A couple weeks ago Discord announced their plans to go down the IPO route. This means that there is now a ticking clock until the platform goes full-on enshittified like so many others before them.
Last time i checked last year there weren’t many options to migrate to, mostly Matrix communities (which are not quite the same thing) and Revolt Chat (which is a non-federated but FOSS and self-hostable drop-in replacement for Discord). Revolt sounds like the logical route as it’s clearly designed for just this exact role, but it seems it’s still early in development and not yet ready for the average Discord user (looks like the voice functions in particular are still in development)
Has this changed or improved since then? I feel like the use case of “IRC servers, but modern!” should have been solved years ago but feels like it hasn’t, i have lots of non-technical people who heavily use Discord who I’d love to rescue from it before it starts actively burning, a replacement that isn’t complicated and has all it’s features would be welcome.
I do want to say Matrix. You’d have to find a server first --> https://joinmatrix.org/ .With its discord bridge, it does allow users to switch to matrix and still be in the community if the community is bridged.
Matrix also supports voice chat rooms and video chat rooms. It isn’t monetized so there aren’t custom stickers, premium accounts, and so on, but if more people used matrix and donated, maybe that’ll happen. Someday.
I have joined revolt servers purely based on size just to see if anything was happening, and every single one of them was basically dead, especially anything with a focus. At most I will see one or two people talking. Makes it very hard to hang around on a daily basis.
Are there any servers you know that have decent activity?
I love the Element client for Matrix. I use it with my friends and I have joined a lot of communities on there. It’s Discord-like, but I personally find it much easier to navigate than Discord. It’s free, open source, decentralized, you can self-host if that’s your jam, it’s got some solid security and usability features, call quality is great, and I’ve found it to be very stable and reliable. I’m a little biased because I personally don’t like Discord, I find the UI clunky and unpleasant to use, but I love using Element. If you love Discord, you will find Element familiar, but you may or may not appreciate the differences.
I’m amazed you find Element easier to use, their idea of cramming a pile of channels into a “home” that you can’t even see unless you specifically look for it is absolutely bizarre, and you can’t make voice rooms either, you have to enter a text chat and then start a ‘call’ which is odd.
I recently started my own Matrix home server. It seems fine for chatting. “Communities” has been replaced by Spaces can act like Discords servers, Inside of that space you can nest other spaces or rooms which would be like channels in discord. Element recently added video channels as an experimental feature. and it looks like you can disable webcam and only allow mic when you connect to one so it could act as a “voice channel”. Overall it is pretty basic in features but usable. It doesn’t help that the available features are different depending on the client used. Bridging is great, I have discord, signal, and sms coming to element on my computer so I only have one application for all of my messaging. I’m looking forward to the further development of Matrix. Voice rooms, custom emoji, and adding gifs to chat would make it basically perfect for me
Originally I was looking into Revolt but couldn’t get a self hosted instance running. My experience with system admin is pretty limited so this was likely an error on my part. I don’t like that accounts can’t be federated so users would have to make a separate account for each revolt server which would be a pain. The developers have stated that as a case against self hosting and prefer users join their centralized server to grow the platform. Last time I checked they aren’t looking into a way to add it since it sounds like it would have to heavily overhaul the protocol. This is one of the main reasons I went with matrix. Issue #25 on their github has a lot of troubleshooting and discussion of people trying to self-host I recommence reading through it if you are planning on setting it up, although If I remember correctly voice chat is not functional on a third-party servers. If self hosing isn’t an goal then most of this is irrelevant.
Spacebar chat was also mentioned in another comment. I’m gonna have to look into it and see how it compares to matrix
I recently started my own Matrix home server.
Cool! What’s the simplest step-by-step guide out there for this?
I’ve read a lot of people use the ansible playbook on a vm to install synapse. It would automate most of the install and usually recommend it as the easiest. you can find it at https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. I am hosing it on unraid so I used this guide instead https://forums.unraid.net/topic/127917-guide-matrix-synapse-w-postgres-db-chat-server-element-web-client-coturn-voice/ which worked pretty well
