Discord Alternatives, Ranked
taggart-tech.com
taggart-tech.com
Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.
Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.
Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.
Ditto on Mattermost.
Discourse is a forum.
Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.
Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls
Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.
Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.
Going back to something you said earlier:
> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.
That is totally true, but is that server really going to be one with NSFW content or channels? Those huge servers are great spaces, but every one I've been on is fully functional if you are on a "teen account" without doing ID/Age verification.
I think there's definitely more than 10 thousand servers... Unless they mean active? Even so... there's 3.2 million Discord servers with the Disboard bot installed, that's just Disboard, a way to advertise your Discord. There's likely millions more with no bots.
In other words there are >10k large servers, in addition to the much larger number of smaller servers.
Large community servers are plentiful. I'm in a few that are definitely several hundred if not a few thousand users. It's pretty common to have a public server for cities too.
https://www.deepcord.com/leaderboard/top-members/all/all-siz...
All my IRL group chats are WhatsApp. Discord is for the local board game bar, various regional tabletop gaming scenes, my favorite basketball podcast, my favorite miniatures game, etc.
When I want to get into a community, these days I get a Discord link (which I guess I prefer to the Facebook Groups of a decade ago).
I’d prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can’t say the experience is that onerous.
That said, I agree that not having to create a new account is a huge barrier of entry removed. A lot of the servers I’m in would probably not be a thing, or at least be even smaller, if everyone had to create an account to join.
As for video calls and screen sharing, not something that's been super normalized in my circle. Some of us stream to Twitch with OBS, but it's rare to say "hey come watch my computer screen for an hour in a 1-on-1 call". There is just one guy who seems like a heavy Discord user who seemed to want to do this sometimes. I showed him Jitsi to placate him, we can both join a session in a browser without accounts and I can see his screen. I wasn't a big fan of that, though, I'd rather just not let that be normalized, personally. A screenshot, video clip, describing it to me, letting it go, any of that seems better than being trapped in a screensharing/video call of uncertain length.
Superapps are just going to just keep winning because of this.
But it's worth noting that as an older Gen Z, this is just how people hang out nowadays, so we'll be watching anime together in the server until we fall asleep or whatever. That's why screen sharing isn't as useful as screenshots and video clips.
Discord has also done a good job protecting identity; better than DNS has :) I use lots of other apps with "real" identity, Discord is good for centralizing non-work, non-family activity.
In order to sustain an ecosystem instead of mega-app, that ecosystem needs to be really smoothly integrated, and I know of no good examples of this
I think the client side could still be a "platform" like pidgin, allowing login and simultaneous participatiin in multiple servers, without needing to be fully centralized.
What disappoints me about this list is the lack of consideration for video calls and screenshare.
Many groups use Discord as a Slack alternative or forum.
Discord's single sign on is convenient. But the list's point was any central platform is a risk.
I wish for the best, but they're probably putting out fires from the increased load
It has a Discord like UI, but the voice and video they're working on isn't released yet
I lead the Zulip project, and I'd like to clarify that Zulip's free community pricing does not have user limits, either in Cloud or self-hosting. The 10 user limit for free mobile notifications only applies to workplace/business use. Larger communities are encouraged to submit a simple form to get approved for notifications beyond 10 users.
And this complaint seems quite strange:
> Even for self-hosted plans, anything above the free tier requires a zulip.com account for plan management.
How would a paid subscription work without an account for managing it?
This is an important and timely topic, but I wish a more deeply researched article was the one being widely circulated.
Personally I would never want to join that noise. If an IRC channel has more than 50 people I tend to avoid it unless it is a technical channel that may have some knowledgeable people. If I want to reach millions of people I will find a way to join the conversation of an influencer on their podcast but hopefully such a need never comes to pass for me.
Signal has a fun dark pattern where it unrevocably grants permissions for anyone you allow to contact you to see everything in your profile for the rest of time. It has only a single trust level with contacts effectively: full trust. This is unacceptable in any tool you use for online community, unless you exclusively use it for online community and can decline to provide any info in this full-trust level. Unfortunately Signal also makes very sure you can't have a second account, by tying your account to a phone number, and only allowing one Signal instance per mobile device.
Is Signal good? Yes, but only exclusively for communication with people you already trust.
EDIT: typos
It's a terrible anti-feature and the only reason they're not being punished for it is because there aren't many alternatives to pick from.
Can you elaborate on what default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant WhatsApp offers, that Signal does not?
Take Telegram for example, where only explicitly 'secret' chats are e2ee, you have to go out of your way, it's not the easy path.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9ziqfi/european_cou...
Also, you can buy phone numbers with monero for 0.08$ https://smspool.net.
Phone numbers are recurring costs. And to keep a truly private one you must keep paying without ever disclosing personal info and that is really hard. Signal is a privacy nightmare for long term use.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
Not only that, but its a unique identifier people generally have already had and generally have already shared and historically been OK with sharing with people they want to talk to. That's a part of the reason why Signal originally chose that way of finding contacts, people were already connected in that way. It makes on boarding people massively easier and greatly reduces the friction of people actually using it. A messaging platform is pretty useless if I can't easily find my friends on it.
> And is terrible UX, imagine having to add your contacts new numbers every other week
Practically nobody is getting a new phone number every other week. And once again, if you are the kind of person getting a new phone number every other week, I'd agree Signal probably isn't the platform for you.
If you don't have a phone number or your number changes all the time, I agree Signal isn't the choice for you. If you already have a phone number, are OK with what having a phone number means in terms of privacy, and that phone number is pretty stable, then Signal isn't a bad choice to use to message on.
It does mean theoretically some large organization (like a government with a warrant) can potentially see "John Doe has this phone number, this phone number is related to Signal, therefore John Doe possibly uses Signal", but personally I'm not too worried about that tiny bit of information leakage. Besides, with enough effort one could probably ID that looking at internet traffic patterns unless you're really that paranoid about controlling your network routing. Especially when that means I'm able to actually convince family to use the platform, as they're used to just looking up people by phone numbers and don't want to have to deal with managing yet another unique identifier on yet another platform. If they had to register another account and manage yet another identity, they wouldn't use it, and thus I'd be stuck just talking SMS with them which results in worse privacy outcomes for our conversations.
Getting and maintaining an active phone number privately is indeed quite hard, partially by governmental design.
Signal only requires occasional/rare proof of control of the registered phone number. It also has very little visible data the provider can access on your account, even if they had a reason to assist in breaking your privacy by look it up from the phone number. Without Signal foundation direct support, the phone number linkage to your Signal account is completely opt in by you only.
So in terms of privacy, Signal is actually very good about the phone number and leaves it mostly to you how public you want to be about it. They're primarily using it as a finite controlled resource to limit how easy it is for people to spin up arbitrary new accounts. Other projects might use some cryptocurrency junk that effectively equates to paying for accounts, but Signal uses what you probably already have.
For those learning about political nuance against the backdrop of current propaganda, it is worth noting that the UK and Ireland do not require registration and that the populous are significantly politically opposed to it; and then Russia requires registration and has one of the most linked up registrations.
So you _may_ be able to have up to 3 simultaneous Signal accounts on the same device.
I'm using my work profile and Private Space for things I can't share a Signal install with though. And I dont want to buy and maintain an extra phone number from a telco just to have another Signal profile.
And it ranks near Discord in terms of removing the single point of failure.
i'd be surprised if they didn't have straight out government logins...
If this is the case you’re referring to, then I don’t know that it is proof of your assertion, in fact maybe the opposite: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/31/us-author...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-spy-...
Millennials and older generations witnessed this happening bit by bit, some of us tried to fight it, but ultimately it’s everywhere now, and apparently it’s been so ubiquitous for so long that people aren’t even aware of it anymore.
1) I do not believe for a second that Meta would actually implement something that would remove their own ability to read those messages.
2) We do not have any proof that their claimed e2e chat service is actually compromised.
The matter of fact tone of the parent made me think there was some actual proof or at least something more than speculation. That's why I asked for a source.
If meta can read those messages, then they’re most definitely not e2e encrypted.
Given the historical record, you would be a fool to assume that any service run by a public company isn’t fully tapped by US intelligence agencies. They’ve been tapping anything and everything they can get their hands on, why stop at whatsapp?
Let me flip it around: what proof do you actually have that it is e2e encrypted? Zuckerberg pinky promised?
They're stating they doubt Meta would ever allow full e2ee, which is not evidence but simply speculation.
AND
They asked for a source/evidence to prove their hunch is more than speculative.
The original post I replied to simply asked for proof, without also stating they doubt meta would ever allow e2ee.
My post is more directed at other readers who might take the absence of a smoking gun as an assumption of safety.
They ask _for_ a phone number. It doesn't have to be yours.
And I know one more of those people already!
5 more to go.
Not a privacy app in my opinion. Sure, might be good for some use cases... but overall there are better solutions.
The real kicker is that almost nothing has the community automation tools and administration of Discord which is the really hard lift.
Can you please name some?
I have lots of Signal contacts I cannot phone, since the phone number is never shared by default. Not even the signal contact is shareable. It is way too privacy focused to work easily.
i.e. I cannot even match two people I have in contacts unless one of them sends me their hidden username. Then they can talk to one another.
And people in my contacts don't use their full name. In groups, they often share the first name, making it confusing as hell. And many use an arbitrary nickname, most often the abbreviated first name I think but sometimes truly random stuff, and might even change that yearly with no mapping in my history to tell me who they were.
Discord has animated (custom) emoji, loops videos properly, silly bots, and fantastic voice chat with screen/game streaming to a HUGE amount of simultaneous users. The end user can pick and choose who they want to watch on-the-fly while remaining in the same voice channel.
The entire concept of a business using Discord for anything other than customer engagement is completely orthogonal to the very basis of the platform. It was built for gamers! It caters to GAMERS.
Repeat after me: DISCORD IS FOR GAMERS! People who want to have fun playing games with their friends. Any other use of Discord is secondary.
If you want to replace Discord with an alternative you must target gamers. What do gamers want? They want to have fun! They want a frictionless voice chat and super easy screen streaming. They want silly emoji and looping gifs in chat.
They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!
I swear, more teenagers (and younger) will scam the age verification system to see adult content than actual adults using Discord. Because the adults aren't there to see "adult content".
no, people hate friction.
it just so happens that most/all decentralized things have more friction than centralized ones.
99% of people do not give 1 shit in either direction of centralized vs. decentralized. they just want an app that is easy and "just works".
I do see a future where we crack the code to a smooth flow that does allow for decentralized networks, but it does suck for most people currently.
I think we're so used to email we forget how well it works.
> I think we're so used to email we forget how well it works.
You're right and that's quite a testament to it.
I use Discord all day and it's not for gaming. It's to involve myself in specific communities. And I'm not looking to migrate to a platform that caters specifically to gamers, because it will eventually make the same anti-user tradeoffs that Discord has made over the years, as ad money and payment processors and stakeholders continue to boil the frog.
This sudden news is very unwelcome. Unless something changes, I will begin the process of leaving each server, making whatever off-channel connections I need, then deleting my account, and either choosing or developing an alternative which suits my needs.
> They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!
Yes, and that's the problem. Manufactured consent cannot be used as a justification for further manufactured consent.
Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost.
People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
A platform does not start growing because of network effects, that's what keeps a platform alive and growing later on, but it starts its growth because people really prefer it to the alternatives (which back then for me was Skype and TeamSpeak).
Nowadays I'm not too happy with Discord anymore, some of it because of enshittification, but most of it is me being spoiled by what we already have, and being used to having this huge centralized (as in, can handle lots of different activities without switching to another platform) social tool that does everything I want it to, without me having to think about it at all.
Thing is, the alternatives, are not as good as Discord, and it really isn't close enough for me. Matrix would be the one I would love most to succeed, but everytime I used Matrix and Element, it's been a massive struggle, encryption constantly breaks (still), joining rooms still fails, rooms are spread about randomly, either standalone or in the new Spaces, searching for rooms is usually broken except on the large matrix.org instance, recently a bunch of rooms migrated because the event syncing completely failed and the decentralized state was broken. Not to mention the contant CSAM attacks (Does anyone know why this happens so much on Matrix? Is it really only because of the bad moderation and the fact that it auto-downloads the illegal images? Just feels so disappointing...).
I really hope we get a really good Discord alternative, maybe even an open-source and decentralized one, if possible. I would really rather not jump onto another proprietary platform.
Now excuse me while I go post to my Facebook about my new MSN Messenger and ICQ addresses.
No alternative platform does this.
I've been using it with my group of friends for a about a month now. Its quite solid in my opinion, uses a peer to peer system with an option to host a central server for video.
On the other hand, IRC lets me /ignore a user and my client renders channels without ever showing a hint of that user's existence.
Meanwhile, in Discord both ignoring and blocking a user still shows a "3 ignored messages" or "1 blocked message", etc.
There are always going to be pros and cons to one or the other.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/28084948873623...
I think it's probably that Discord has such a range of use cases.
I only ever use Discord for open source projects that have communities there. Discord supports a whole load of stuff around voice chat etc, but I've genuinely never used it.
Open source projects I've seen mainly just use it as a text chat, so they could in theory switch to something else with only a tiny fraction of the features.
For some a Discord alternative needs to be a voicecall, for others it‘s game streaming, and for others it‘s just a chat, a bulletinboard or newsgroup, while they never used the Voice features.
Doesn't Matrix essentially satisfy all of them?
Although the bulletinboard/newsgroup feature is something that I don't know but I feel as if that can be on matrix as well.
Yes, I know Matrix is hard to host but I don't imagine discord if they release their source code to be easy either.
So for a discord-like experience, I really prefer matrix.
It has voice calls and meetings but that's not the same thing and has much higher friction to use.
IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is still in the works). And of course all these protocol features work fine with federation.
Generally an XMPP issue :/
The protocol is amazing and selfhostable servers (I use prosody) are great. But The only client I enjoy is conversations, and that’s mobile while my main usage is always desktop. There are decent clients, but none I’d say are great.
It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely.
XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people.
(I am still a proponent of XMPP, but the working groups need to get their shit together to unify protocol support across clients)
The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.
That software list, how it's done and how it's ranked is literally confirming my initial point of critique :D
Last time I tried out several chat clients, most of them were alpha software, had lots of bugs appearing in normal conversation flows, well, or were so broken that they broke compatibility in subminor version updates to their very same client apps.
I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
This is exactly what the Compliance Suits are for, and the XMPP Software Fundation is taking care of telling all the clients what they misses directly on the official website, for example: https://xmpp.org/software/movim/
This should not be allowed.
You can't run scripts on all the XEPs declared, some of them are purely redaction or bound to specific UI/UX behaviors. This is based on trust that the developers actually implemented things as stated.
https://joinjabber.org/ is/was an attempt at something more user-focused. It is not linked to the XMPP Software Foundation. BTW, joining the XSF and participating in discussion around protocol evolution, communication strategy and these sort of things is free, and only requires asking for write permission on the XSF wiki to add an application page. Everything happens in the open (mailing lists, chat rooms). We value democratic processes.
Not sure about servers, but for clients there's Gajim, Dino, and Conversations. Not much else is super relevant these days. Profanity exists but is significantly worse than irssi or weechat despite looking superficially similar. Kaidan is a KDE/Qt alternative to Gajim but I'm not sure if it's usable yet. It may be worth switching when it's fleshed out to escape the bugs and slowness of the GTK-based clients.
[0]: https://snikket.org
The developer is very active in updating and maintaining the software (both client and server), and it already supports most of the XEPs.
It's open source and fully supports self-hosted as first class, but if you want to support the developer he offers a cloud hosting paid offering as well. There's a crossover offer with JMP.chat too. If you pay $5 upfront for your first month of JMP.chat, you can get a free cloud hosted Snikket server for it to be setup on. As long as you maintain at least one number with JMP.chat, you keep the server maintained. If you don't, you get a chance to migrate your data. The Snikket cloud server gives you an XMPP server admin account, and you can setup as many accounts as you want. The caveat is that Snikket implementation is optimized for <1000s of user accounts per server.
If the answer to "it's confusing" is "there are apparently standardised sets", it sounds like it is, indeed, confusing :-).
Then about it being confusing: you're right, that's an outsider point. Because I haven't been able to try it (again nobody ever told me "oh, this project is on XMPP, you can go ask your question with this app/website"), but I have been genuinely interested in it, I ended up on the official pages.
- Check the RFC list: https://xmpp.org/rfcs/#6120. The first one is more than 200 pages, the second more than 100. There are 5 "basic RFCs" and 19 "further RFCs" (whatever "further" is supposed to mean). There is no way I will even open them all. Conclusion: I have no idea how XMPP works, except that there is XML in the mix and a whole bunch of stuff around.
- There is a "technical overview" here: https://xmpp.org/about/technology-overview/. I invite you to have a look at it. Apart from the fact that it seems to use "XMPP" and "Jabber" interchangeably (I think? I'm confused), it kind of loses me at "Jingle", which seems to be a "multimedia specification" (does that mean it's for video?), and has a bunch of implementations, like "pidgin". Isn't pidgin an XMPP client? Here it's under the Jingle section. And then there are extensions, with a whole section just for "Multi User Chats": so the default is that there are no groups, and if my client supports this extension and the server supports it, then I can join a group? I gave up at "PubSub", I did not even read anything from "BOSH".
As a person who wrote his own IRC client, contributed to Signal and looked into the Matrix protocol (which seems more complex than I am comfortable with), I must say that XMPP is in its very own league.
My conclusion with Matrix was that nobody would ever want to write it from scratch, so there has to be some kind of `libmatrix` on top of which people could build. Seems hard in practice because it feels like it keeps changing.
I don't know how fast XMPP is moving, but I would hope that it is now stable. Is there a libxmpp that contains all the necessary features to write a client? Not clear to me. It feels like it's still a complex ecosystem where it depends on the client, and on the server, and on what you want to do.
> XMPP clients mostly work together much better than Matrix clients, from what I've experienced
I can only take your word on it: I don't know a community that is on XMPP, so I haven't had a chance to try. Matrix has been frustrating, that I can say.
IRC has been getting the retro nostalgia kick start, and it briefly came back to attention when Slack started as "wrapper" of IRC. In my experience IRC channels are used by about 50% of open source projects, even though it's abysmal for access on mobile devices, very unfriendly for users, and extremely limited in functionality. About 50% of those have a bridge to Matrix so the mobile access is at least somewhat solved, and there are some more usable client options.
It seems because you haven't seen people already adopt it, you believe it must not be good. I'd encourage some basic research for your own benefit so you can see how XMPP is way easier to setup and maintain, far more efficient, and more capable than the oddly more commonly used Matrix/Element. In fact, between the organization issues of the last couple years, everyone finally getting fed up with Matrix being brittle, unmaintainable, and extremely inefficient to run on a server, I would expect Matrix support channels to drop off very rapidly over the next few years.
On the contrary, I have been hearing about it for so long, I believe there must be something there.
But maybe there is something fundamental in the fact that because it is actually interoperable, it's a lot harder for it to get traction. If a client gets a lot of traction, it probably quickly gets tempted to leave the interop world and do whatever they want (and lock the users in). In other words, XMPP sounds like a success story of diversity, but the cost of that is that normies don't even know what it is. Similar to Linux in a way: if someone gets interested in Linux, the next thing they see is a gazillion different distros and people arguing about them (disclaimer: I have been a Linux user for 15 years).
Matrix is different in the sense that it does not look like a success in terms of diversity. Matrix is pretty much Element. And Matrix seems to be about converting everybody to Matrix: I have seen bridges to IRC that made the IRC experience so bad that people would move to Matrix. Not because Matrix was necessarily better, but because Matrix was killing the IRC experience.
In a way, I find it interesting that those "interoperable protocols" (both Matrix and XMPP) are all for diversity, as long as it is their protocol. XMPP wrote a blog post about the EU Digital Markets Act, saying something along the lines of "the DMA is a good idea, the only thing that they miss is that they should force everybody to use our protocol, XMPP". Matrix has a similar stance: "we don't consider it interoperability if we can't make it work with our protocol, no matter how much we destroy the experience on the other platform". Because the end goal is not really interoperability: it's interoperability under their conditions.
Sorry to remind you, but this never happened. AIM and ICQ eventually interoperate because they were owned by the same company at that point. There was never XMPP federation in the mix here.
Matrix is seemingly trying to leverage that memory, but "there's a bridge bot somewhere that you can run somehow, with extremely widely varying quality / integration smoothness" is rather different.
XMPP took it a step further and has feature segmentation by defining XEPs. This is basic minimum for defining an extensible protocol for client-server communication and has been for decades (maybe it was a new idea when XMPP first started). Notably, browsers use this same thing with w3c specs, which is why they keep working too. If you don't have this feature segmentation and negotiation, you don't have a functional open source client-server protocol full-stop (looking at you Matrix).
I think what XMPP has gotten better at is doing like with w3c and setting baseline minimum features, which has allowed more standardization of clients.
Whether or not those are being done well / compatibly / etc, no idea.
https://snikket.org/ are working on a new iOS client too (no release so far).
I think this will be a pretty similar case because discord straddles "small personal servers with ten friends" and "large official servers with 500 users for a particular game" and "tech support forum for an open source project", and one user might be in all of those servers pretty easily.
- Free without requiring self-hosting;
- Absolutely frictionless community access - here's an invite link, you can start chatting immediately;
- High quality voice calls with screen sharing.
I don't think there is a competitor that hits all three points right now. Screen sharing in particular is often disregarded by developers who have limited interaction with Discord and don't truly understand the platform. It was not an original feature, but it is Discord's killer feature. Because screen sharing is also impromptu videogame streaming.
It's open source, trivial to self-host, and can support an arbitrary number of rooms and users.
Sure, it doesn't have all of Discord's bells and whistles (for better or worse), but then neither do some of the alternatives mentioned in the article.
However, the owner (37signals, not DHH) has an excellent reputation for producing high quality web applications since the early 2000s.
Signal → private but bad for communities
Matrix → flexible but rough UX
XMPP → powerful but fragmented
Discord → centralized but frictionless
Users pick frictionless every time. We probably don’t need new apps or protocols we need a client that works well.
I love IRC, I even wrote my own IRC client in the 90s, but it’s clearly not going to be suitable for gaming in this context.
Some of my gaming buddies on Discord needed help getting that properly working. Asking them to set up and use both IRC and Mumble would be a step too far.
This is a common trap HN falls into. Stuff that’s easy and practical for people of our capabilities can be a nightmarish hellscape for other people.
I'm not sure if any client has solve this, but what about image / video / file hosting? You can't just drag 'n drop a image into a chat. You have to host it on a 3rd party site and link it.
I do wonder how server management is now adays. In Discord you can host your own server with a few clicks and make it easy to adjust permissions and controls invites. I would assume IRC is also lacking behind. But would love to hear more about the current state.
Discord has invite links, where people without the app or account can quickly join. In IRC you have the IRC:// link, but that does not work for people who don't have a client installed. Then you can do a web client link, but that is not optimal for people who already have their favorite client set up :)
Otherwise it's not really an alternative. It does not matter if it's technically a protocol. Users don't care about if it's a protocol, IRC clients had over 10 years to catch up.
Are they solved, in practice, in the real world? For users in general? No? Then what's the point of discussing it right now?
I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.
It's a muddy middle ground where neither you are I are satisfied. Far from perfect.
Matrix's UI/UX is actually really flexible with multiple clients.
You aren't struck with Element, you can even use TUI clients or any clients.
For the web, the one which I really love is cinny.
Cinny is really awesome, its UI/UX is better than discord imo.
I recommend people to check out the matrix ecosystem of clients to see what they like, because I also liked the fractal gnu app & it has tons of clients.
It's not like the registration process necessarily involves typing in the server IP and port number, picking and setting up an advanced TUI client or something else.
As some specific example, it's happened a couple times that someone's using a client that doesn't support rendering spoilers as spoilered, and as such they made unspoilered replies of something that should've been spoilered (and of course many clients (incl. the Elements) don't even have a sane way to type spoilers).
The Lounge is open website, type name, you're in. Matrix definitely is not.
But Ignorance is also bliss and I recommend you (or many people) as such to be ignorant if it feels frictional to them and just use cinny.
"Just use cinny" It really can't get any simpler than that for most purposes in my opinion
cinny is really improving in adding features plus its open source and I do feel like its UI/UX done right for the most part.
So I get what you mean but there's no free lunch. I really don't know what we are comparing against given that discord is literally adding User ID verification. This feels such an non-issue to it and I hope you can agree with that.
So in essence, to break the network effects of discord. I recommend people to embrace cinny for the most part if they are worried about lack of UI/UX or the amount of options and what to pick. I had done some amounts of search and this is what I landed on for the most part.
Just use cinny, my friend :)
So in a way, the answer's sort of because "I am saying so" but as with all things the answer's subjective but I hope that you can try matrix and enjoy the clients that you wish.
I would recommend you to "Just use cinny", Just try it once and have fun :D See what you like the most and then recommend it then instead to your friends/community.
I am gonna say, Just use cinny but you can say just use fractal and both could be valid and the beauty of the protocol in this sense is the fact that we can all still talk to each other :)
Cinny really fixes the UI/UX problem in my personal experience, even better than discord.
And y'know technically this problem still persists with other messaging protocols like how should a new user know they should use X client and the limitations of X client (UI/UX). Matrix as such meets half way through and cinny can then streamline the experience.
You or anyone using matrix doesn't have to know so much.
The only thing one has to know is "Just use cinny" (in my honest opinion) and everything else is actually really simple.
And I feel like new users like any new users of any tech (discord was once new too) knows simply because the time is convenient/somewhat mouth of word.
I feel like people should convince others to meet on cinny (matrix) because then we can have network effects which is actually a really big issue in my opinion.
So the answer's mouth of word. I hope you can spread the word and hope that you can try cinny. It's seriously that good and I am doing my best spreading the mouth of word.
Have a nice day :D
The biggest immediate win that we can achieve for our users is to remove all (!) technical jargon from our landing pages and product ui.
This is a problem throughout all FOSS. For example in KDE:
> Do x when Plasma starts.
Wtf do I care what Plasma is. Oh, you mean my computer? Yeah makes sense.
Raycast: You can search files, have a calculator, a translator…
KRunner: You can run terminal commands and convert characters to hexadecimal.
It is so obvious that these products are designed by developers for developers. From my experience, this friction is everything. You cannot expect people to intuitively figure it out.
> Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Feels like these are two different things.
What I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
I'm quite active on multiple discord server and yet never use voice / video. But I get why people use it.
If OP is looking for a platform not to replace Discord 1 to 1, but overall to have a community why not do a broader comparison. Then everyone can for themself see what fits their personal needs.
> I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Same. I'm somewhat sad that a lot of the FOSS community got stuck with IRC level of technology and ease of use :( I whish for more projects would subscribe to a low barrier of entry mantra.
Learning reg-ex to ban a member is .. ughh
Discord replaced Ventrilo, TeampSpeak and Mumble simply because it merged Slack/IRC-style chatting with an easy to use voice chat that took less resources than skype and less setup than any of the self-hosted version or cheaper than a hosted version.
Low-latency voice chats combined with Slack, I don't know why no one has an alternative for that.
Sadly Matrix has never had a good UX for me. IMO they spent too many complexity tokens on e2ee and there are simply not enough left.
You could join a discord server with a single link.
Account creation could come later.
Considering the competition at its heyday was Teamspeak or Skype, the mere fact you could just actually see the hell you were getting into without some stupid ass "Hol' Up!" instantly made it popular with basically everyone who didn't even know what it was.
My account is dated June 2015 which is apparently a month after it launched, and both me and every single one of the early adopters in that channel that is still up to this day have this same story to tell. We used it because we didn't even have to login at all in the first place when we first got it.
The only thing TeamSpeak has on it is multi level voice for complex command chains. But you pay for that with enormous sign up friction.
There's no viable frictionless chat alternative. Maybe jitsi. And if you try to make one? You'll get regulated and have to do the same thing.
That's one of the features I hate most about Discord, the difficulty of having separate identities in separate places! You can set a "display name" for convenience, but everyone can see your root identity.
The whole fediverse wants to offer that, but I have no idea why single sign on fails mostly to make waves for them. Perhaps it is just user adoption, or technical complexity about privacy protection vs. ease of use.
I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.
That makes you an even smaller minority unfortunately. Most people are not going to set up a home server.
It requires next to no CPU time, since the server is effectively just a packet relay.
I tried this in the past but it didn't work. Now if your friends want to play you need to start the server for them. What if you're not at home? You basically end up making your pc a 24/7 server. Or you need to coordinate so that someone else runs the server in those cases, but that ends up creating more confusion. And let's not start talking about port forwarding issues...
All these issues are solvable, but they add so much friction when all you want to do is play with some friends.
Huh. I’d have said majority. It was always my impression that a) gamers make up the vast majority of discord users (with all their gamification and gaming features), and b) that gamers mainly care about voice chat (which is what people almost always talk about when it comes to discord and gaming).
Myself, though, I basically only use it to talk to the same guys I've been gaming with since we met in middle school 20-some years ago, and for that Mumble seems perfect.
Curious what prompted this verdict. My only experience with Revolt/Stoat has been with the Handmade Cities instance, but said experience hasn't been anywhere near as bad as this writeup seems to suggest.
I mean, that's the entire issue. There's very little tangibly better than Discord. I like the idea of Matrix, but it's complete garbage in practice.
At least for now, the solution lies more in mass outrage and action rather than any technological migration. The post raises this and I think it's a good point.
The difference between XMPP group chats and Matrix group chats is that Matrix servers replicate all the message history, whereas XMPP group chats are hosted on a single server. IMO the "bring your own account to a central server" model of XMPP is a good thing, but the "replicate all the things" model of Matrix is not.
The Matrix devs demonstrated an alarmingly cavalier attitude towards fundamental security issues that the writer pointed out in the past, so they are naturally not going to encourage its use.
However, in practice, this was not exploitable: the only way to exercise these primitives was over the network, where network latency and request rate limiting mitigates such attacks.
Meanwhile, we had already rewritten and replaced libolm with vodozemac, a pure rust implementation using robust primitives, shipped in the major Matrix SDKs and implementations like Element and Element X.
I’m not sure this counts as alarmingly cavalier. I do regret libolm ever going into production with substandard primitives from a hygiene perspective, but we fixed it as soon as we could via vodozemac, and meanwhile included the safety warning.
You visibly deprecated Olm after my disclosures went public. When I last checked, only Element and its forks actually use vodozemac, so the rest of the ecosystem which still binds libolm was still vulnerable, and probably still is today.
That's alarmingly cavalier.
Predators, racism, gore, pedophilia, harassment, stalking and so on..
No matter how high you value security, these are matters that hurt real people today. If you attract the mainstream, you must deal with it.
Then you won't have to make the decisions that most people suffer from.
I strongly doubt that was a joke.
For example - we let people drive cars despite the frequency of deaths that happen in car accidents.
Then, Discord is not uncomplicated. From „Servers“ not being servers, multiple account onboarding levels, to what happens when Discord believes you are a bot or are using a blacklisted IP.
I believe you underestimate the average age.
A polished ui and a couple of fav discord features onto the product milestone plan and I think matrix adoption would start to really pick up.
Anecdotally it felt a little uncooked.
https://github.com/teamspeak/teamspeak6-server?tab=readme-ov...
> Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do
Absolutely, but it's also important to keep in mind that the tool has a big impact on culture by virtue of what behaviors it encourages and what limitations it has. "The medium is the message" is very true here, so think carefully about which tool you hop onto.
Possibly in the UK. Not likely in the USA and even if so most of us will just ignore the laws and if need be just move to a .onion hidden service. In this regard I like the totalitarian aspect of these laws as it will fragment society and push many more people under ground. I like the idea of fragmenting the big services so that governments and shady companies have a harder time hoovering up all the data in one place and taking my words out of context or associating me with some clown on their watch lists that was too lazy or cavalier to implement intermediate level opsec.
I think you should be able to use whatever suits your needs and preferences. The key is removing friction for the potential users. Friction can be overcome by incentives e.g. what it is in for them to jump through a few hoops. As just one example the more totalitarian and risky that laws become the less that people will object to a little initial friction. This can also weed out lower quality members.
IRC, XMPP, SSH, Self hosted forums, Radio Mesh ... bring it all!
getDeviceMedia and getUserMedia are very powerful these days. I haven't actually tested it but I believe a chromium browser would have no issue capturing the hw accelerated output from a game. You can pipe these media streams directly to WebRTC peers for playback on the other side. A server with a simple selective forwarding unit could enable larger scale meetings (100s of participants). All of this can happen in <1000 lines of JS and server code. Most of the heavy lifting happens in the browser engine. Concerns like automating browser permissions, global hot keys, etc. can be handled via electron or platform specific options like WebView2.
Mobile clients are a bit cursed right now. The best solution is to maintain a standard client in the app stores. Forcing everyone to sign their own mobile apps is way too much friction. And you do need native for this on mobile. Browser only / PWA has no chance in hell of providing a smooth UX on iOS or Android.
It does. https://zulip.com/help/general-chat-channels
But even without that, in a normal threaded channel, you can see all messages in all topics chronologically. IIRC that's the default view when you click a channel in the sidebar.
Here's an example: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/138-user-questions the messages are grouped into runs of the same topic, but it's the whole channel.
https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/101-design/topic/UI.2...
See also my and other users feedback about their UI in: Zulips values (24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953815
For example, if you had it open on your laptop with a window open, suspend it, and open it up on a plane, you can read the last few weeks of message history, compose replies that will send when you regain network, etc. I do this regularly on flights.
We always have ideas for how to improve this further, and the mobile app doesn't do as extensive caching as the web app does, but it's not an issue of technical feasibility. The protocol was designed for mixed online/offline use from the beginning.
It's not too late to make another tool that can fit this niche. There's currently nothing that checks every box for me, especially when it comes to UX and security/privacy. I started designing an open source comms framework with a friend to fit this niche a decade ago and feel somewhat motivated to try again in the future.
Steam group chats are still janky and by no means a Discord replacement. It feels like an MVP that they lost interest in shortly after adding the feature.
It's fine for a couple people with no real need for moderation but beyond that I don't think it's currently viable.
Discord getting used as a knowledge base or download source for some areas is already seen as a convenience for those involved or a single point of failure by many 'outside', I wouldn't want to see more of PC gaming moving to one place.
Can anyone suggest a good archive tool? The open source project I help run has ~10 years of conversations, bug reports, feature requests, etc. sunk into Discord, and obviously I want to preserve all that (not sure we'll end up leaving the platform, but it's good to have backups anyhow).
Our bug reports / FRs are in forum channels, and I've written a script to extract those and potentially import them into some bug-tracker. But I'd like something good that can archive the entire thing in a reasonable format.
In recent days people have been coming out of the woodwork trying to join again.
Even if one could reproduce their tech (which I doubt, they are top-tier), individuals would drown under hosting costs. They've positioned themselves incredibly well.
The moat there is staggeringly large comparatively.
Apart from that, I would have been interested in more details about the author's experience with ~Revolt~ Stoat. To my naive eyes it looks pretty nice. I really like the nuanced takes about the other platforms in this article, so I'd guess the author has some good reasons to dismiss Stoat like that.
Here is a quick promo video as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekOxAg7leXM
They do need to fund development, but SSO is almost always in the top two level pricings :(
Maybe the best way to think of Discourse is as an anti-Discord. It's everything Discord isn't: asynchronous, open source, and self-hostable.
Then why is it the highest rated "Discord alternative"?
Still not implemented.
Dang moved all the comments from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46979742 to this thread so now it's confusing.
[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-discourse-still-free-to-self...
https://wiki.bitmessage.org/index.php/Main_Page
https://vituperative.github.io/i2pchat/
Bring this back!, for sentimental reasons:
https://dcplusplus.sourceforge.io/webhelp/chat_commands.html
i just wonder why TeamSpeak is not there
I think that’s why it’s rarely mentioned.
It already has quite big communities https://simplex.chat/directory/
The founder of it is on here https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epoberezkin
Far too many flaws of discord, reddit, and other "socialmedia commons" come from an absolute lack of friction. People seeing it as almost a right to participate wherever, whenever, without ever lurking more and learning a community's culture, norms, or etiquette.
Client dependent, but channel overview per server is also not that good.
Discord has a financially and politically vulnerable posture that is downstream of having to operate a very large team, raise funding, be exposed to investor market pressure. However, it is also one of the rare instances of successful consumer freemium subscription monetization. A clone does not have to pay the tuition of "what makes this specific space compelling, and want-to-pay-for"; it just have to _exists_, passively soaking up migrants from each platform shift.
ITT WTB 3rd place for my frens.
That's how discord started, too. And then they scaled up. You probably need 10 people to handle infrastructure alone.
This is what happens when we reach for convenience over openness.
Times have changed and people have different expectations. Nobody (except very few) is going to use multiple services and set up a bouncer just to get the basics working. It's better to spend time building a good replacement that keeps up with current needs than trying to push these old systems onto people, especially younger ones.
IRC obviously has its limitations, but it shines as an example of simplicity and maintainability with no corporate strings attached.
I take the point that a one-stop-shop is nice and probably viable leveraging this tech. At the same time, users already use a slew of different social media platforms that are usually redundant or overlap in some way. For most their mode of consumption is "the algorithm", endless feed of videos. Discord's core offering is not that, it's an orchestration of chat, video-chat, forums, notifications. It's a swiss-army knife.
What kind of secret system uses a phone number tied to your ID as a user name?
https://hlwiki.com/index.php/Clients
https://hlwiki.com/index.php/Servers
But the number of users on any particular server these days is extremely small.
TeamSpeak also has a newer client, but its design decisions are a little odd. Still worth checking out though.
I think a better question right now is "what does Discord consider adult content?" Is it just NSFW stuff or does it include other topics as well? If everyone's account becomes a flagged as a teen account and the content isn't NSFW then what is the reason to leave at that point? You aren't forced to show an ID and face scan to keep using the platform. So most servers may be able to just keep business as usual.
It's FAR more burdensome to assemble some amalgamation of features and content to be a replacement and move the community over. At least at the moment. Seems very reminiscent of the first exodus to Mastodon. Where there was excitement in the beginning but ultimately people went back to Twitter and stopped using Mastodon because only the most hardcore privacy nerds moved.
Most alternatives suck for that purpose. There is search for server members and the "blinking things" keep you up to date with where the new stuff is and I presume give you dopamine hits. It's simply not old school forum software and considerations that'd make sites like that good don't enter the equation at all - which also makes attempts at turning Discord into a support forum for any "organized" group or project misguided at best, but also great for the more casual gaming/interest oriented communities.
Discord's key value proposition is that it's a trusted zero friction voice chat with a lot of features.
The workflow that made it huge: organizer creates a server for a game, creates a short link for a voice channel. The organizer then goes to play their game, shares the short link with their group.
The members click the link, write whatever they want as the name, click join and are in the voice chat. Say hi and go into the dungeon to have fun.
Need more? Just share your screen with one click. Streamer mode kicks in and hides all pii in the discord interface. Easy global bindings for push to talk.
If the outing is fun some of them will create profiles and stay in the server and play together again.
It's all very organic and easy, while being trusted as a brand so people don't have to hesitate to click your jitsi.weirdgamer.tk link.
It's a great, great tool and I really wish they'd offer a business tier that opts out of all the data leak features.
If you don't use it with that purpose, there's tons of alternatives.
Even when people insist on organizing a telecon they usually use zoom, teams, or google meet instead.
I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s
I also can't figure out a way to access them outside of the Steam client and in DOTA where I believe they're tied to the in-game guild system.
Seems to me you're just re-building discord.
Our goal is to implement end-to-end encryption for DMs so that even we can't read message content. But we're not there yet, since after all we need to make sure the platform is safe and not to shield illegal content being sent."
This is a message from one of their founders I found while exploring the app.
https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc
I didn't bother adding much styling to the website because I was only interested in the network side of things.
Guilded
Built specifically for gamers and communities, with calendars, scheduling, tournaments, voice chat, and rich server customization. It's very similar to Discord but adds gaming-focused tools. Completely free with no premium tiers required for core features. Matrix (via clients like Element) Decentralized, open-source protocol with end-to-end encryption by default. Supports rooms (like servers), voice/video calls, bridges to other platforms, and self-hosting. It's more privacy-secure and federated (you can join servers across instances), though the UI/learning curve can feel less "fun" than Discord for casual use.
Strong Voice-Focused / Gaming AlternativesTeamSpeak
Classic low-latency VoIP with excellent audio quality, strong encryption, and server customization. Still popular among gamers for performance. Self-hostable or use public servers; very lightweight compared to Discord.
Mumble
Open-source, extremely low-latency voice chat with positional audio (great for games). Minimalist but high-quality; excellent for privacy-conscious groups. Self-hostable and free.
Other Notable OptionsSlack or Microsoft Teams — Better for professional/work teams with integrations, file sharing, and structured channels. Less ideal for casual gaming hangouts.
Signal or Telegram — Great for secure, encrypted messaging (Signal especially), but voice/video is more basic and lacks full server/channel structures.
Zulip — Threaded conversations (unique UI), good for organized discussions, open-source, and supports voice.
Rocket.Chat — Open-source, self-hostable Slack/Discord hybrid with video calls and integrations.
If privacy or avoiding centralized control/ID checks is your main concern, Stoat, Matrix/Element, or self-hosted Mumble/TeamSpeak stand out right now. For pure gaming similarity, Stoat or Guilded are the easiest transitions.What kind of community or features are you looking for (gaming, friends hangout, work, privacy-first, self-hosted)? That can help narrow it down further!