Its looking like Microsoft is gonna buy Discord. Preferably open source, and has a big userbase, and has Windows and Linux option. (but mainly windows because i only game on windows now.)
Matrix
Not really a Discord alternative until they ship voice channels. Revolt chat is a straight up Discord clone, but it’s not federated, they have really obfuscated the way to self host it, and their releases are way older than what the main server is running. Plus, it’s developed by kids who don’t give a crap about anything.
So, Matrix is the best chat out there, but it’s not a Discord alternative.
The matrix client element has video and voice chats as beta feature. I use it and it works fine for me. I can absolutely recommend Element as a Discord alternative.
Element is the best one I’ve found, at least for DMs. I don’t use servers and as such the way they work on Element still deeply confuses me, but if you work your way into it like with Lemmy it probably works.
👍🏻
I’m using Matrix with Coturn integration for voice. Works great. There’s an addon for video too but I don’t use that so never added it.
@scrabbone mentioned there’s already a beta feature we can enable in Settings, Experimental. So, it’s already working! When they ship this as a stable feature we can start recommending Matrix to everyone looking for Discord alternatives.
Source? Last I heard they offered 10 Billion and Discord said no.
Time to go back to Teamspeak or Vent? 😁
Rocket.chat
Revolt
Spacebar-chat
Teamspeak
Teamspeak still under development? Damn! Haven’t seen anyone mention teamspeak in a while! That was the standard back in the OG CS days.
Teamspeak 5 looks very cool but you can’t selfhost it yet…
Definitly Mumble. Great audio quality and very low resource requirements.
It even has a new very nice web-client these days. Disroot has a test instance.
Also the great Pumble Android client got forked and now it back in active maintenance. It’s called Mumla now, get it via F-droid.
Edit: Guildbit allows you to temporarily set up a Mumble server for free.
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Isn’t Mumble voice chat only? It’s not really a full replacement.
Matrix / Element, or IRC. Mumble for voice chat.
is muble Foss?
A few people have mentioned the issues with Matrix but I think a part of it is the severe lack of community moderation tools. Something like a mandatory pinned rules channel would help for communities (possibly announcements too, communities are a client convention atm so not very useful). There isn’t a good story for letting bots automod channels (useful when you get raids of about 2k to 4k messages per second), which also hangs on the server not being on the performance level to easily handle more massive servers if it gets raided for whatever reason.
So at the moment, there is no alternative that isn’t also a centralized single point of failure.
I’m just hoping one day someone writes some chat client that pivots over ActivityPub for discovery, sadly my ADHD will probably prevent me being that someone.
What you want is perfectly possible with IRC. There are also nice looking web-clients like Convos or The Lounge that are as user friendly as Discord once they are set up.
Well, no, because IRC lacks communities like Discord has them (called Servers there). I can’t coherently organize a community over several channels. IRC also has issues with netsplits as it doesn’t really have support for HA architecture. There is no chatbacklog either. And moderation cannot delete previous messages. Atleast not out of the box and requiring client support. There is also no option to require people to have created an account X minutes ago to be able to join or that moderators must setup 2FA to be able to access the server.
IRC is the absolute minimum of what can be called a “chat”, it has no tools that fit what modern and safe communities need.
You have seriously outdated information about IRC. Nearly all of what you describe can be done with one of the above mentioned clients and a modern IRC daemon like Oragono or a bouncer like ZNC.
I know my position and the advocacy that I do, but realistically Discord has no replacements if you are looking on the aspect of available users and communities. Technicalities matter only so much, no matter the other alternatives like rocket.chat or Mumble.
If you can get around learning and practicing OPSEC, like me, simply do not type self doxxing PII, have a constant common typing grammar pattern and not share images or media without stripped metadata. It is plenty to obtain decent anonymity by obscurity, and decent amount of privacy. Use Discord as a resource tool rather than shitposting all day, and you are good. This is my personal way of usage.
