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Comment by bramhaag | Hacker News Reader

What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group:

- Matrix

- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)

- IRC + Mumble

- Signal

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For the latest in IRC tech, you can read my blog posts: https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.

Thank you! I've bookmarked your website!

One thing most of those lack is an easy way to share screen.

Now if anyone wants to differentiate their Discord alternative, they want to have most of discord functionalities and add the possibility to be in multiple voice chats (maybe with rights and a channel hierarchy + different push-to-talk binds). It's a missed feature when doing huge operations in games and using the Canary client is not always enough.

Stoat has screen sharing / video calling in the pipeline at least: https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313

According to the last comment in the issue it is already available for self hosted clients.

Matrix screen sharing is a feature of Element Call / MatrixRTC (in development).

For now, I think they do it through their Jitsi integration. I don't know how easy it is, as I haven't tried it.

https://docs.element.io/latest/element-cloud-documentation/i...

I’ve been self hosting Element Call and use it to call my girlfriend (and also used it with another friend a few nights ago). I’ve had a few problems where when starting the call it seems to not connect but just trying again works, and that’s really the only issue i’ve had that I can think of since setting up a TURN server (before that it would completely fail sometimes, but that’s not Element Call’s fault)

Thanks for sharing. I think the design of MatrixRTC (especially the scaling via hierarchical SFUs) looks promising. It's nice to see someone actually using it at this early stage, even if only for 1:1 calls.

Jitsi does that well

I use MiroTalk for it. Within Element you can set up widgets (basically PWAs) and so you can call via Element’s built in Jitsi widget (or a more reliable dedicated Jitsi link) and then use MiroTalk to share screens. It is a LOT better, especially for streaming video.

In terms of ease of use, it’s like three clicks. Technically more than Discord, but it’s p2p streaming so it’s far nicer quality.

Hard to say, I don't really use discord so I think of it as voice chat as a service, and for pure voice chat it is hard to do better than mumble. However from the way people talk about discord, it is also a text chat screen sharing file server. and it is hard to find one product that does all that well.

For video, both video chat and screen sharing I have had a lot of success with Galene, it offers text chat and file sharing, but they are sort of anemic and bare bones, which could be good or bad based on the needs of your users. https://galene.org/

What I usually do is start with a fossil server, this is trivial and gives you files, a wiki and a forum (none of them super good but like I said trivial to set up) then if I want voice, mumble is my normal route, but galene is growing on me more and more, the web interface makes buy in from the end users trivial and despite it being nice you almost never need the cool room stuff you can do with mumble.

But I am a sys-admin, I like running servers, hell, I find I enjoy running the servers more than I like playing the games. Plus, statistically, I have zero-friends, it is fine to say a server is great when only one other person has used it. That is to say, my results may not be typical.

I think Matrix is the closest equivalent that's reasonably popular, at least for text messaging. There are both web and mobile clients and they interoperate seamlessly. It's also at the point where it somewhat reasonably works for the average user, rather than being the usual UX nightmare that teaches people that anything open source or anything pushed by their nerdy friend should be avoided.

This seems like a nice breakdown of some options:

https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/

(Not affiliated)

Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don't want to host their own shit, they want a one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have baggage.

This is your chance to start Bluesky for discord. A competently built, VC backed competitor to exploit a misstep only caused by government overreach due to their colossal market share. 26 million daily active users is a nice guaranteed market to start whittling away at, with an effective marketing campaign to drive a wedge between "little gamers, and big corporate enshittification."

> government overreach

How would you avoid the same problem that discord ran into that made them require ID verification? I doubt they're doing this for fun. Incorporate in the Bahamas?

the largest block of discord users are from the US which hasn't got id verification laws regarding age for social media. The 2nd largest is brazil, which does, and the 3rd is India, which doesn't.

So they are forcing users from countries that haven't passed these laws to abide by them. They don't have to do this, they could just require brazilians use face-id.

I've been tempted for a long time.

I don't think I would need VC to get off the ground.

I keep coming back to the gigantic headache of content moderation, and it gives me pause not to do it. There are some truly terrible people who will try to tear the platform apart.

I think automatic moderation is one of those golden use cases for LLMs. You can use cheaper inference models, and maybe some clever sampling techniques to limit the token expense.

Thinking out loud, I'd be surprised if this isn't a startup already.

I wonder if you break TOS by sending unlawful content that way... :) Would have to be local model I'd imagine.

Any option that is not self hosted will eventually suffer the same fate. Decentralization is the way forward

What successful mass market service is self hosted[0]? We're in an endless cycle of cool new service suffers enshittification and abandoned. I'd love to break the cycle, but self hosted hasn't had a lot of success.

[0] Self answer: Maybe crypto and email would be the best examples, and neither of them are fantastic examples.

Discourse?

> Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don't want to host their own shit, they want a one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have baggage.

I mean, come on, this is, what, a couple hours of vibe coding, max?

Let's go AI bros on HN. Chop. Chop. ... Wait, why am I hearing crickets?

For those who don't get it, yes, I'm being sarcastic. It isn't that easy to code this, but the problem isn't coding or even deploying.

The problem is your manual service. Logins are a pain in the ass and chew up sooooo much of your customer service time. Then there are the griefers. Then there are the spammers. Then there is law enforcement compliance (in spite of what HN says, you DO have to comply with local laws). etc.

All that costs time which equates to money.

I was once talking to someone who made a point that Discord specifically tries to hide IPs so that people playing a game can't DDoS their opponents. o_O! At that moment, I realized that I simply can't imagine all the malevolent behavior that Discord withstands.

Revolt's rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding MSFT done ever.

It's because of the trademark: https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat

Nevertheless, I don't like the new name either, oh well...

I like this comment though:

Imagine you make a free software project and it runs into trademark issues because people have more money than you to register in more classes than your project.

And then even though your project existed first, they still come after you anyway.

And from that an even more expensive rebranding from this as well.

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225, not sure how accurate it is, but it makes me want to revolt .

I wish there was more info. Who sent the C&D? Did that entity seem likely to have enough money to actually sue, and did they seem immune to the negative press if they did sue? Is that company in an unrelated-enough industry that they could just call it "Revoltchat" or something and be safe? Did they at least show it to a lawyer? Why didn't they publish the C&D?

I'm not a lawyer, but this kind of thing happens enough that I've asked GPT to explain it to me, and I think most people roll over at the first legal demand, no matter how outrageous.

Calling it "stoat" seems like a form of self-destructive protest.

It's open source, I'm tempted to fork it and do nothing other than change the branding.

"[beaver emoji] Revolt is Stoat now"

Argh. If there's no stoat emoji, petition the Unicode Consortium for one, don't just use a beaver. It's not even the right family; the badger emoji would be closer.

Does matrix have decent 1:N client desktop broadcasting with low latency (and high fps) yet? I use discord for "watch parties", video and tabletop gaming...

MiroTalk can be made into a widget on Element, is open source, and is P2P after the initial connection.

Which of these has been around for over three decades?

That would be my answer.

Same, depends on what you expect in terms of features and so on, but for chat, IRC works perfectly.

Most of the more elaborate features can probably be done through CTCP.

Discord's voice rooms with screen sharing is a very cool feature i depend on daily. I haven't seen opensource messenger that implemented this yet.

Jitsi handles this very well.

I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.

Jitsi has audio rooms like discord?

Jitsi supports audio, video, or both, in addition to screen sharing.

One use case Jitsi doesn't support that Discord does is "push to talk"; that's something I haven't seen a good alternative for, other than Mumble, which seems much less usable for other purposes. But for other purposes, Jitsi works very well; I've had thousands of hours of calls on it at this point.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see a web standard for a web app to request access to a single (user-determined) key, to allow web apps to do push-to-talk while staying in their sandbox.

Well, even if Jitsi doesn't have Push-to-Talk, you can still easily get it by using a hotkey to mute/unmute the mic system-wide.

For exampple, if you're on PC, MicMute [1] can be used for free, or if you want more customization, I would humbly present my side project, AutoPTT [2].

[1] https://github.com/SaifAqqad/AHK_MicMute/

[2] https://autoptt.com/

Diode Collab - not fully open source but network and client are all open source. It has dramatic privacy commitment (stores no data on servers, decentralized user-to-user routing, no PII/phone/emails). Diode team just added STUN/TURN to the network last month and streaming will come soon. https://collab.diode.io

Worth looking at Diode Collab too No PII, E2E encrypted, p2p. Not 1:1, but its Zones are Discord-like. https://collab.diode.io

You've pretty much covered all the open source alternatives, other than rocket.chat which is more similar to slack. This has a good list - https://medium.com/@jingjunm/the-best-alternatives-to-discor...

If you don't NEED the open-source, pumble and steam group chats work great too

I wonder how Stoat will fare, and how it is currently maintained, in terms of "making money"; my fear is that it would steer into the direction of Discord itself.

Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind a paywall to remain sustainable.

Check out Diode Collab. It’s private communities to join/create, no IDs/personal info needed, fully encrypted, and keeps your data under your control. Not a voice clone, but great if privacy and community joining/creating is the main thing.

For me, the closest alternative to Discord is Stoat. Matrix with Element (or other clients) would be great, but it feels so slow on both desktop and mobile.

IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after.

I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron. Total waste of time.

IRC does not support group voice & video calls, which is one of the primary features of Discord (and previously Skype, from which everyone migrated to Discord in the first place)

Kids these days...

Should be blame the majority of the users, or should we accept times change?

It's a viable system for the many open source software projects that collaborate over chat. Expo, Typescript, and Effect are relatively large examples. I'll participate there if available and I get locked out. Otherwise, I'll just use the stuff without contributing, no problem.

IRC exposes your IP and you can't even access history unless you're willing to self-host your own bouncer, which costs time, money, and risk even if you already know how to do it, which most people don't. Being IRC only will exclude a lot of people who want to contribute to your project while also adding a lot of friction to the mere act of sharing screenshots, which is problematic if you have any software which renders to something not text.

I grew up on IRC and still use it, I have my own bouncer set up, etc. But the devs on Discord and not IRC probably aren't the devs with the skillset and resources to host their own server and bouncer. IRC just isn't in the running to fill the Discord shaped hole.

I haven't used an IRC server implementation in 20 years that doesn't do host masking. (IE; cloaking of client IP addresses).

That said, I'm biased as I have been running an IRC community for 22 years or so... but I prefer to have video/voice in it's own system. (mumble/jitsi)

>IRC exposes your IP

That hasn't been true for decades, and even if it was, it sounds like Hollywood's idea of a problem.

>IRC only will exclude a lot of people

If they can't figure out how to point a client to an IRC server, their contribution is worthless. It's the most trivial barrier to entry possible.

>sharing screenshots

Print screen > paste to image host > share link. Not hard.

I get that the Discord experience is slick, if you're willing to give up any sort of privacy or confidentiality. IRC is lightweight and simple, and its shortcomings can be worked around without too much effort. Discord is bloated, malicious, evil - I will gladly suffer some inconveniences of IRC.

Keep in mind that I am an IRC user, and I am not advocating for staying on Discord. I'm just stating that IRC is not - and probably never will be - a contender for "Discord alternatives", even among developers.

I can still see other peoples IPs on IRC today. When writing this comment, I can see people on major IRC servers with IP addresses that appear to correspond to consumer ISPs.

Another benefit of not being on IRC is that they don't have to interact with people who will disregard their contributions as "worthless". That's so dismissive of other people that I can't really take your comment seriously on the topic of interpersonal collaboration and communication.

And yes, even sharing screenshots becomes difficult. What host would you use that works in every country the IRC server operates in, works with people using any given VPN, and has a ToS and PP that is at least not worse than Discord's? Keep in mind this excludes Imgur and Catbox.

IRC is not simple and its many problems are not trivial.

Someday the big-name networks will support IRCv3 ChatHistory and all will become well with the world.

For most Discord users IRC simply does not have the feature set that people need. Basics like simple drag and drop media sharing, threaded conversations, emoji reactions and voice comms, up to more complicated stuff like screen sharing and video calling.

Or even persistent chat history

The real sin is that if they went with electron, they probably could have gone with a web app, and while web apps have downsides, they make fellow user buy in trivial, instead of "download this client" it's "go to this web page"

I am especially bitter because electron advertises as being "cross platform" by which they mean that it also runs on linux and as a openbsd driver I get to go "cross platform my ass" and then weep because of how close I am, if it were a web app it would probably be trivial for me to to run. What I really want is a method to unelectronify electron apps.

Snikket (https://snikket.org ) with Monal as the iOS client

Requires hosting of the private server (security/privacy implications) or renting it from the third party.

Any XMPP provider will give you a chat address that is compatible with Snikket: https://providers.xmpp.net

Zulip?

I keep wondering why Zulip is so often left out of reviews and tooling comparisons. For me it ticks a lot of important boxes, yet it barely gets mentioned. Is there a downside I'm missing, or is it just under the radar?

The concept that every message belongs to a topic and the async communication focus makes so much sense to me. I read conversations, not timelines.

Sadly Zulip does not have a big marketing budget, and many reviews/tooling comparisons are paid for in some way, directly or otherwise, or are SEO spam that starts with reading other similar SEO spam.

It is highly ranked on some platforms that do validated reviews, like Capterra.

(I lead the Zulip project).

Hey, cool :-). I've used Zulip for a bit and really enjoyed it.

We're planning to roll it out at our company (foundata) in Q4, so you’ll get at least a few bucks from us. I'll also happily recommend it to our customers. As an OSS company and service provider, I can very much relate to the lack of marketing budget and the constant SEO spam.

I feel like the average person isn't looking for something professional grade, sadly it's hard to get people to go away from Discord at the moment. Hard to suggest alternatives if people aren't seeking them yet.

If I had to say it would have to be something customizable, letting a user to delete their data even after getting kicked from a server, very fast and seamless joining process ,great gif/sticker support without any premium features etc. But really that's just some fantasy app lol. Discord is doing just fine destroying itself however

By the way, I didn't know there was an instant online test app because when I searched for Zulip I was in the download page and it doesn't say anything about trying it online. Seems like a strange suggestion UX wise but that's how I feel about it (wonder how many people missed out on this?), same thing after you enter the app. It should have a test area for the new user to chat around by himself with a bot or something with locally/session stored messages.

Oh please, fix your self-deployment story first. Search "zulip docker" or "zulip self host". It seems like you guys just deleted your compose file right when folks are looking for alternatives. Even before this refactor I gave it a good try for an hour before just moving on to RocketChat/Mattermost. It seems like you just don't try the product as if you're a customer.

Not sure which compose file you mean; here's Zulip's official container image repo:

https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip

https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/blob/main/compose.yaml

It doesn't have an installer or even a starter compose.yml now. Even the much-ridiculed NextCloud has had a turnkey AIO installer for 5 years now. When no one is coming into the shop, maybe check if anyone unlocked the entrance.

https://zulip.com/

I have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS

Element’s awful, but I’ve found FluffyChat, another matrix client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.

https://nostrapps.com/flotilla

Matrix has been trivial enough for me to implement with some of my non-technical friends. YMMV

Last I checked Signal was not fully open source, which is iffy, believe their encryption protocol is still closed. That said its the best of a bad bunch for E2EE messaging. If you're on android I'd recommend doing what I do, which is installing from the APK on the site, manually verifying the sig locally (you can use termux for this), and then lagging ever so slightly behind on updates to avoid potential supply chain or hostile takeover attacks. This is probably over cautious for most threat profiles, but better safe than sorry imo. Also their server side stuff is close sourced, technically this isnt an issue though as long as the E2EE holds up to scrutiny though.

Edit: My information may be out of date, I cannot find any sources saying any part of the app is closed source these days, do your own research ofc but comfortable saying its the most accessible secure platform.

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