Hi everyone,
I just had my account deactivated from Discord for ToS violation (I didn’t do anything wrong, I just tried to send a friend request), but that’s not the most important thing.
Now that I no longer have an account, and I’ve been wanting to leave Discord for a while for a better, self-hosted, open-source alternative, this is the best time.
I know of Matrix, XMPP servers and applications that work very well, but none of them work in the same way, or have the same feel as Discord. I see more alternatives for professional use than for gamers or communities.
Revolt exists, but last time I checked, you can’t really host it yourself, and I haven’t read good things about it. (I don’t remember the website listing all the negative aspects.)
That brings me to my two questions.
- Can you list some alternative to Discord that I probably don’t know ?
- If you want a alternative to Discord, what are your requirements to using it ? I’m not saying I can or will, but I think I can try to create one.
PS: I already trying to get my account back (but I have the same response from the support and I can’t send request to “Appeals & Age Update Requests” because of ToS violation) and even if I manage to get it back I really want to leave discord right now.
Look into mumble. It’s NOT a discord replacement but does provide a good quality, low latency, OSS voice chat. Mumble + Signal group chat is what my friends and I use for gaming. Seems to work well.
Tip: Turn on text-to-speech to get narrated announcements when users join channels. Also works for text chat shenanigans. 🤣
The “problem” is that most people only want an app that does everything, and I’m sure some of my friend don’t want to have two app to do the same thing one app can do.
I prefer to have two perfect app for one task, but not everyone want this.
I would have said in fact Matrix or XMPP-based solutions but it seems you already have spotted them. Maybe Mattermost?
I need to give a try, I know by name but never use it.
I presume you can make call, good audio and screen share ?
There indeed was an alternative called Revolt. Idk if it’s still maintained. Though I had quite bad experience with it so can’t recommend. Another alternative is Guilded which seems dead in terms of development but it has an active (and very small) user base. I think it can even be self-hosted. But ultimately you need to be ready for changes if you want to leave Discord. There’s nothing quite like it, especially in terms of convenience and popularity.
Not a gamer* but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.
*multiplayer gamer. I do play single player games.
I think Element has the best chance of being a viable discord alternative. Especially with matrix 2 around the corner.
Element X (their new mobile app) loads as quickly as discord and supports e2e calls as well as chat.
It is a different app than discord though. It does not feature the nice server layout that discord is kind of known for but it is planned with spaces.
I say give Element another year or two and it will be a very formidable chat program.
And I have no doubt they are doing well financially and will continue to push improvements as matrix is very widely used. I mean hell apparently Nato uses it
Element X is fast Indeed.
There are more cool organisations that use Element.
- US navy
- US space force
- French government
- German defence force
It’s more a Skype alternative at the moment though.
Maybe rocket.chat?
Matrix, via Element.
I haven’t seen Revolt on here yet! I’ve only played around with it seems pretty nice! https://alternativeto.net/software/revolt-chat/about/
It’s closer to Slack, but Rocket Chat is another option.
