With Discord announcing age verification globally, people are searching for alternatives. But a Discord alternative on the open social web might just look structurally quite different.
Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games.
I think this is the important part that’s missing from a lot of these discussions, including from users themselves looking for a new place to go. Some people use discord as an IRC chatroom replacement. Some use it was a small group text, essentially, between friends or co-workers. Some people use it as a Patreon perk to get access to a community around an artist and interact with that artist and their other fans.
And I’m in some “servers” of all of those. So anywhere that’s using it as IRC can be replaced with XMPP or Matrix no problem. Or IRC, but with gifs. Cool. But my other group that hangs out in there async every day and the occasionally jumps onto an ad-hoc voice chat when people are available to game, or sometimes shares my screen so someone else can watch what I’m doing? None of those things do that. But mumble kinda does, but not in a persistent or integrated way. Mumble is a great way to talk, but an awful place to hang out. Jitsi does screen share, but is not casual and also isn’t a good hangout.
And we could limp by with an XMPP room for chat and then a link to a Jitsi or Mumble or something when it’s time to do something. But there’s something tight about having the “just call” button right there, tied to the chat you’re already in, and in being able to see “huh Alice and Bob are playing GAME right now. I should pop in!”
But if you’ve never been in a discord server like that, you make a recommendation of IRC or something, and a gaming friend group user checks it out and is like “this is even close to doing any of the things I need it to…”
But my other group that hangs out in there async every day and the occasionally jumps onto an ad-hoc voice chat when people are available to game, or sometimes shares my screen so someone else can watch what I’m doing? None of those things do that.…but Matrix does that.
How I miss the “do one thing and do it well” attitude in commercial services. Why do they have to convert any nice product into a s.itshow? It can’t be that investors want good services to become worse…
We need a damn federated Discord! Stoat and Root are bandaids until they either shut down themselves or degrade.
Do NOT reply to me with Matrix. It’ll be a federated Discord when it actually gets some uptake for more than just Fediverse instance rooms.
I agree with this but why are we all pitching for completely new platforms. Why don’t we all just go and contribute to stoat and implement federation instead of waiting for an entirely new platform to come up. I understand many open source people like fragmentation, but I personally would wish for more concentrated dev time on a single project. Also having one centralized place for most work makes it easier to fork later and have a solid base to work off of instead of a bunch of different ideas over and over
Stoat have not designed their platform to federate and aren’t interested.
Why do we need federation though? I like my discord ‘servers’ being disjointed.
Same reason the Fediverse does. Because a would-be piece of software can’t scale without it. If each instance is entirely disconnected, then you can’t jump between different communities on them without new accounts. This depresses growth. Your average would-be Discord instance host is unlikely to be able to scale up to any meaningful size to be a large host, and nor would that be desirable anyway as its just a form of centralisation to begin with.
Barring the single account, I want them entirely disconnected though. Discord had not suffered in growth because of a lack of interaction.
Centralization is irrelevant for what users want outside of a niche. The average user doesn’t care.
And I should note I’m not against competitors and open source but they all need to realize that the thing that matters to users isn’t the underlying architecture or that they’re foss. It’s the features, community, and experiences they deliver.
Lemmys a good example. From the outset having to ‘choose’ a server is already an anti-pattern on seamless user experience.
Why? You could always self-host a federated Discord alternative and not federate it with anywhere else if you wanted it like that. You can use it like that and others can utilise its federation functions. Why is Federation presumably desirable for you when it comes to Lemmy but not Discord?
Federation is necessary here for long-term resistance to corporate greed and decline. It isn’t a selling point specifically for the individual user experience here.
Snuck in an edit that touches some or your points. I’m not on Lemmy because of federation, that’s incidental. I’m here because it’s another option to explore. But I still use reddit, too, because the community is there.
I can assure you here that the majority here will always want federation in anything even if it makes the sign-up process more complicated slightly to new users. For many reasons.
And sure, features also matter. If they didn’t, then Matrix would be already winning here.
As you seem to appreciate, 95% of the time matrix is exactly what’s needed. People seem to hate it because it’s slightly different than discord, but anything that isn’t discord is going to have that problem. It also has other problems, but at least it’s not as bad as fucking discord.
I mean Stoat and Root just do not have that problem. They look like Discord.
All that we need is that but federated.
Also Matrix lacks key Discord-like features in terms of voice chat, screen sharing etc.
Can you explain which features are missing for you?
No audio/screen sharing, incredibly basic community or “space” customisation tools. No roles.
Imo all it needs is for 2.0 to come out and for discord-like clients like cinny to mature to get to a point where it’s a good discord replacement, and both of those seem pretty close to happening.
Fluxer.app looks promising. It’s still in very early dev, but according to the site:
These features are coming soon:
- …
- Opt-in E2EE messaging
- E2EE calls
- Federation
- …
The public beta looks pretty good but it’s currently very slow. There is a large refactor going on so I’m hoping for the best, but even in its current state it seems to support many of Discord’s biggest features quite well.
That feature list looks too good to be true ha ha
I can dream lol
I am now waiting manual review
Really? That’s new, I signed up this morning and it just worked. They must be being hammered by people leaving Discord too
Well yes, it says: “To manage the influx of users during our public beta, we are throttling registrations…”
There’s Shoot.
Any active Shoot instances?
Don’t think so. I mean there is the web client which does give a default instance, but it requires an invite code.
Yeah, if that can develop further and some people start to take it up - it could become more of a thing.
Gonna say it aloud for the unweaned masses in the back.
The main problematic issue with most “we need an alternative for Yplatform in the Fediverse!” speech is the use of the singular. We are never going to get a good thing going if we push for “everything-app” platforms because they’ll be everything-apps, and the push of power is irresistible. Also, everything apps are much harder to develop for the same base feature set (“share a message” is easy in text, quadratically much harder on video), which is why VC-funded capital can do it.
We have to accept that what we need is alternatives, plural, to the various things that Discord and other platforms centralize. Because half the point here is we are against centralization. And allowing each project to focus on each problem separately allows them to take advantage of their own strengths, up to and including funding and provisioning (“get storage for a million items” is trivial on text; quadratically much harder on video).
We need a text messaging platform? XMPP already exists. Let’s go help.
We need audio chats? Mumble already exists. Let’s go help.
We need instant notifications? Surely something already exists. Let’s go help.
We don’t need “a walled garden but on the Fediverse”.
I agree with you, and I think there’s a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).
The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the “education”, users will converge on particular instances because that’s what’s most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.
If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.
I don’t know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There’s certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.
Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.
This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?
Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.
I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.
For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.
Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.
I’ve looked for alternatives lately and the most promising one I’ve seen is Spacebar. I would like to see it federate eventually, but I think the way to attract users fleeing Discord isn’t to make them adjust to a less-intuitive or less-featured alternative. People switched to Discord because it combined feature-rich text chat with group voice, video, and streaming all in one central place. Going back to Mumble, Teamspeak, etc. for voice, Matrix or XMPP for chat, etc. is a downgrade and people will just put up with Discord if that’s the alternative.
Unfortunately, there are no fully feature-complete alternatives with Discord’s user-friendliness yet. Spacebar is at least going in the right direction, trying to completely replicate Discord’s API. It seems they had voice working at one point but it’s currently broken due to a compile issue, hopefully the influx of new users will expedite a fix. The only major other thing they’re lacking then is streaming, though that doesn’t sound too hard if they already have voice working. The devs have said they’re open to federation as a future upgrade but the current focus is fully implementing the Discord API. A self-hostable Discord is pretty much what I’d want as a replacement. I’ve used Mumble and I’ve used Matrix and I agree with the idea that neither are a proper replacement for Discord. Matrix’s communities are a loose collection of independent rooms, which is not the same as a proper Discord guild/server. Matrix is great if you want secure, encrypted chats, but synchronizing keys is a pain I don’t see most Discord users accepting.
I feel like I’ve explored every alternative, and there’s one feature that’s missing from everything: audio with screen share. Not a single service lets me share my system audio with the people watching my screen
Matrix, Element?
Nope, no audio with the screen share
This is actually a feature missing from many browsers. Maybe Discord has a workaround, not sure.
Movim.eu recently added it, but it only works on Chromium based browsers.
Even using desktop apps it seems like these services just don’t even try to stream audio. If they just made a pipewire node I could connect it up easily but they don’t even try that.
Jitsi, Revolt? BigBlueButton? Spacebar? You could try Matrix with Jitsi. Or Matrix with the video call beta in element, as someone else said.
I haven’t tried BBB, also Revolt is now called Stoat
It looks like discord. There is no replacement. No other project comes close.
stoat.chat
