- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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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
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
So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
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
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.
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can’t even tell the difference.
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.
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 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?
I haven’t used IRC since I had to “accquire” fan sub anime in the 00’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.
IRC isn’t really a replacement either. Discord supports rich multimedia embedding and the servers preserve history (by default anyway).
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
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
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:
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.
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 :)
Jitsi, simplex, mumble, matrix, lemmy.
We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
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!
I just set up mybb board a few weeks ago for old times sake. Brought back so many memories.
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he’s going to include Discourse…)
Some other alternatives not reviewed:
- Spacebar
- TeamSpeak
- Root
Spacebar sounded really promising when I checked them out years ago.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are: Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
Unfortunately, seems like it’s still not at a point where it could cover basic Discord functionality.
Edit: I should be clear, I’m not trying to discourage it. I really hope it succeeds to the goal of parity with Discord! Love to hear from someone who has used it a bit.
Yeah, it was immediately clear based on the scoring that he was super biased toward Discourse. It’s not a Discord alternative, and had no place in that list at all.
I mean, it certainly is an alternative to all three morons using discord as some sort of forum for an app or similar. The same way discord is the worst for easily searchable info like a forum is basically the converse for discourse. And exactly the opposite for real time chat obviously.
He at least mentions outright it’s a forum tool. The real problem is having to include it because people misuse discord.
Kind of like anyone using SharePoint for anything. It’s not meant for it.
Why is SimpleX not mentioned anywhere in the article or the comments here? I thought it is similar to Discord. Am I wrong?
Looking at its Wikipedia entry, it looks like a reasonable alternative, I hadn’t looked into it before.
Have you had the chance to try it out?
Not a single reference to Zulip either (edit: I meant in the comments on this thread)
Personally, I really want Matrix to succed though, hope this discord diaspora (?) gives them enough push to smooth their problems.Either they edited it to add Zulip or you missed it.
shit I meant in the thread, I get my comment was confusing
Zulip is literally the 5th thing in the article.
yeah my bad, I meant here in the comments, I was thinking of the thread more than the article itself
No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.
God, I hated that terminology when I needed to talk with people about discord.
I can only assume it’s on purpose so average users really understand it wrong to avoid the associated negative view. Clever, really. But absolutely evil.
This wasn’t intended to be misleading. The term “Server” as in a Discord Server is because, be fore Discord were the days of Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. For many of us gamers used to have to run or pay for their own actual server to have that kind of functionality. Then we’d combine direct calling with Skype for small groups and video. The term made sense at the time, but hasn’t held up to the test of time. Basically Discord solved a problems of having to pay for those servers, and having to use two separate programs.
I’m a it professional (working in enterprise DCs) and have been running ts2 and murmur myself. It was misleading from the beginning and while I do understand your point I can not see a company doing this in good faith, I am too old for that.
You didn’t provide any evidence that it wasn’t intentionally misleading. Discord was clearly intended to replace communities like IRC, Ventrilo and TeamSpeak so they used language that was familiar to them, even though it was completely incorrect.
The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
I highly doubt that when you start a “Discord server”, there’s any new machinery spun up. There is a near 100% chance it’s just an entry in a database. Nobody’s running a server just for him. So I don’t think there’s even reason to be charitable.
Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that
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.
Look at Cinny if you’re looking for a Discord-like experience
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/
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.
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).
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
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…
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.
Hey… Trillian was awesome.
Lmao that is the exact program that came to mind.
Dont do pidgin too dirty…
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!
I’m running with signal for just plain ol bsing. And then maybe steam just for voice chat gaming. Discords been dumped its actually been a refreshing week of something different.
I tried pidgin and it didn’t land with me. I always went back to Trillian.
i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.
did he not try stoat? he just put a bunch of question marks there.
I’d have thought if that was the case it’d be left out of the rankings.
Switching to a self-hosted good old Teamspeak 6. Their screen sharing is very good, and audio quality is far above Discord. Overall it’s still need some polish but is okay.
Isn’t that closed source tho?
Maybe, but let’s deal with one crisis at a time
But isn’t that the wrong approach?
If you want to choose something better, shouldn’t be ‘enshittificationability’ be the main point you want to address? That is the reason discord is doing most of the bad stuff. Proprietary software is about enshittification.
No.
The main point that needs to be addressed is the requirement to upload your face or government ID. This exodus has nothing to do with Discord not being Open Source.
If you’d rather stay on Discord and give them your face while you await the “perfect” solution to materialize you are free to do so. But I think everyone else just needs something purpose ready that doesn’t ask for their face. Then when a fully functional, self hosted, open source solution appears they can reasses.
I mean the issue at hand is discord enshittifying, TeamSpeak has been around for a lot longer and didn’t do that (even when they were in discords position market wise) which also mlght be because their funding model is actually sustainable.
Sure they might enshittify later down the line anway but it’s an alternative that’s here now and solves the ossue at hand
True. At least it’s self-hosted. I just hope some real alternative to Discord comes soon.
I mean, mumble has gotten super good at audio, but I don’t know about other features
Should still be a massive upgrade to discord in terms of how much you’re getting shafted
Teamspeak sounds familiar, I think I had issues with them once before. Is it the one bundled with that OverWolf malware?
TeamSpeak is basically what Discord replaced in many gaming communities/servers/groups. Before discord, most gaming groups would have a TeamSpeak, Ventrillo or Mumble server. These were self hosted (or hosted in a VPS) and generally worked better than Skype. TeamSpeak was the most polished, Ventrillo was kinda dated looking but worked well and Mumble was the free software that was getting started and is now pretty good
I personally treated Discord as a replacement for Skype, I used to chat with close friends on there for years before Microsoft purchased it.
Yeah back in the day my friend group was on Skype as well as jumping onto whatever vc server was setup for whatever Minecraft server we were on. Skype was too bloated and bogged the system down especially if trying to do a voice call while playing a game on my old single core Pentium circa 2010ish
I think TS3 is bundled with Overwolf, but not TS6. I can be wrong.
Is screen sharing available for self hosting? Last I checked (6 months ago) the TS server version wasn’t publicly available yet.
If it is I’ll give it another go!
The interface indicates that sharing can be done via P2P or server. Since I cannot select the server option, and both my friends and I have stable internet connections, I left it on P2P. I successfully tested streaming in 1440p/60fps on Warframe and Nioh 3, and the stream was remarkably smooth, even during scenes with heavy visual effects.
That’s great to hear and pretty cool that it can be done as P2P. I’ll definitely give it a go now!
P2p streaming hasn’t worked for me on the Linux client
I made a test with a friend who is on Nobara. He streamed and watched a stream: everything worked flawlessly.
What client version and server version? I’m running the latest docker container and whatever is in the arch repos
Client : 6.0.0-beta3.4 Server : 6.0.0-beta8
On Nobara, my friend used the flatpak version.
Hm those versions seem to match what I have going, is there special configuration for a TURN server or anything that you had to do?
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.
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.
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.
Ugh yea I have thought about trying to get away from FB, but a few years ago I moved to a more rural area than I was before and it’s incredible how many places -the regional dump among them - don’t have a website it’s just Facebook pages if you want info like if theres closures due to weather or operating hours.
I get that, I had to keep my FB when I lived in a rural area just to pay rent. Lazy.
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
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.
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.
