it.
The target user group for Discord actually is children and teens. Look at that UI and how it‘s trying to sell you „swag“.
Then, Discord is not uncomplicated. From „Servers“ not being servers, multiple account onboarding levels, to what happens when Discord believes you are a bot or are using a blacklisted IP.
I don't think I'm active on any "server" that is predominately used by Teens.
I believe you underestimate the average age.
Minecraft servers are full of teens!
I use matrix with several non-technical friends. Its UI/UX has improved greatly over the last two years or so.
Any other Zed users annoyed that they've removed the Help section from GitHub discussions to a sodding discord, please do chime in here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/48737
I really do not like discourse. Mail lists are better because you stay in the loop, plus Gmail is better for searching emails than discourse searches itself.
How do you search messages from before you joined the mailing list?
You check the mailing list archives - those usually have a web based interface.
When you rank something with numbers, I’d love it to be more like 1 of 5 (1/5) even when you said it before. When you are reading at that line, I had to recalibrate, if that is 4 (out of 10), which is what most people try to rank against.
I would love an updated KDX/Hotline server running an a RasPi or similar at home. This was a solved problem 20 years ago. The migration to online based platforms will always lead to network effects and enshittification, for very little gain.
There are updated clients and servers for Hotline.
https://hlwiki.com/index.php/Clients
https://hlwiki.com/index.php/Servers
But the number of users on any particular server these days is extremely small.
I like this page about how a paid forum is the best alternative to a free chat app. Trying to imagine saying “if you don’t like the whole ICQ numbers thing just buy a vBulletin license” in 2002
> signal for secrecy
What kind of secret system uses a phone number tied to your ID as a user name?
What about good old IRC?
Cool
This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat.
I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s
It would be nice if Valve filled in the gaps here. They already got a lot of community features built into Steam.
Steam Group Chats are sort of there; no video chat but text chats and drop-in voice chats like Discord. On the other hand they're basically ephemeral, with messages disappearing from history at some given point.
I also can't figure out a way to access them outside of the Steam client and in DOTA where I believe they're tied to the in-game guild system.
Matrix/Element has video rooms as a Lab function and for a while it had voice rooms too. Not sure what happened to them, but either way with MatrixRTC coming out the technical underpinnings are all there, clients just need to put it all together.
Someone mentioned (I believe?) after talking to Element/Matrix at FOSSDEM this year that the organization has been struggling a lot to get this going. Apparently issues with thier project organization forking and funding the last few years has made one of thier primary contributors, who already had fully functional and working video/voice, all but give up on the project because the upstream forming means it's now forked from a commercial/defunct version of the original code(?)
Why can't anybody just add a button to host a fully P2P WebRTC call? Like everyone did back when Slack didn't have anything, but in one click?
In the case of voice chat in servers used for gaming, my experience has been that the persistent channels for voice are actually kind of important, it removes any friction from dropping in and out of voice chat, and allows others to easily see 'hey, there is someone in this voice channel, maybe i should join'
I did this as a side project awhile ago it was very fun.
https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc
I didn't bother adding much styling to the website because I was only interested in the network side of things.
Yeah I really don't get that. The biggest benefit, by far, of Discord is that it combines both text and voice chat into one! How can one seriously put forth a replacement which can't match the features Discord had on day 1?
Yeah it’s so odd that none of the open-source alternatives have this feature. No video calls are not an option. We need video/voice rooms!
You might be interested in https://kloak.app I believe. It's a privacy-first alternative. It's still in early alpha days, but have most of the things set up. Oh, and we’ve got voice channels with screen sharing in beta too.
How do you plan on funding it? Also, the landing page mentions "You own your community data" but it just looks like you own it and allow us to access it?
Seems to me you're just re-building discord.
"Messages are stored on our servers and are technically accessible at the database level , we won't pretend otherwise. Kloak doesn't require email, phone, or personal info to create an account, your identity isn't tied to your messages the way it would be on other platforms.
Our goal is to implement end-to-end encryption for DMs so that even we can't read message content. But we're not there yet, since after all we need to make sure the platform is safe and not to shield illegal content being sent."
This is a message from one of their founders I found while exploring the app.
Why would they name their software sewer?
If an option doesn't have that then it's not a Discord alternative for me or many of my friends.
Aside from Discord, nobody has gotten this right since Yahoo! Live and Tinychat. Both are dead.