Alternatives to Discord

[Rubbereon]

Me and another friend quit Discord and the rest of our group, as well as a local writing group, migrated to RootApp. Unfortunately, despite them putting out consistent updates, they haven't done anything about fixing notifications. No one gets notifications unless they are @ed. RootApp is essentially a Discord clone, and they're pivoting to being for gamers as well the same way Discord is. It's not great tbh.

I heard about stoat acting as a replacement for discord. I dunno if it's any good, but you may like it.

[grubbyfox]

Me and another friend quit Discord and the rest of our group, as well as a local writing group, migrated to RootApp. Unfortunately, despite them putting out consistent updates, they haven't done anything about fixing notifications. No one gets notifications unless they are @ed. RootApp is essentially a Discord clone, and they're pivoting to being for gamers as well the same way Discord is. It's not great tbh.

hhahaha i love the "it's not great tbh"  lmao made me chuckle. but also, eughhhh i just want a fun program to chat with friends in, that's preferably somewhat privacy concerned and ..works xD its crazy, there's so many things i'd be willing to let go of (large image sharing, voice chat etc) just to be able to have a program that you can really vibe with, ya know? that's also not ancient and literally just sending plain text between you and friends hahaha.

[klungus]

i just want a fun program to chat with friends in, that's preferably somewhat privacy concerned and ..works xD

lol I relate to this so hard. I don't think I'll ever get my friend group off of Discord unless something insane happens :/. It used to be such a fun platform that was pretty good at being hands off and just letting the communities run themselves however they wanted. Is it so hard to have a chat app that just ignores you? 

Anyways, I really like Signal if your only goal is to chat with friends. Yes, its basically just a texting app and yes you need a phone number to register which is pretty annoying. But there's a handy feature where you can register an anonymous username and hide your phone number from those you chat with, which I love. Best of all...it works xD. Downside is it doesn't do well with group gaming or communities; I'm addicted to the Discord server layout lol.

Matrix would be the perfect alternative to me, and I would happily start begging my friends to switch to it, except it doesn't support video streaming with audio as far as I know. If anyone knows how to do it, please let me know! I can't switch until I can watch my friends' streams.

 

[grubbyfox]

lol I relate to this so hard. I don't think I'll ever get my friend group off of Discord unless something insane happens :/. It used to be such a fun platform that was pretty good at being hands off and just letting the communities run themselves however they wanted. Is it so hard to have a chat app that just ignores you? 

Anyways, I really like Signal if your only goal is to chat with friends. Yes, its basically just a texting app and yes you need a phone number to register which is pretty annoying. But there's a handy feature where you can register an anonymous username and hide your phone number from those you chat with, which I love. Best of all...it works xD. Downside is it doesn't do well with group gaming or communities; I'm addicted to the Discord server layout lol.

haha yeah. i dont get why Signal doesnt offer more customization honestly. Well, I understand that this is not their focus, but when I see people come to their defense like oh they actually cannot possibly make more color options than dark and light because they are soooo focused on privacy. huh? They cant give us the option for pink or aero glass colors or like a greyscale win98 look or something ...because?? they are constantly inventing the wheel or something?

I did see that they added these fun little "title tags" to your username for group chats, which is neat. You could basically use it as a status bar I guess? It adds a little bit of fun whimsy. but what annoys me is that....you cant see your own. Because on your end, your username doesn't show. sighhhhhhhhhhh

[klungus]

haha yeah. i dont get why Signal doesnt offer more customization honestly. Well, I understand that this is not their focus, but when I see people come to their defense like oh they actually cannot possibly make more color options than dark and light because they are soooo focused on privacy. huh? They cant give us the option for pink or aero glass colors or like a greyscale win98 look or something ...because?? they are constantly inventing the wheel or something?

Seriously that would be such a nice change. Even if they just made it possible for people to modify their own client to spice it up a bit. I know Signal is more focused on serious use and doesn't have the kind of money to do huge changes being an open source project and all. I think being boring is the only thing I dislike about it though. Having a goofy profile is the fun part of Discord as well as the community spaces, and Signal doesn't accomplish either of those. Matrix kinda has that since there's all the different clients but the system of home servers and spaces is kinda confusing to me lol. I feel like less tech-savvy people will be scared off. :/

I'm worried about all of these clones (Root, Stoat, Fluxer, etc.) and that they'll either never gain enough traction to replace Discord or just end up doing the same thing Discord is doing. It's not like the Discord team is inherently evil or enjoys making their app worse. The company is chasing money and the same thing is happening to all sorts of other platforms. Who's to say if Generic Clone replaces Discord that it won't just do the same thing after a few years. At least with Matrix/Signal they are open source projects with different goals than consumer gaming-kinda stuff. It's why even tho Signal is boring I can't imagine it ever pulling the kinda stunts Discord is. 

[grubbyfox]

I'm worried about all of these clones (Root, Stoat, Fluxer, etc.) and that they'll either never gain enough traction to replace Discord or just end up doing the same thing Discord is doing. It's not like the Discord team is inherently evil or enjoys making their app worse. The company is chasing money and the same thing is happening to all sorts of other platforms. Who's to say if Generic Clone replaces Discord that it won't just do the same thing after a few years. At least with Matrix/Signal they are open source projects with different goals than consumer gaming-kinda stuff.

I think both Stoat and Fluxer are open source tho? Atleast Stoat I believe. I just dont really trust it long term since it's based in the UK. I'd rather have a fork based elsewhere in the long run. Fluxer, iirc is also open source, so at the very least if both these turn into money chasers as well, there could always be a fork somewhere. Fluxer will prob at some point feature all the things Discord does (but apparently will not focus in implementing E2EE, unlike Stoat). If you really want the Discord experience down the line, I'd say go for Fluxer or Stoat for sure! But they're both pretty new and need a bit of time to implement it all lol

[klungus]

Fluxer will prob at some point feature all the things Discord does (but apparently will not focus in implementing E2EE, unlike Stoat). If you really want the Discord experience down the line, I'd say go for Fluxer or Stoat for sure! But they're both pretty new and need a bit of time to implement it all lol

Yea for a 1 to 1 Discord alternative it seems like Fluxer is the best. I do wonder where their servers are hosted at and yea I've heard the concerns about Stoat. I also didn't know Stoat was even considering implementing E2EE. I wouldn't really trust it unless they opened their source code tho :/. I've heard similar concerns about Root and how it makes its money from private investment rather than donations.

In a perfect world I'd love a Matrix/Fluxer hybrid lol. I like the decentralized and encrypted part of Matrix but also the ease of use of Fluxer or any other Discord clone.

[arcus]

Has anyone else tried anything else, or have some more insight or thought about what they'd like to swap to?

I've been using Matrix and Steam for years. I quit Discord years ago, and any friends that wanted to keep in contact with me but were reluctant to use Matrix used Steam instead. I also use XMPP, IRC, Fluxer, and Deltachat but less frequently. I'm going to nudge my friends on Steam onto Fluxer.

Steam is absolutely awful. Message history deletes after two weeks, it has a bug that quietly makes it lose connection after uploading an image, uploading images makes it crash sometimes, and it straight up doesn't work on some machines.

Matrix is better and I'm used to the quirks by now, but I wouldn't call it good. Public servers are pointless with encryption, since anyone can join them and listen in. Most public servers are on matrix.org, which relies on Cloudflare. My sig should give a rough idea how I feel about that. Cloudflare collects a lot of metadata and can see what matrix.org users type in non-encrypted chats. I'm on a private server, but for anyone that wants to join a server not run by matrix.org it's a pain to find one. The protocol is bloated, there's security issues, and the devs have lost a lot of good faith over the years, so I have low hopes for it in the long term.

Deltachat I like a lot. It requires no email or anything on sign-up. It's straight forward and it's designed around supporting multiple accounts. The encryption can be improved (they're working on that) but for one-on-one chats and small groups, it's great. I'm not a fan of the client relying on Electron however. Electron is a browser that comes prepacked with desktop versions of web apps. This can be an issue since it can take up a lot of extra disk space, and can have security issues if it's not kept up to date.

XMPP is fun. It has a variety of clients but I stick to Gajim because I'm used to it. Encryption-wise it's misleading as I said before, and shouldn't be used for that.

IRC should get more use outside of tech spheres. The desktop clients are technical, but there's easy to use browser clients. It doesn't require an account to lurk, and more public communities should use it. The Starlight Network's IRC chat has web client, try it out.

Fluxer is Discord, for better and for worse. It's a pain to use with keyboard navigation, has accessibility issues when using a screen reader, and is slow on lower end hardware. But from the perspective of an actual Discord replacement? It's the only good one. The dev is working on federation, so even if the main instance has issues down the line, it wouldn't effect accounts on other instances. It has bugs but it's more or less on par with Discord's feature set. It also has an active bot development community, with a pluralkit alternative (Github link). It's biggest risk long term is something happening to its sole developer.

Stoat and Root have no plans on federation, so they are doomed to have funding issues or become a repeat of Discord. If they get big, then the server costs would rise, and moderation would become more difficult and expensive. With federation moderation and server costs are spread out. Them being open source doesn't help much, since that would require making new accounts on every instance of it.

Signal is the gold standard for encryption, but doesn't mean it's perfect. It has various ethical problems (a rebuttal), and requires a phone number. It's a big step up from text messaging, Telegram, and similar, but activists should be aware of its drawbacks and use a secure operating system: An activist using Signal recently got arrested over their iPhone storing incoming messages through app notifications. I've heard of it storing metadata for contacts, but I have no good sources for that (please link me one).

It's too soon to talk about Polyproto, but I hope it succeeds.

End-to-end Encryption should be normalised, but it shouldn't be treated as the ultimate solution to security and privacy. As I said with Signal and Matrix, it doesn't matter how good the encryption is if you or whoever you're talking to is being spied on by other means, or if there's metadata leaks.


TL;DR: Fluxer as a Discord replacement, Deltachat for direct messages and small groups, Signal as a text/Telegram replacement, IRC for indie web chat rooms, and XMPP for novelty.

[grubbyfox]

TL;DR: Fluxer as a Discord replacement, Deltachat for direct messages and small groups, Signal as a text/Telegram replacement, IRC for indie web chat rooms, and XMPP for novelty.

thanks for the input!! Yeah, seems this is really the way to go for many of us.

XMPP isn't much novelty for me lol just by the barebone look of it haha, but yeah...it's an option I guess if people want to use it! So I guess I'll try to sway people into Fluxer as a daily chat and Crosstalk (for novelty) on my end. Signal is my go-to for some very private chats, haha.

I'm kinda keeping a door open for a Stoat fork down the line, should they implement E2EE (and thus forks would have it too) but I'm not holding my breath on that.

[lakes]

TL;DR: Fluxer as a Discord replacement, Deltachat for direct messages and small groups, Signal as a text/Telegram replacement, IRC for indie web chat rooms, and XMPP for novelty.

While I agree with your assessment, I'd like to add that for me, I use XMPP because I have an easier time finding group chats that aren't dead, opposed to IRC where all except 2 I'm on are dead as hell. So I'd also recommend XMPP for indie web group chats.
Maybe others might have a different experience though.

[arcus]

While I agree with your assessment, I'd like to add that for me, I use XMPP because I have an easier time finding group chats that aren't dead, opposed to IRC where all except 2 I'm on are dead as hell. So I'd also recommend XMPP for indie web group chats.
Maybe others might have a different experience though.

That's also my experience outside of tech chat rooms. My TL;DR is for my ideal preferences. If it was for what people use, I would've replaced it with XMPP and Matrix with Crosstalk under novelty and IRC for tech communities.

IRC's advantage is that channels are public and don't require an account to lurk (and usually chat in as well), making it the only one on my list that isn't a walled garden. With recent chat history enabled and a web client (like the server I linked to has), there's a smaller barrier of entry than XMPP and the other alternatives I mentioned. It's a perfect fit for the indie web.

But it's stuck. The communities and users that do use IRC are technologically inclined, so it's rare to see web clients for specific servers. It pushes away less tech inclined users, making the non-tech related channels ghost towns. It doesn't help that it's easier to make and manage chats with anything else. Back in the 2000s it didn't have a reputation of being complex, all online communities used it just about.

[lakes]

That's also my experience outside of tech chat rooms. My TL;DR is for my ideal preferences. If it was for what people use, I would've replaced it with XMPP and Matrix with Crosstalk under novelty and IRC for tech communities.

IRC's advantage is that channels are public and don't require an account to lurk (and usually chat in as well), making it the only one on my list that isn't a walled garden. With recent chat history enabled and a web client (like the server I linked to has), there's a smaller barrier of entry than XMPP and the other alternatives I mentioned. It's a perfect fit for the indie web.

But it's stuck. The communities and users that do use IRC are technologically inclined, so it's rare to see web clients for specific servers. It pushes away less tech inclined users, making the non-tech related channels ghost towns. It doesn't help that it's easier to make and manage chats with anything else. Back in the 2000s it didn't have a reputation of being complex, all online communities used it just about.

Makes sense. For me, with IRC, the only chats that aren't dead for me are the Linux Mint one which is pretty much abandoned by the devs and gets trolls, & a newer one for the frutiger aero archive userbase. Even with tech-y ones like for XFCE, Nicotine+, and qBittorrent; I don't see people talking there too much. But that could just be me.
I do agree that IRC has a simultaneously lower and higher barrier to entry because you don't have to register an account, but registering an account with a server is harder than on other platforms. I know this because the frutiger aero archive one requires you to sign up with NickServ before joining, since it prevents trolls and people seeing your IP with the "whois" command.
I still like IRC though & encourage people who are interested to look into it.

[MapleTheFur]

worst comes to worst we could just go back to irc i guess. i used to hang out in the dragon cave adoptable website IRC of all things...not my first rodeo...melonland irc channel...imagine it...

its a possibility id love to happen, but not for the entire discord userbase :3
i kinda like it small but big enough to be relatively active!

a melonland irc network would be great! integration w/ the forum chat would make it a bit better, for it would help users who cant use a proper IRC client :3