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”.
Honestly, I am ready to go straight back to TeamSpeak.
I miss hosting my own server and having full access and control over it
I used to just host it on a piece of shit. 2003 Dell XP machine I put Ubuntu on
Hell yah, TS3 crew all the way. (Or TS5 for the zoomers…)
My nerds herd recently also set up a cluster of Matrix Synapse servers so we got our little “We have Telegram at home” set up. Getting non-tech people to accept that this is how to find me has been tricky without sounding like a digital prepper.
it’s Element/Matrix if we’re lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won’t be a “platform” you have to leave when it goes corporate.
Revolt is F/OSS
https://github.com/revoltchat/
It’s not just a company with a clone of Discord, all the server back end, etc is open.
Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:
- Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
- Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it’ll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.
Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.
My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.
That said I’ve had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.
An alternative would need screen share, just voip is not enough any more.
The problem is that performant screenshare (to multiple users) more or less requires infrastructure. That requires money, and it’s impossible to compete on price with services that have the VC-enshitification model.
You can get around this in a few ways, but they’re all tradeoffs that are in some way or other worse than discord.
- P2P - sacrifice latency, reliability
- direct multi-stream - sacrifice PC performance and/or bitrate
- paid infrastructure - sacrifice money
I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s simpler and by it’s very nature doesn’t require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.
Plus, don’t forget screen sharing in discord isn’t very good as is (720p30) if you’re not a paid user.
What if you had OBS create a “camera” of your screen, and then use that through video chat?
Ah, the good old “screenshare not working on wayland” workaround!
honestly that isnthe only thing that stopd me from going all in on teamspeak/mumble
i just need a screen sharing solution (not necessarily built into those tools)
man I wish mumble had a better interface and a chat function, it could real FOSS competition with Discord, but the lack of a chat feature is holding it back
It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.
It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.
Unbelievably so. Mumble is… basically one setup command. Don’t even need a domain. And it needs absolutely no resources, can run on a Pi Zero.
Setting up my own Matrix server was honestly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever attempted in decades of non-professionally using computers and I’m still not sure I’d be able to properly take care of the installation if it breaks. Sooo many moving parts. All the federation-oriented projects that rely on adoption rates reaaaaally desperately need setup wizards before any other additional feature.I’ve set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.
Matrix is like “Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn’t work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that’s NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?”
You forgetting the part where the server starts using crazy resources because you entered the main Matrix chat. Does the server need to send you everything that’s ever been said? Apparently yes
I’m running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I’ve set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.
Matrix is the way. It’s federated and you can have your own server.
+1
What are your thoughts on xmpp? Recently I have come to like a lot and am pretty active with friends there.
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.
Just remember your friend, https://discorch.org/
Time to dust off my old Mumble server!
I was reading this thread and started looking for that app again.
Mumla? Is it even still being updated?
Mumla the ever living!
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.
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.
This does sound extremely useful and good.
I’d say the only issues software like this have is there’s a lack of beginners guides to self hosting, so people either know too little and instantly have their server botted / hacked, or know enough to be too paranoid and afraid to set up their own server because they know of the risks.
As for me though, I’ll probably look into implementing this and play around with it for our DnD group first.
they are owned by a Nasdaq-listed company. does that not the defeat the purpose when OP is trying to avoid Wall Street-ownership?
Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.
Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.
Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.
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.
https://spacebar.chat/ looks like it will eventually be good, it looks like it’s in its infancy right now though
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.
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… ?
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.
