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I mean, if you are looking for a Discord alternative, isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? If you want something that is the opposite of what you describe, IRC still exists and works well, but not sure many end-users would call it an alternative to Discord.

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That and I assume if its open-source you can make clients that look like whatever you'd want.

> isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for?

I think this applies to the original target audience, namely gamers, but as a general purpose chat application, e.g. as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.

Of course, this begs the question why these projects adopted Discord in the first place. I guess the lack of a better alternative (that is not self-hosted)?

> as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.

Why is that?

They use it because Discord works well and simply, with a rich feature set, that's largely free. And yeah, there aren't FOSS alternatives that actually match up.

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