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Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

I share some of the concerns about discord, but the problem is, Mumble or XMPP or any of these alternative solutions are not viable replacements for what people actually use Discord for.

It's the combination of persistent text chat / community driven features + voice chat / streaming / etc. that all work well together and are tightly integrated. It's easy for someone even with minimal experience to manage Discord servers, even for a large community. Roles and permissions are a breeze. It's easy to add bots that provide a ton of additional functionality. The interface is pleasant for end users.

You would need multiple open source projects running to replace all of the core functionality people use Discord for, and they would be in different interfaces, often less user-friendly ones.

And I say this as someone that ran Mumble and TeamSpeak servers for years.

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If you're running a community you want to actually grow, you don't have much of a choice besides be on discord. It's replaced both Facebook and Meetup for events and building Internet groups. Even open source projects moved to Discord. Is it more FOSS to use an open format? Yes, absolutely. But a Discord server is what any younger person will join, frictionlessly, from their phone.

Honestly, people are really missing the forest for the trees with Discord. It's gone well beyond a chat application to being an entire category killer for things like community forums.

Doesn't Element tackle all these with communities, and jitsi room integration?

If you run down a heavily abstracted feature list looking for checkboxes, maybe. If you look at actual user experience, not unless things have changed in massive ways in the past ~8 months since I last tried it. Some form of the Matrix stack + Jitsi is 100% the way to go if you're attempting to self-host a Discord-like experience, but it's quite the heavy lift compared to just using Discord.

You're still missing out on things like Discord Forums, which are inferior compared to a real forum, but work surprisingly well for being what they are inside of the general Discord app. Threaded conversations are a very different experience (and Discord of course supports these as well.)

Matrix stuff also obviously supports bots, but there's just a metric ton of them available for Discord that server "owners" don't need to self-host or manage beyond adding them to the server. Stuff like managing roles based on reacting to messages all the way to bots that will run your D&D combat... all possible with Matrix, but not generally a "click in three places and it's in your server and working" sort of setup.

Discord takes all these things and just makes it extremely friction-free.

Absolutely agree - I've been watching the slow enshittification process that Discord has been going through and keeping a close eye on any alternatives and there just aren't any that I could get my less technical friends to join.

From my perspective it seems like Discord being free, easy to use, and such a comprehensive solution to online socialization makes it so that no one else even thinks to compete with them. It's going to take significant shifts in monetization or quality to prompt anything similar to get spun up.

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