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”.
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Matrix is a solid option, a lot of activity there as well
mumble is great for VOIP.
Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.
revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there’s that. There’s also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don’t know much about how matrix works
a lot of modern technology and software is built on the foundation of work built by the web browser industry, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not necessarily a good thing either. Provides a lot of nice features, native integration into a web browser, industry standard security and encryption procedures.
That’s about it though, Outside of that, running a dedicated version of that app is almost always some bullshit built in electron, which is a horrible buggy mess with horrible performance. Nothing stops devs from integrating these features into a standalone application… But, they likely won’t since they’ve already developed a web browser version.
I also have some problems with the way web tech is generally built, it’s built with the expectation that you will host and treat it as a web app, which is fine, it works. But i prefer not to host services i use via anything web related as generally i find it both intrusive, and problematic, in the instance that a DNS server goes down for example. (it’s not very likely, i know, but still)
I also think a lot of the networking protocols are fairly bloated, but that’s not as big of a deal, it’s just annoying.
anyway, enough of my ranting. Matrix is actually a specification for a set of communication protocols based on the foundation of web tech, it’s highly universal, and inter-compatible, which is great. But it sort of stops there. There are several server implementations, and numerous front end implementations, none of which seem to be particularly, interesting. There’s numerous electron front ends, a few that aren’t (though they won’t support most features) etc, stuff like that, it’s just. Not clean.
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I’m very excited!
I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.
I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different
Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.
The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.
Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.
It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.
What are you using instead? I only recently set up my synapse server and I’d be interested to head what the alternatives are
I’ve found SimpleX a much better solution than matrix for a discord alternative.
Conduwuit is actively developed and works pretty nice for me. Single user, but bridged to hundreds of telegram, WhatsApp and discord rooms. As well as a few matrix rooms too.
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.
I guess that’s the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.
Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.
Not entirely related, but why do so many people use Discord? What’s the appeal? I only ever used it as a replacement vor teamspeak or ventrilo. And I honestly hate most online games.
I’ve been using it for several years. I have a small server I use with my IRL friends and it works great.
- Near 100% availabily
- Nice sound quality
- Supports multiple servers for your multiple interests
- UI is amazing
- Works fine on every platform
- Screen sharing / streaming is easy
- Cool to see what your friends are playing
- Free plan is more than enough, you can pay for cosmetics or higher stream quality.
+1. It’s like an IRC channel but improved and easy to use.
When I started in the online games, we used IRC + TeamSpeak. Now we only use Discord since it has all of them in only one app but it’s better (except the ads), easier and you also has a Mobile App.
The UI is actually kinda ass, but we all got used to it.
Me and my friends moved to matrix, but we still use discord for streaming.
Compared to the software we were using before such as Skype, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble… The UI is amazing.
I’d happily move to Matrix but I’d lose all the servers for my hobby interests. No point in having both.
What are your thoughts on xmpp? Recently I have come to like a lot and am pretty active with friends there.
There are people using xmpp? Last time I set up a server and tried using it with Pidgin, I couldn’t find a soul that used it
They’re out there. The Venn diagram of people still choosing IRC (as opposed to being forced to use it b/c that’s where the community is) is probably just a circle.
I was a big XMPP user back in the day, but because of the lack of multi-device message syncing and the really shoddy state of encryption, I wandered away. Plus, using XML for the protocol really geeked me out. XML is a document format, and per the spec, to be well-formed it needs to have an open and matching close tag. Jabber hacked around this by making a sort of infinite document - you get the open tag, but never the close tag - and it just felt really icky.
I understand a lot of these things have since been addressed. I don’t know if XMPP still uses that bastardized version of quasi-XML without a close tag. But other things have come along that I like more. About 6 months ago I started running a client on my desktop again, but like you, nobody I knew was still using it, and nobody new was advertising it as their connection info, so… yeah. After a few months, I stopped running the client.
@sxan @shortrounddev jmp.chat uses XMPP, and it’s a very viable replacement for Google Voice (and generic SIP options like voip.ms), so that’s what got me back on the XMPP train. No one else other than my family is using it with me, though, but it’s still nice to have SMS, (encrypted & decentralized) family chat, and IRC (via biboumi bridge) in one desktop client.
That’s interesting; the integration with SMS is a nice feature. Thanks!
You do eventually get the close tag, when you log out. Lol
Xmpp is mostly used for private groups and 1:1 chat, so more of a WhatsApp than a Discord replacement.
But you can find some public channels here: https://search.jabber.network/
The issues you mentioned have been fixed, and XML was never an issue 😅
xmpp is still valid but the new kid on the block is activitypub. I don’t think I’ve ever hosted an xmpp server but to me it’s a better suited (mature, focused)protocol with plenty to offer that AP can’t yet.
having said that, stillll no moderation on free networks.
XMPP feels dated and has to much protocol sprawl.
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.
…theoretically for now
It a centralized server controlled by the devs
Host your own then
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.
Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.
Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker.
The federation itself is a deal breaker
Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
Because the person they’re responding to said the lack of the optional feature was a deal breaker for them on a different piece of software.
but also with request ratelimiting
I get why Federation can cause issues (most of the time it’s moderation related), but why would an extra option be a deal-breaker? Federation can always be disabled on a per-domain basis if you prefer. In fact, I’d argue it’s best practice to only allow domains on a case-by-case basis to prevent spam and abuse.
On the converse, you can’t enable Federation on a platform that doesn’t have it.
They were talking about matrix itself, not a specific option. And I’m not going to lie, having to hand hold your servers federation choices seems like a hassle. At that point why not just use a self hosted, non federated option?
I think the point they’re making is you can effectively have a self hosted non federated option with Matrix. Just disable federation as a whole (which I’m pretty sure is completely possible. Given companies use matrix for comms, and might not want federation, for similar reasons to what is being discussed here)
That doesn’t really change that it’s one company hosting it. Unless you’re willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren’t willing to join each others instances?
I guess the easy solution here to to make it use oauth2 authentication. Then you can just authenticate using one account elsewhere. If fediverse services also at some point become oauth2 providers, then even better.
That’s still not a solution. That entails non unified communication, access, and search. Making it easy to log in to others still doesn’t solve easy sharing between others. Also oauth2 is a pain to set up, and many people hosting their own instance aren’t going to bother.
Sorry but what exactly do you communicate and access between discord servers? Are you talking about PMs which are by default independent of servers?
Unified search could easily be achieved through third party tools at the least, like for IRC. I don’t think even discord has unified search between servers.
Oh hey, you’re totally right, that’s crazy. I use Beeper (hosted matrix setup) to aggregate my chats and I guess I’ve always been using that to search across all servers without realizing. Fully thought the DM search would also search across servers.
DMs are definitely also another case though - you can’t easily DM people on another server if that requires you to log into another server.
That’s true about DM, however DMs are not a core use-case for discord-like services. It’s the group/voice chats etc. I could see a workaround like lemmy does, where if you want to DM a user in another server, you might be able to do it through your fediverse instance (i.e. a DM simply has your fediverse instance DM their fediverse instance), but I’m sure there can be more elegant things like. However DMs by themselves are a weird thing by themselves, so much so, that even bluesky had to bolt DMs on-top and outside of their protocol.
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Nheko provides an interface that is reminiscent of Discord. Fully featured and fast Matrix client.
Thank you for the recommendation. I tried element a while ago and found it lacking. Matrix must be the way forward. Disregarding IRC of course.
Sadly I found out yesterday:
Matrix is not a community-based software, it was born [00] in Amdocs [01], a multinational corporation founded in Israel.
https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html
Many were claiming its impossible to get contributions merged as well.
I would be happy to find out this information is wrong or outdated.
Feels like fud.
Matrix is a set of standards and governed by an open foundation https://matrix.org/foundation/about/
Also there are many different server implementations and its hard to believe they all send your data to some third entity. In other words, what is stated by that link is just plain false. Not to mention that today there are quite many clients as well and I find the bridge point a bit… Idiotic.
You are free to use matrix.org but makes way more sense to self host your instance, and maybe not even use Synapse but something more “modern” as server.
Why use Element for matrix?
From what I can tell it collets and links data to you: Location, identifiers and contact information.
How is that private or better than Signal?
Isn’t the data sharing optional? I’m pretty sure it asks you on first startup and you can decline.
The Element web client will break encryption when you clear your browser data.
Does it? I think it logs you out and after logging in again, you need to provide your encryption key/verify with other device again in order to access the history. Or wdym with breaking?
I use Signal for private and personal messages. I use Discord solely for gaming and voicechat. A good alternative doesn’t need to be overly private (although that would be a bonus of course). It just needs to have a good UI and feature parity with Discord.
There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.
Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.
Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?
You know the app still works if you deny it loc permissions, right?
still means they’re willing to collect data
Does it? On Android, it never asked me to grant location permission unless I try to share my location to another user. Similar with contacts and calendar, it’s working perfectly fine without them. Where exactly does it link those identifiers and with what?
This is what shows up when I check Element. Every other Federated app that I use doesn’t collect any information. Voyager, Pixelfed, Peertube, Mastodon all come up with “No data collected”
Ah! I don’t know what exactly these mean, would be interesting to see what Element says what those mean. I don’t think Element actually adds these to your messages etc but I don’t know the protocol enough.
Because people don’t use discord for privacy. They use it for gaming, voice chat, communities and streaming.
@Nikelui is 100% right: a chat room may be private, but it’s not secure. Even in an encrypted room, every additional person you add reduces your security. I’m sure there’s some paper out there that studies this, and that the graph of # of members vs security is an inverse power ratio.
If it’s a public chat, there is no security.
However, with Matrix, if you run your own server and restrict access to your friends, at least you can be fairly certain your chat room isn’t being used to train an LLM, or to harvest information about you for advertising.
There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.
Public chats are not my concern. That’s information I’m putting out there willingly.
Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.
Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?
I don’t know. I don’t use Element; I wasn’t aware it requested location service access. I switched to FluffyChat ages ago; it only asks for notification.
But that’s just for group chat. I’ve been using Jami lately, and it does ask for location access; that’s because it has a “share location” feature, that - if you use it - shows a little map with your location to the person you’re sharing with. Maybe Element has implemented something similar?
This is what shows up when I check Element. Every other Federated app that I use doesn’t collect any information. Voyager, Pixelfed, Peertube, Mastodon all come up with “No data collected”
Huh. I just checked Fluffy, and it asks for location, camera, and phone. I just denied it everything but notifications, so VOIP won’t work, but all I use it for is chat rooms anyway.
In any case, it doesn’t look any better than Element, in that respect.
Are you specifically referring to the mobile client of Element? i wasn’t away of anything with the desktop client that has anything to do with location.
This is what shows up when I check Element. Every other Federated app that I use doesn’t collect any information. Voyager, Pixelfed, Peertube, Mastodon all come up with “No data collected”
I just looked in detail through their privacy policy, and it looks like if you use their “service” they are collecting quite a bit of data, certainly more than I would have expected. I only use stand alone, non-federated homeservers and I have everything disabled as far as telemetry, etc, but I think you’ve convinced me to keep an eye on the other clients. I last test drove several last year and all of them were either lacking features I needed or had issues.
Signal is centralized and require a phone number to register, it’s not private at all.
That’s bullshit.
A) Privacy =/= anonymity
B) They have usernames and the option to hide your number from searches for those interested.
C) Signal has absolutely no way of accessing any of your information: https://signal.org/bigbrother/ They publish all their subpoenas and there is no information that are able to collect. It’s all encrypted.
D) Phone numbers are an easy way onboard the normies and Meta addicts that don’t value privacy.
Your phone number is tied to your identity, there are no reasons to ask it to begin with.
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
TS 6 looks so good. I can’t seem to figure out it’s release window though. Along with the mobile app being updated. Once those are done I plan to move over.
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.
: ( i was too dumb to follow the playbook correctly
i wanna have a matrix sever!
but I’ll use snikket for now until i skill up
If you try to do calculus and don’t have the understanding of the underlying math then you won’t have a good time when ansible breaks. I’d advise it’s normally better to learn how to manually install and manage software from the command line.
We believe in you, there are other write-ups and guides on how to get it working. Its was great learning expirence for VMs and Proxmox (thats what I did and it did make it harder, but I feel more confident when im cosplaying as a sys-admin)
This one is pretty close to whats needed, but go into it expecting each step to open a new tool/application that needs to be researched before you press enter. Also look up how to set it to a PSQL db before you start inviting users, it defaults to SQLite and that will cause problems eventually.
that is actually what I’ve been thinking. xmpp with encryption seems good enough for me! plus I’ve heard some stuff isn’t encrypted in matrix, (metadata? emojis? not exactly sure)
i am heavily leaning towards scaling up to snikkets big brother, prosody.
The currently common older implementation of e2ee in xmpp has the same issue with only the message body being encrypted. There are newer specs of OMEMO that have better metadata protection, but its adoption in xmpp clients has been very slow.
Prosody is more of a sandbox, with Snikket being a preconfigured version of it, but yes running Slidge will be a bit easier with a normal Prosody server.
I used to have a free lifetime server from someone that was giving them away, but he shut down after a few years.
Did he die?
Maybe it was based on the “lifetime” of their hamster 🤷
There is also Mumble. TS3 era voip and text chat features, but it’s FOSS.
If they add federation I’m sold. Honestly it would be nice if it integrated with Activity Pub
It’s not that kind of application. Federation would be massive overkill for a project like Mumble.
It’s a voip server and client for video gaming, with a couple adjacent features sprinkled in.
It doesn’t even really have accounts, and adding servers is just matter of configuring their IPs. What would you even use federation for?
It was so featureless back when I last used it. I don’t remember it having half the features ts3 had in 14
Oh, it’s basic af. But it did what it needed to do, and still does, for some.
I havent used it in ages, I have no clue what sort of stuff continued development has enabled. If anything.
My friend group went first from Skype to the massively better TS3, and finally to Mumble. I don’t remember really missing anything.
I’ve been tinkering with old BBS software :)
Kibo lives!!!1
Matrix.
Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.
An alternative would need screen share, just voip is not enough any more.
Most of the discords I’m on never use screen share for anything.
All the ones I’m on, around 30, it’s the only thing it’s used for.
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!
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.
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)
TeamSpeak recently added screen share to their TS6 beta, however it currently only works on official servers provided by TeamSpeak; they have not yet released TS6 server software, only the client. To my understanding, they are thankfully still planning on releasing it though.
It never made sense to me how popular discord was to begin with.
It used to be fast and not full of useless bloat like what you see right now. The usual enshittification.
@[email protected] Among my friends, it replaced Facebook Messenger, Teamspeak, and Mumble instantly. It was fast and the voice quality was excellent. The appeal in 2017 was obvious. The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.
Don’t get me started on the “rewards”…
Don’t forget free servers.
On TS3 it was to either know a friend that rented/hosted it, rent/host it yourself or use a public server.The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.
VCs gotta make back that ROI…
Funny, I remember in 2017 the voice chat had mic issues all the time but now that works much better. But I suppose everything else got bloated…
- persistent IRC style chat rooms
- virtual “servers” to organize said chat rooms, manage privileges, control visibility
- integration with bots for all sorts of things (moderation, user welcome, dice rollers, etc.)
- integration with games/music players/etc (I don’t use it but it’s very popular)
- privacy and moderation controls
- client allows fine grained notification controls
- voice, video, and screen casting simultaneously
- “server” templates: use an existing server config (roles, permissions, rooms, etc.) when creating a new server.
That’s just off the top of my head.
It’s enshittifying, but the value proposition is still hard to beat. I’m really hoping Matrix catches up with the feature set soon.
Its popularity is more inertia based
Really? Is there an alternative that hits all the points above? I’m really asking.
I’m not subject to intertia. I could move my friends to an alternative in a week. Tell me which alternative has all those features and I’ll switch.
Other voice chat programs were crap, discord was significantly better and more consistent. Simple as. It still has features way ahead of other services. The business side is shitty but it works without anyone needing to know anything with no troubleshooting.
If you’re self hosting, it’s Revolt. But the default instance limits you to 20mb or something for files, which is a problem for me, personally.
Revolt is also an annoyance to self host and the apps don’t support self hosted instances without you rebuilding them because the server is hardcoded.
Why even give the option then lmao
That’s just it, it isn’t an option
Just use croc to share files. Then size doesn’t matter.
Yes that sounds super convenient…
Doesnt discord also have a max of like 25mb? Unless you pay for nitro?
If that, depending on the type of file sometimes its 10mb
Yea that’s what I thought, cause I’ve had small files get rejected recently now.
It was 8mb then 25mb then 10mb now (for non-Nitro users)
I believe it’s ~100mb. I don’t mind paying for more. That’s not an option on Revolt.
Wait? I thought this was FOSS? Is there no settings to allow you to change the upload size of files?
Again, if you’re self-hosting, yes; If you’re using the default instance, no.
