Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
Personally I got all my friends to move to Element on Matrix. Not all of them are particularly technical, and they still have no problems on Element. I’m inclined to recommend Element / Matrix.
Not entirely related, but why do so many people use Discord? What’s the appeal? I only ever used it as a replacement vor teamspeak or ventrilo. And I honestly hate most online games.
I’ve been using it for several years. I have a small server I use with my IRL friends and it works great.
- Near 100% availabily
- Nice sound quality
- Supports multiple servers for your multiple interests
- UI is amazing
- Works fine on every platform
- Screen sharing / streaming is easy
- Cool to see what your friends are playing
- Free plan is more than enough, you can pay for cosmetics or higher stream quality.
The UI is actually kinda ass, but we all got used to it.
Me and my friends moved to matrix, but we still use discord for streaming.
Compared to the software we were using before such as Skype, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble… The UI is amazing.
I’d happily move to Matrix but I’d lose all the servers for my hobby interests. No point in having both.
+1. It’s like an IRC channel but improved and easy to use.
When I started in the online games, we used IRC + TeamSpeak. Now we only use Discord since it has all of them in only one app but it’s better (except the ads), easier and you also has a Mobile App.
Time to dust off my old Mumble server!
I was reading this thread and started looking for that app again.
Mumla? Is it even still being updated?
Mumla the ever living!
mumble is great for VOIP.
Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.
revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there’s that. There’s also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don’t know much about how matrix works
a lot of modern technology and software is built on the foundation of work built by the web browser industry, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not necessarily a good thing either. Provides a lot of nice features, native integration into a web browser, industry standard security and encryption procedures.
That’s about it though, Outside of that, running a dedicated version of that app is almost always some bullshit built in electron, which is a horrible buggy mess with horrible performance. Nothing stops devs from integrating these features into a standalone application… But, they likely won’t since they’ve already developed a web browser version.
I also have some problems with the way web tech is generally built, it’s built with the expectation that you will host and treat it as a web app, which is fine, it works. But i prefer not to host services i use via anything web related as generally i find it both intrusive, and problematic, in the instance that a DNS server goes down for example. (it’s not very likely, i know, but still)
I also think a lot of the networking protocols are fairly bloated, but that’s not as big of a deal, it’s just annoying.
anyway, enough of my ranting. Matrix is actually a specification for a set of communication protocols based on the foundation of web tech, it’s highly universal, and inter-compatible, which is great. But it sort of stops there. There are several server implementations, and numerous front end implementations, none of which seem to be particularly, interesting. There’s numerous electron front ends, a few that aren’t (though they won’t support most features) etc, stuff like that, it’s just. Not clean.
I’ve also been comparing Element and Revolt. Both seem really solid, both are open source and both are self-hostable. Hard to find any downsides there.
There’s a discord server that me and a bunch of friends use as our main hangout. They’ve raised the prospect of bailing before things enshittify, and of course I’ve been tasked with pitching a replacement. For my money, Revolt is the way I’m going to go, specifically because it’s basically a one for one clone of Discord. The people I’m pitching this to are a mix of technical and non-technical, so I think something that looks and feels like what they’re used to will be the easiest transition.
It also feels like Element is geared pretty heavily towards being a replacement for Slack / Teams rather than a replacement for Discord. Their pitch seems a lot more focused on the enterprise market. Revolt seems more focused on gaming, casual hangout, that sort of thing.
I like Element a lot, but for me it doesn’t feel like the right solution to this specific problem. But if I was pitching something to my work as a Teams replacement, Element is definitely the way I’d go.
Man I wish my online friends were that easy to switch.
As soon as I mention Lemmy “what’s wrong with reddit”. As soon as I mention element “but everyone uses whatsapp/discord”.
It suck that 90% of the people are stuck in their old ways and refuse to try anything new.
Hell I almost got banned for even mentioning lemmy once.
Silly question perhaps, but I haven’t tripped across it on the site for Revolt – is there a relatively straight forward server version for self-hosting, or is it just that the source is on github and you can compile it in theory if you feel like goin through that process… ?
The most straight forward I see appears to be Docker hosting
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-what-can-i-do-with-revolt-and-how-do-i-self-host
If you’re looking to self host but are uncomfortable with Docker I recommend checking out YunoHost as an option for something a bit simpler, they also support Revolt
Thanks, appreciated.
Way too few mentions of Jitsi.
I use it with friends, it has good server config, and I’m pushing it on businesses.
they are owned by a Nasdaq-listed company. does that not the defeat the purpose when OP is trying to avoid Wall Street-ownership?
Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.
Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.
Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.
Just self-host it? It’s open-source, that will last you a lifetime.
Explain more of this Jitsi, sounds interesting for my business
It’s voice and video calling with chat and screensharing. I intend to use it for a language school. It’s extendable, for instance you can also self-host a whiteboard, where everyone can draw. You can see the drawing in real time, which is good for asian languages, where direction of the stroke is important.
Free, open-source, packaged in Debian, runs without issues, used it with friends for multi-hour voice chats during gaming nights.
On the server you can configure things like FPS for screenshare. I have yet to adjust that and try streaming video/game through it.
This does sound extremely useful and good.
I’d say the only issues software like this have is there’s a lack of beginners guides to self hosting, so people either know too little and instantly have their server botted / hacked, or know enough to be too paranoid and afraid to set up their own server because they know of the risks.
As for me though, I’ll probably look into implementing this and play around with it for our DnD group first.
That sounds great, let me know how it works for you.
There is also BigBlueButton if you are looking for another similar project.
Just remember your friend, https://discorch.org/
Thank you for sharing this link! Fucking wild times we are in.
Ever looked up XMPP ?
And Snikket for super-easy setup and management
Matrix is nice, and you can have jitsi for calls integrated. It seems to be pretty popular; Lemmy has a field for matrix @ in user profiles. Never heard of revolt before.
I use Jitsi for a non-profit, and I like the mute someone else function, but oh wow the noise cancellation needs improvement. So many voice comm apps have disappeared (there used to be one our group used all the time, then the devs dropped it (the client app) and just became on API or something).
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I’m very excited!
Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.
The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.
Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.
It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.
What are you using instead? I only recently set up my synapse server and I’d be interested to head what the alternatives are
Conduwuit is actively developed and works pretty nice for me. Single user, but bridged to hundreds of telegram, WhatsApp and discord rooms. As well as a few matrix rooms too.
Nice! Looks like a cool matrix platform! I’m on synapse myself but this looks cool
Synapse has seemingly improved since 2020. A word of warning though: if you join large rooms from your server, Synapse will eventually grow the DB to a huge size due to a “lookup” table state_groups_state, and will require manual cleanup. See https://www.sequentialread.com/matrix-synapse-out-of-disk-space-state_groups_state/
Woah nice heads up I appreciate it!
I’ll keep the janitor tool in my pocket for now as my instance takes up negligible space at the moment but someday that might not be the case.
Here’s the referenced tool for anybody else interested:
https://git.cyberia.club/cyberia/matrix-synapse-diskspace-janitor
This tool looks fantastic, thank you!
I’ve found SimpleX a much better solution than matrix for a discord alternative.
I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.
I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different
it’s Element/Matrix if we’re lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won’t be a “platform” you have to leave when it goes corporate.
Sadly I found out yesterday:
Matrix is not a community-based software, it was born [00] in Amdocs [01], a multinational corporation founded in Israel.
https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html
Many were claiming its impossible to get contributions merged as well.
I would be happy to find out this information is wrong or outdated.
Feels like fud.
Matrix is a set of standards and governed by an open foundation https://matrix.org/foundation/about/
Also there are many different server implementations and its hard to believe they all send your data to some third entity. In other words, what is stated by that link is just plain false. Not to mention that today there are quite many clients as well and I find the bridge point a bit… Idiotic.
You are free to use matrix.org but makes way more sense to self host your instance, and maybe not even use Synapse but something more “modern” as server.
Revolt is F/OSS
https://github.com/revoltchat/
It’s not just a company with a clone of Discord, all the server back end, etc is open.
Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:
- Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
- Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it’ll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.
Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.
I have yet to try revolt, but I thought you could just add stand-alone servers to your client (like idk, mumble). Is a revolt instance a whole separate ecosystem/infrastructure and not just a server entry?
My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.
That said I’ve had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.
I get why Federation can cause issues (most of the time it’s moderation related), but why would an extra option be a deal-breaker? Federation can always be disabled on a per-domain basis if you prefer. In fact, I’d argue it’s best practice to only allow domains on a case-by-case basis to prevent spam and abuse.
On the converse, you can’t enable Federation on a platform that doesn’t have it.
They were talking about matrix itself, not a specific option. And I’m not going to lie, having to hand hold your servers federation choices seems like a hassle. At that point why not just use a self hosted, non federated option?
I think the point they’re making is you can effectively have a self hosted non federated option with Matrix. Just disable federation as a whole (which I’m pretty sure is completely possible. Given companies use matrix for comms, and might not want federation, for similar reasons to what is being discussed here)
Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.
but also with request ratelimiting
Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker.
The federation itself is a deal breaker
Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
Because the person they’re responding to said the lack of the optional feature was a deal breaker for them on a different piece of software.
I’m might be being dense but… Still: why would an optional feature be a dealbreaker? You just restated, you didn’t address the confusing logic.
Go ask the actual person who said it was a deal breaker for them, I can’t explain it more simply than I have.
That doesn’t really change that it’s one company hosting it. Unless you’re willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren’t willing to join each others instances?
I guess the easy solution here to to make it use oauth2 authentication. Then you can just authenticate using one account elsewhere. If fediverse services also at some point become oauth2 providers, then even better.
That’s still not a solution. That entails non unified communication, access, and search. Making it easy to log in to others still doesn’t solve easy sharing between others. Also oauth2 is a pain to set up, and many people hosting their own instance aren’t going to bother.
Sorry but what exactly do you communicate and access between discord servers? Are you talking about PMs which are by default independent of servers?
Unified search could easily be achieved through third party tools at the least, like for IRC. I don’t think even discord has unified search between servers.
Oh hey, you’re totally right, that’s crazy. I use Beeper (hosted matrix setup) to aggregate my chats and I guess I’ve always been using that to search across all servers without realizing. Fully thought the DM search would also search across servers.
DMs are definitely also another case though - you can’t easily DM people on another server if that requires you to log into another server.
That’s true about DM, however DMs are not a core use-case for discord-like services. It’s the group/voice chats etc. I could see a workaround like lemmy does, where if you want to DM a user in another server, you might be able to do it through your fediverse instance (i.e. a DM simply has your fediverse instance DM their fediverse instance), but I’m sure there can be more elegant things like. However DMs by themselves are a weird thing by themselves, so much so, that even bluesky had to bolt DMs on-top and outside of their protocol.
…theoretically for now
It a centralized server controlled by the devs
Host your own then
Nheko provides an interface that is reminiscent of Discord. Fully featured and fast Matrix client.
Thank you for the recommendation. I tried element a while ago and found it lacking. Matrix must be the way forward. Disregarding IRC of course.
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Honestly, I am ready to go straight back to TeamSpeak.
I miss hosting my own server and having full access and control over it
I used to just host it on a piece of shit. 2003 Dell XP machine I put Ubuntu on
Hell yah, TS3 crew all the way. (Or TS5 for the zoomers…)
My nerds herd recently also set up a cluster of Matrix Synapse servers so we got our little “We have Telegram at home” set up. Getting non-tech people to accept that this is how to find me has been tricky without sounding like a digital prepper.
: ( i was too dumb to follow the playbook correctly
i wanna have a matrix sever!
but I’ll use snikket for now until i skill up
We believe in you, there are other write-ups and guides on how to get it working. Its was great learning expirence for VMs and Proxmox (thats what I did and it did make it harder, but I feel more confident when im cosplaying as a sys-admin)
This one is pretty close to whats needed, but go into it expecting each step to open a new tool/application that needs to be researched before you press enter. Also look up how to set it to a PSQL db before you start inviting users, it defaults to SQLite and that will cause problems eventually.
that is actually what I’ve been thinking. xmpp with encryption seems good enough for me! plus I’ve heard some stuff isn’t encrypted in matrix, (metadata? emojis? not exactly sure)
i am heavily leaning towards scaling up to snikkets big brother, prosody.
The currently common older implementation of e2ee in xmpp has the same issue with only the message body being encrypted. There are newer specs of OMEMO that have better metadata protection, but its adoption in xmpp clients has been very slow.
Prosody is more of a sandbox, with Snikket being a preconfigured version of it, but yes running Slidge will be a bit easier with a normal Prosody server.
If you try to do calculus and don’t have the understanding of the underlying math then you won’t have a good time when ansible breaks. I’d advise it’s normally better to learn how to manually install and manage software from the command line.
There is also Mumble. TS3 era voip and text chat features, but it’s FOSS.
It was so featureless back when I last used it. I don’t remember it having half the features ts3 had in 14
Oh, it’s basic af. But it did what it needed to do, and still does, for some.
I havent used it in ages, I have no clue what sort of stuff continued development has enabled. If anything.
My friend group went first from Skype to the massively better TS3, and finally to Mumble. I don’t remember really missing anything.
If they add federation I’m sold. Honestly it would be nice if it integrated with Activity Pub
It’s not that kind of application. Federation would be massive overkill for a project like Mumble.
It’s a voip server and client for video gaming, with a couple adjacent features sprinkled in.
It doesn’t even really have accounts, and adding servers is just matter of configuring their IPs. What would you even use federation for?
TS 6 looks so good. I can’t seem to figure out it’s release window though. Along with the mobile app being updated. Once those are done I plan to move over.
I used to have a free lifetime server from someone that was giving them away, but he shut down after a few years.
Did he die?
Maybe it was based on the “lifetime” of their hamster 🤷
An alternative would need screen share, just voip is not enough any more.
The problem is that performant screenshare (to multiple users) more or less requires infrastructure. That requires money, and it’s impossible to compete on price with services that have the VC-enshitification model.
You can get around this in a few ways, but they’re all tradeoffs that are in some way or other worse than discord.
- P2P - sacrifice latency, reliability
- direct multi-stream - sacrifice PC performance and/or bitrate
- paid infrastructure - sacrifice money
I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s simpler and by it’s very nature doesn’t require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.
Plus, don’t forget screen sharing in discord isn’t very good as is (720p30) if you’re not a paid user.
What if you had OBS create a “camera” of your screen, and then use that through video chat?
Ah, the good old “screenshare not working on wayland” workaround!
honestly that isnthe only thing that stopd me from going all in on teamspeak/mumble
i just need a screen sharing solution (not necessarily built into those tools)
Most of the discords I’m on never use screen share for anything.
All the ones I’m on, around 30, it’s the only thing it’s used for.
TeamSpeak recently added screen share to their TS6 beta, however it currently only works on official servers provided by TeamSpeak; they have not yet released TS6 server software, only the client. To my understanding, they are thankfully still planning on releasing it though.
Damn TS3 was still kinda wet behind the ears and maybe even still in beta last time I played with it. I only used it for one group and I cut ties with them.
I never even used it, I only know TS2 and it’s purplish, super basic ugly interface. (If anyone even remembers that- would’ve been back in mid to late 00s)
I’m running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I’ve set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.
Did you follow a guide, or know one you could link? I’m thinking this is the path for me and my friends too.
This is my wiki, no Fb bridge, but telegram, WhatsApp, discord and signal bridges yes
https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=matrix%3Astart
Check the sidebar, its closed by default on mobile.
My humble experience so far: https://kcross.engineering/blogs/matrixandmautrix/
Biggest thing so far is “go slow on federation”. Large federated servers are where you get into trouble with resource requirements and needing to spin up workers, etc. Small, private servers are relatively easy.
I can try to write some stuff up, it’s not super complex. Core requirement for my setup is Docker + a domain. I recommend Linux host but you can make Docker Desktop work.
Let me write some stuff down this week.
Are you saying you can import chat history with a bridge some how? I don’t remember that being an issue, but would be very handy
Yes! Absolutely (* didn’t check all existing bridges, so… Maybe not all of them)
I’m messaging Facebook users over Matrix via the bridge.
This sounds great. If you end up writing something for the other commenter using a Linux server and the Messenger bridge I would love to hear if there were any pitfalls to avoid!
My humble experience so far: https://kcross.engineering/blogs/matrixandmautrix/
Biggest thing so far is “go slow on federation”. Large federated servers are where you get into trouble with resource requirements and needing to spin up workers, etc. Small, private servers are relatively easy.
man I wish mumble had a better interface and a chat function, it could real FOSS competition with Discord, but the lack of a chat feature is holding it back
Started hosting a mumble server for gaming maybe six months ago and have been using it daily. Really happy with it.
I don’t have a guild to host for anymore, but I used to host one years ago and it was solid as a rock. I am glad mumble is still going strong
It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.
It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.
Unbelievably so. Mumble is… basically one setup command. Don’t even need a domain. And it needs absolutely no resources, can run on a Pi Zero.
Setting up my own Matrix server was honestly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever attempted in decades of non-professionally using computers and I’m still not sure I’d be able to properly take care of the installation if it breaks. Sooo many moving parts. All the federation-oriented projects that rely on adoption rates reaaaaally desperately need setup wizards before any other additional feature.I’ve set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.
Matrix is like “Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn’t work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that’s NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?”
What server are you hosting? Synapse probably.
I went conduwuit and was quite easy: https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=matrix%3Astart
You forgetting the part where the server starts using crazy resources because you entered the main Matrix chat. Does the server need to send you everything that’s ever been said? Apparently yes
Sounds like this is part of their business plan. Make hosting it so onerous, you’re better-off using their servers, or paying them to do it for you.
that and screen sharing
There’s no text chat in mumble? Really? (I seem to remember otherwise, sorry)
There is text chat but it’s not persistent, or very customizable.
Its been ages for me, so I may be incorrect now. I think the chat is not persistent and I am pretty sure there is no channels. Its most definitely not set up how discord is where its more of a chat client that has voice rather than a voice client that has chat.
