In Search of a Discord Replacement

How does "DISCOURSE.ORG" compare? Is anybody using it? Anybody using it as a "self hosted" solution?

Matrix/element is the best bet atm. Had a solid 40m users compared to Discord's 140m at some point, which is good proof they can scale up compared to other. Hardest part is convincing your groups to switch from Discord. But you can bridge the two in Matrix and talk between them which might help ease the transition.

Teamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.

> Signal is the E2EE chat app and protocol. It's FOSS software, and can be self-hosted (though with much difficulty)

I can not emphasise this point enough: it is difficult and unsupported to a degree that Signal can not be considered self-hostable to any remotely useful degree.

It should be in the non-starter category.

Small correction, Stoat does have a usable native mobile app:

- Android: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-android

- iOS: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios

How about using forums again, which keep the history of discussions instead of loosing all that knowhow in the infinite scroll of doom?

otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix

I'm enjoying Chatto, https://chatto.run/, which is due to launch soon ish. Open source, self hosting, cloud hosted option, etc. Architecture looks pretty cool.

I think I will try to push at least my more techy friends to a combination of Matrix and Teamspeak (because honestly the Matrix implementation of anything VC/Screenshare/Video is pure ass. A group call on Element right now starts a Jitsi conference. Can we be for real). On CachyOS with Wayland I additionally apparently need OBS with WebRTC for streaming because audio streaming support for Wayland seems to be some sort of circle of hell.

Matrix is kinda jank but I hope Discord enshittification will speed up client development a bit. I am just really fond of the concept of federated servers and self-owned chat history. Prevents hostage holding of chats in the future. For people who don't want to switch I will run a Discord Bridge for now but I do hope to get my main contacts off this software honestly.

For me anything that visibly looks like Discord is a non-starter because I want a product with an actual vision, not someone trying to slopcode an exact replacement of the Discord UI. Imagine if Discord just looked like Skype did in 2008. Yuck. The Matrix protocol, for all its faults, at least has some form of vision.

TBH, I hate and have always hated Discord. I'm a tech nerd and it's way too complex for me. Teamspeak worked fine for me... simple channels, voice or text chat if you want. That's all I need in an app like that. Teamspeak seems to still be around.