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I read the article, it’s a good article but it also shows how we don’t really have any options that would match the discord’s functionality and ease of use. Which is very sad.
It’s wrong. There are more variants to check out:
- GameVox
- Fluxer
We all now the true alternative would be phpBB… /hj
Unfortunate to see that Revolt hasn’t really changed much since I last tried it out. It’s the closest alternative I can see that seems like it would actually look like a replacement for the average Discord user.
SimpleX is not there ? A?! Really ?
Bring back the old BBs!
Where do you think you are? (Yes I know this isn’t exactly a BBS.)
I know and love your avatar btw!
I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000’s IM landscape. Soon we’ll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn’t support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.
Dont do pidgin too dirty…
I tried pidgin and it didn’t land with me. I always went back to Trillian.
Pidgin was good; it did what needed to be done and wasn’t that bad at it.
The last service I was using it for was a self-hosted XMPP server for a small group of friends that were all refugees of other defunct services. We ended up finally moving to Slack or Discord (the group bifurcated along game-playing lines).
Now I’ve got to find something new yet again!
Hey… Trillian was awesome.
Lmao that is the exact program that came to mind.
I’m glad nobody is mentioning WhatsApp as an alternative. They released usernames a few months ago, all messages are end-to-end encrypted, will add voice and video calls to WhatsApp Web, many people and companies have an account there already… It would be an easy migration, but awful for privacy. Thankfully, the most similar suggestions I found were Telegram and Signal.
WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal aren’t Discord alternatives though? There’s no ability to have multi text and persistent voice channels in groups. WhatsApp doesn’t even support screensharing.
I’ve said this a lot in different places and the Lemmy community is so small folks might even recognize me repeating myself, but I’ll say it again here. The problem with recommending a good Discord alternative is that Discord is different things for different people. For some it’s streaming. For some it’s video calls. For some it’s voice calls. For some it’s DMs. For some it’s group servers. For some the image and video sharing is an important aspect. It’s hard to recommend a good alternative because you’ll always inevitably run into the problem of someone saying “but it doesn’t do the thing I use it for.” The reality is that folks might need to use multiple apps to meet their needs if they migrate.
If you’d skimmed the article you would’ve seen they they suggested Discourse which the author openly admits is a forum, not a chat app. But hey, that’s what some folks use Discord as.
What’s app claims E2EE but it’s not really they store everything on their servers that any one of their staff can access at any point
Your cloud backups are not encrypted either, and you have to explicitly opt out of cloud backups. That means any chats or group chats that involve someone who hasn’t opted out are sitting unencrypted on Meta servers, even if you personally have opted out. Even if everyone has opted out and assume it’s encrypted, they still know who you’re talking to, when you talk to them, how frequently, etc.
That is false.
it’s absolutely true actually… whatsapp are the key holders and there was a leak a few weeks ago that showed meta staff can access anyone’s messages: they just need to raise a ticket and they get access to an app that allows them to pull up any user they like
this is always the case unless you’re the keyholder. any app where you can “forgot password” and get your data back you aren’t the key-holder (though recovery phrases are legitimate), or login simply via phone number and an SMS MFA or similar
it’s also true for apple stuff - despite being similarly encrypted - but they’ve at least on the surface displayed a willingness to protect user data from external threats
There was no leak. It was an ex employee who claimed that others were able to access everyone’s messages.
so… whistleblower
… that’s called a leak mate
Regardless, the app is proprietary. You shouldn’t trust it.
Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
The enshitification of the internet as a whole killed so many forums. I used to scour forums (and still regularly visit old forums) for info, but now it’s on discord or some bs facebook group. I miss old school forums and wikis and I fail to understand why everybody got away from them :c how on earth is an endless scroll of a FB page remotely conductive to finding information vs searching for the right thread on a forum?! I have no experience using discord so can’t speak for them but seeing all these articles makes me think I never will either.
Trying to find relevant information that’s supposed to be in a Discord server is one of the most hair-pulling aggravating experiences I’ve ever had on a computer. I mean seriously, any aspiring software developer of any kind should outright feel ashamed if they are relying on Discord for anything related to their project. Code repository sites are free, made for that purpose, and already offer everything necessary for collaboration. If communications are necessary, that’s what email is for - everyone has it already.
And yeah I also hate the over-dependence on Facebook. If a companies “site” is their fb page, they don’t get my business.
These things are successful not because they’re good. It’s because they’re easy and convenient. That’s the biggest thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to alternatives.
I absolutely love matrixs UI, but I wish they would make the device verification configurable. aware it’s a million times easier to say then implement though.
We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It’s not search indexable or archivable. It’s more or less a memory hole.
Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.
I hope you’re not implying an old forum search was any good
Back when Google was a decent search engine you could just search “something site:someforum.com” since the built in search was so ass
Something Reddit has in common with old forums
Google didn’t remove site:something from their search functionality. Yet.
Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence “search indexable”
I’m not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.
Not denying that it’s shit, I don’t know anyone who’s actually happy with it. But old forums also weren’t built nicely.
You say search indexable as if it’s a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:- moved somewhere
- renamed, so now the link is dead
- was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
- was edited to remove crucial information
- was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
- someone got butthurt so it’s now defaced
- all of the above and more.
So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can’t access it.
The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time
That’s why I also mentioned archivable. Public forums can be archived. If I hit one of those issues I look for archived pages. Deleted discord comments are just silently gone and deleted servers are lost forever
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
If the old service is less convenient that fucking Discord, it’s not better.
The information is as inaccessible now, just in different ways.
We never had a good solution. We had different bad solutions, each bad in it’s unique way.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
I just set up mybb board a few weeks ago for old times sake. Brought back so many memories.
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything
yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations
Yea… Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn’t great at…
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
oh yeah!
what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.
You don’t have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.
i haven’t seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.
Pripietary…
It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
I don’t really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.
Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.
I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.
Agreed. I think the fact that discord kind of does all the things is what made it attractive. But it’s not GOOD at the forum aspect, and it has its flaws for the other use cases as well.
Although there is some kind of fun with “real time chatting” on a forum. Back then, It kind of became that way when it got heated. It’s like a turn based game where all the players take their moves and execute at the same time lol
I would bet on the screen sharing not being that big of a requirement for most people. Voice and text chats though? Yeah, that’s the minimum.
A lot of people I know regularly use screen sharing through discord or opentalk. Both for work/productivity and while gaming (watching each other, helping, sharing what people are up to etc).
To get people to switch it sadly should support all features: text, voice, video and sending files/images/gifs/videos.
It’s tough.
Sure, a lot of people use it, because it exists. How many of those people would actually say it’s a requirement to be built into it though? There’s plenty of other options for screen sharing they could use. I don’t know though. Maybe a lot of people actually do consider it a critical feature. I doubt it though. I’ve used it a few times with my group, but it’s only ever a “do you want to see this?” It’s just a bonus, not a requirement.
I also want this suite of things. I stream movies to friends, share games I’m playing…
These are core features to me now in a robust chat client
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can’t even tell the difference.
By reducing a complex topic down to one score that has “features” as only one of many factors, so that “openness” and “safety” push it to the top.
A lot of people don’t seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. There’s almost no platform that has all of them so you have to zoom out and look at more of the general purpose. The Discord “servers” I’ve used NEVER used anything but text chat.
I understand that but even the text chat is a different experience than what Discourse offers. Even people who only used Discord for text chat and want a replacement for that would be better on IRC.
IRC isn’t really a replacement either. Discord supports rich multimedia embedding and the servers preserve history (by default anyway).
It’s not the text chat they’re referring to. An annoying amount of open so it be projects use Discord as a replacement for forums specifically.
I’m aware but I don’t think this was the issue Ulrich was speaking of. If they were, I don’t think it was well conveyed.
Yeah, clearly everyone loves IRC, that’s why no one uses Discord /s
I’m currently logged in to IRC and haven’t opened discord in weeks.
LOL I can’t wait to hear what you think that means.
I honestly think the vast majority of people on Discord don’t know what IRC is, and therefore don’t have an opinion of it. However, I didn’t mean to suggest IRC as the best alternative anyway.
Okay so they know what Discord is, but they don’t know what IRC is, despite it being 20 years older. What does that tell you?
looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
I’ll keep you company in the minority, since that’s what I want too
Live chat is all I ever use but you never know
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?I’m thinking of something else, I think.
You’re thinking of Guilded.
Looks like Roblox forced everyone using Guilded to suddenly have a Roblox account in 2024, and then Guilder officially shut down about 2 months ago (end of 2025).
Jitsi, simplex, mumble, matrix, lemmy.
Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year
Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)
I love that Discourse is open. I hate that it’s just horrendous from a usability perspective. Flarum is much better than that, in my opinion, while being way more flexible. Examples:
I find discourse perfectly usable.
Cool 👍️
Discourse isnt free
And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service
This is misinformation.
You can self host it, for free.
That doesn’t seem to be communicated very clearly on the website, though I could always be missing something.
It also doesn’t seem like the average Discord user is the target audience. The website is for sysadmins, and the goal seems to be selling a Slack/Teams alternative to a business or government organization.
Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. “Rooms” (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, b
I don’t think that’s true anymore. it has been encrypted by default for quite a few years now
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
They should use some of the funds for UX.
For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXACTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.
Not whatever they’re doing now.
Which client do you refer to regarding the bad UX, Element Web?
Matrix is just the protocol. There are a bunch of different clients though that all implement Matrix but are made by different people: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY
Please don’t. Please for the love of god don’t
I think that is one of the problems. People want an exact copy of discord but don’t ask if discord even has the perfect layout and if it should be copied directly. Anyway there are clients like cinny which look similar and other chat platforms like stroat(previously revolt) and spacebar which look exactly like discord and they are not doing massively well either so shrugs.
Look at Cinny if you’re looking for a Discord-like experience
There is a difference between funding of the Matrix foundation and the matrix.org instance vs. funding for the companies working in the ecosystem. The Matrix foundation has been struggling financially, yes. But the companies using and contributing to the Matrix standard are doing quite well from what I know - though they should probably cough up a little more money to find the overhead and the public matrix infrastructure imo
Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, that’s why it’s in the position it’s in today, yet it gets ranked lower than… Rocket chat??
If we’re objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.
Discord got popular because it’s centralized and pretty
I switched initially because it was lighter on resources then Skype
What functionality are we talking about? Genuinely curious here, since I use discord like a couple of times a year.
From what I’ve noticed, matrix can do basically the same, except for the voice chats which are a pain to setup (and are better handled by jitsi anyways).
