What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group:
- Matrix
- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)
- IRC + Mumble
- Signal
What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group:
- Matrix
- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)
- IRC + Mumble
- Signal
For the latest in IRC tech, you can read my blog posts: https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...
I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.
One thing most of those lack is an easy way to share screen.
Now if anyone wants to differentiate their Discord alternative, they want to have most of discord functionalities and add the possibility to be in multiple voice chats (maybe with rights and a channel hierarchy + different push-to-talk binds). It's a missed feature when doing huge operations in games and using the Canary client is not always enough.
Matrix screen sharing is a feature of Element Call / MatrixRTC (in development).
For now, I think they do it through their Jitsi integration. I don't know how easy it is, as I haven't tried it.
https://docs.element.io/latest/element-cloud-documentation/i...
Stoat has screen sharing / video calling in the pipeline at least: https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313
According to the last comment in the issue it is already available for self hosted clients.
Jitsi does that well
I think Matrix is the closest equivalent that's reasonably popular, at least for text messaging. There are both web and mobile clients and they interoperate seamlessly. It's also at the point where it somewhat reasonably works for the average user, rather than being the usual UX nightmare that teaches people that anything open source or anything pushed by their nerdy friend should be avoided.
This seems like a nice breakdown of some options:
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
(Not affiliated)
Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don't want to host their own shit, they want a one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have baggage.
This is your chance to start Bluesky for discord. A competently built, VC backed competitor to exploit a misstep only caused by government overreach due to their colossal market share. 26 million daily active users is a nice guaranteed market to start whittling away at, with an effective marketing campaign to drive a wedge between "little gamers, and big corporate enshittification."
> government overreach
How would you avoid the same problem that discord ran into that made them require ID verification? I doubt they're doing this for fun. Incorporate in the Bahamas?
the largest block of discord users are from the US which hasn't got id verification laws regarding age for social media. The 2nd largest is brazil, which does, and the 3rd is India, which doesn't.
So they are forcing users from countries that haven't passed these laws to abide by them. They don't have to do this, they could just require brazilians use face-id.
I've been tempted for a long time.
I don't think I would need VC to get off the ground.
I keep coming back to the gigantic headache of content moderation, and it gives me pause not to do it. There are some truly terrible people who will try to tear the platform apart.
Any option that is not self hosted will eventually suffer the same fate. Decentralization is the way forward
> Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don't want to host their own shit, they want a one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have baggage.
I mean, come on, this is, what, a couple hours of vibe coding, max?
Let's go AI bros on HN. Chop. Chop. ... Wait, why am I hearing crickets?
For those who don't get it, yes, I'm being sarcastic. It isn't that easy to code this, but the problem isn't coding or even deploying.
The problem is your manual service. Logins are a pain in the ass and chew up sooooo much of your customer service time. Then there are the griefers. Then there are the spammers. Then there is law enforcement compliance (in spite of what HN says, you DO have to comply with local laws). etc.
All that costs time which equates to money.
I was once talking to someone who made a point that Discord specifically tries to hide IPs so that people playing a game can't DDoS their opponents. o_O! At that moment, I realized that I simply can't imagine all the malevolent behavior that Discord withstands.
Does matrix have decent 1:N client desktop broadcasting with low latency (and high fps) yet? I use discord for "watch parties", video and tabletop gaming...
Discord's voice rooms with screen sharing is a very cool feature i depend on daily. I haven't seen opensource messenger that implemented this yet.
Jitsi handles this very well.
I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.
Jitsi has audio rooms like discord?
Which of these has been around for over three decades?
That would be my answer.
Same, depends on what you expect in terms of features and so on, but for chat, IRC works perfectly.
I wonder how Stoat will fare, and how it is currently maintained, in terms of "making money"; my fear is that it would steer into the direction of Discord itself.
Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind a paywall to remain sustainable.
Revolt's rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding MSFT done ever.
It's because of the trademark: https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat
Nevertheless, I don't like the new name either, oh well...
I like this comment though:
Imagine you make a free software project and it runs into trademark issues because people have more money than you to register in more classes than your project.
And then even though your project existed first, they still come after you anyway.
And from that an even more expensive rebranding from this as well.
from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225, not sure how accurate it is, but it makes me want to revolt .
I wish there was more info. Who sent the C&D? Did that entity seem likely to have enough money to actually sue, and did they seem immune to the negative press if they did sue? Is that company in an unrelated-enough industry that they could just call it "Revoltchat" or something and be safe? Did they at least show it to a lawyer? Why didn't they publish the C&D?
I'm not a lawyer, but this kind of thing happens enough that I've asked GPT to explain it to me, and I think most people roll over at the first legal demand, no matter how outrageous.
Calling it "stoat" seems like a form of self-destructive protest.
"[beaver emoji] Revolt is Stoat now"
Argh. If there's no stoat emoji, petition the Unicode Consortium for one, don't just use a beaver. It's not even the right family; the badger emoji would be closer.
It's open source, I'm tempted to fork it and do nothing other than change the branding.
Snikket (https://snikket.org ) with Monal as the iOS client
Requires hosting of the private server (security/privacy implications) or renting it from the third party.
For me, the closest alternative to Discord is Stoat. Matrix with Element (or other clients) would be great, but it feels so slow on both desktop and mobile.
Zulip?
I keep wondering why Zulip is so often left out of reviews and tooling comparisons. For me it ticks a lot of important boxes, yet it barely gets mentioned. Is there a downside I'm missing, or is it just under the radar?
The concept that every message belongs to a topic and the async communication focus makes so much sense to me. I read conversations, not timelines.
Sadly Zulip does not have a big marketing budget, and many reviews/tooling comparisons are paid for in some way, directly or otherwise, or are SEO spam that starts with reading other similar SEO spam.
It is highly ranked on some platforms that do validated reviews, like Capterra.
(I lead the Zulip project).
Oh please, fix your self-deployment story first. Search "zulip docker" or "zulip self host". It seems like you guys just deleted your compose file right when folks are looking for alternatives. Even before this refactor I gave it a good try for an hour before just moving on to RocketChat/Mattermost. It seems like you just don't try the product as if you're a customer.
I feel like the average person isn't looking for something professional grade, sadly it's hard to get people to go away from Discord at the moment. Hard to suggest alternatives if people aren't seeking them yet.
If I had to say it would have to be something customizable, letting a user to delete their data even after getting kicked from a server, very fast and seamless joining process ,great gif/sticker support without any premium features etc. But really that's just some fantasy app lol. Discord is doing just fine destroying itself however
By the way, I didn't know there was an instant online test app because when I searched for Zulip I was in the download page and it doesn't say anything about trying it online. Seems like a strange suggestion UX wise but that's how I feel about it (wonder how many people missed out on this?), same thing after you enter the app. It should have a test area for the new user to chat around by himself with a bot or something with locally/session stored messages.
Hey, cool :-). I've used Zulip for a bit and really enjoyed it.
We're planning to roll it out at our company (foundata) in Q4, so you’ll get at least a few bucks from us. I'll also happily recommend it to our customers. As an OSS company and service provider, I can very much relate to the lack of marketing budget and the constant SEO spam.
I have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS
Element’s awful, but I’ve found FluffyChat, another matrix client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.
IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after.
I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron. Total waste of time.
IRC does not support group voice & video calls, which is one of the primary features of Discord (and previously Skype, from which everyone migrated to Discord in the first place)
It's a viable system for the many open source software projects that collaborate over chat. Expo, Typescript, and Effect are relatively large examples. I'll participate there if available and I get locked out. Otherwise, I'll just use the stuff without contributing, no problem.
Kids these days...
Should be blame the majority of the users, or should we accept times change?
For most Discord users IRC simply does not have the feature set that people need. Basics like simple drag and drop media sharing, threaded conversations, emoji reactions and voice comms, up to more complicated stuff like screen sharing and video calling.
Last I checked Signal was not fully open source, which is iffy, believe their encryption protocol is still closed. That said its the best of a bad bunch for E2EE messaging. If you're on android I'd recommend doing what I do, which is installing from the APK on the site, manually verifying the sig locally (you can use termux for this), and then lagging ever so slightly behind on updates to avoid potential supply chain or hostile takeover attacks. This is probably over cautious for most threat profiles, but better safe than sorry imo. Also their server side stuff is close sourced, technically this isnt an issue though as long as the E2EE holds up to scrutiny though.
Edit: My information may be out of date, I cannot find any sources saying any part of the app is closed source these days, do your own research ofc but comfortable saying its the most accessible secure platform.