Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
Way too few mentions of Jitsi.
I use it with friends, it has good server config, and I’m pushing it on businesses.
Explain more of this Jitsi, sounds interesting for my business
It’s voice and video calling with chat and screensharing. I intend to use it for a language school. It’s extendable, for instance you can also self-host a whiteboard, where everyone can draw. You can see the drawing in real time, which is good for asian languages, where direction of the stroke is important.
Free, open-source, packaged in Debian, runs without issues, used it with friends for multi-hour voice chats during gaming nights.
On the server you can configure things like FPS for screenshare. I have yet to adjust that and try streaming video/game through it.
mumble is great for VOIP.
Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.
revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there’s that. There’s also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don’t know much about how matrix works
Matrix is nice, and you can have jitsi for calls integrated. It seems to be pretty popular; Lemmy has a field for matrix @ in user profiles. Never heard of revolt before.
I use Jitsi for a non-profit, and I like the mute someone else function, but oh wow the noise cancellation needs improvement. So many voice comm apps have disappeared (there used to be one our group used all the time, then the devs dropped it (the client app) and just became on API or something).
Time to dust off my old Mumble server!
I was reading this thread and started looking for that app again.
I’ve also been comparing Element and Revolt. Both seem really solid, both are open source and both are self-hostable. Hard to find any downsides there.
There’s a discord server that me and a bunch of friends use as our main hangout. They’ve raised the prospect of bailing before things enshittify, and of course I’ve been tasked with pitching a replacement. For my money, Revolt is the way I’m going to go, specifically because it’s basically a one for one clone of Discord. The people I’m pitching this to are a mix of technical and non-technical, so I think something that looks and feels like what they’re used to will be the easiest transition.
It also feels like Element is geared pretty heavily towards being a replacement for Slack / Teams rather than a replacement for Discord. Their pitch seems a lot more focused on the enterprise market. Revolt seems more focused on gaming, casual hangout, that sort of thing.
I like Element a lot, but for me it doesn’t feel like the right solution to this specific problem. But if I was pitching something to my work as a Teams replacement, Element is definitely the way I’d go.
Man I wish my online friends were that easy to switch.
As soon as I mention Lemmy “what’s wrong with reddit”. As soon as I mention element “but everyone uses whatsapp/discord”.
It suck that 90% of the people are stuck in their old ways and refuse to try anything new.
Hell I almost got banned for even mentioning lemmy once.
Silly question perhaps, but I haven’t tripped across it on the site for Revolt – is there a relatively straight forward server version for self-hosting, or is it just that the source is on github and you can compile it in theory if you feel like goin through that process… ?
The most straight forward I see appears to be Docker hosting
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-what-can-i-do-with-revolt-and-how-do-i-self-host
If you’re looking to self host but are uncomfortable with Docker I recommend checking out YunoHost as an option for something a bit simpler, they also support Revolt
Thanks, appreciated.
Just remember your friend, https://discorch.org/
I’ve started my self-hosting journey having Matrix in mind - especially the Matrix bridges to cut off the need to use social media clients like Discord.
Today, I’m slowly convicting my friends to join my instance. So far, that’s just one of the closest ones (still win for me).
I hope one day decentralization in social media would take off!
I JUST managed to get my closest ring outside my family to join Signal.
We have a total of 7 people now.
I’d light up a server and host matrix/frendica/lemmy/mastodon/headscale in an instant if I thought I could get those 7 to join.
if discord is going public they don’t need my turbo sub anymore
Cancelled mine when they redesigned the mobile app anyway. I don’t want a different interface on mobile vs desktop. I want a unified experience, which was their original purpose.
Matrix is the way. It’s federated and you can have your own server.
XMPP?
Mumble?
TeamSpeak exists too
Teamspeak is alright, in fact we use it along with discord for inter-channel Comms. But discord does a lot of stuff that ts doesn’t touch
That’s a throwback. Let’s take it one step further and just get back on Ventrilo and play some DOTA. (For the younger folks who don’t get the reference: https://youtu.be/aTJncWndUB8 )
I still have my copy. I cannot believe that song is like, 18 years old now. It was such a staple of my college experience.
I am certainly not one of the younger folks and had never seen that before. That is awesome, thank you for sharing.
Oh man, Basshunter was huge in the chronically-online gamer space in the 2000s. His other songs are pretty good too.
To put it in perspective, the fact that they’re gaming on laptops and LCD monitors was an enviable flex when his songs released.
Used to use Vent playing Eve Online 19 years ago. Worked great back then. Apparently it’s still around, but still no Linux support after all these years.
Mumble!
Tmspk egssts tuh
Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.
Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
I guess that’s the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.
Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I’m very excited!
Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.
The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.
Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.
It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.
What are you using instead? I only recently set up my synapse server and I’d be interested to head what the alternatives are
I’ve found SimpleX a much better solution than matrix for a discord alternative.
I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.
I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different
