What's the best Free alternative? Since WebRTC is pretty powerful & cross platform, is there a really good WebRTC text + audio chat system that matches the core functionality of Discord?
While I think they're both great, neither of them are an alternative to Discord.
Getting in? One click on email/URL and then sign up. Join a channel? One click. Voice chat? One click. Stream your game? One click. Seamlessly switch to mobile app? Done. I have yet to meet a user that can't get into it with just an invite link. It's amazingly user friendly. And if I want to, I can granularly create roles for users and administrators of arbitrary levels and access rights.
I share the privacy concerns, and that I can't grep any logs easily (though with voice chat that's harder regardless), but simply from a user perspective if it wasn't for the network effect of my IRC communities, and Messenger groups, I could happily just use Discord tomorrow.
I strongly dislike that it's closed source and partly Chinese owned, but I've been using Messenger to reach people I couldn't on IRC for years already, and that experience is much worse, with no privacy gain.
Credit where credit is due, they knocked it out of the park in most aspects.
Also the protocol is open so it should be doable: https://mumble-protocol.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
For those curious about the switch from murmur to mumble in our conversation, murmur is the server side, while mumble is the client side.
For a chat-only replacement, it's definitely perfect.
https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting#fair-billing-poli...
It looks like if I wanted to invite 10 friends to my room on Modular.im, I'd have to pay $17.50, compared to $0 for Discord.
- Open source. Self-explanatory.
- Federated. Sure, you can probably redundant-ify your IRC server with Apache Something and Amazon AWS/ Cloudflare whatever if you really wanted to, but I regularly see Matrix rooms with 10+ addresses because the protocol's designed around that redundancy, not the other way around. And of course with Discord none of this even applies...good luck if Intern Greg elbows the Big Red Button, or they pull a yahoo groups/google+/etc.
- The protocol leaves a lot of room for experimentation that Discord isn't nearly open enough for. [1][2][3]
- There's bridges to other discord, irc, and dozens of other platforms, sidestepping the adoption problem (note that there's been even more added since this graphic was made). [4]
They aren't exactly languishing in obscurity either: the government of France is one of their userbases [5]. Yeah, I'd say Discord-style VC would be nice, but the lack if it isn't exactly holding them back.
[1]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/matrix-live/ [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/freebird/ [3]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/lightrix/ [4]: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-... [5]: https://vector.im/#case-studies
The only thing this doesn't let you do is install bridges to other services (such as Discord). For that you'll need your own server.