Need a discord replacement

Privacy and Security Get Advice
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In my country, my threat model has gone from low/moderate to high due to the laws potentially changing soon. One of the most concerning is the age/ID verification. After seeing Discord getting hacked/breached; affecting those who had to give an ID. I don’t want this happening to me and the potential headache of what I have to deal with afterwards.

Honestly, I’ve been looking at alternatives and… I’m not liking my options lol. I could use signal but not everyone I play with has a phone number (I play with family members; younger and older). Element has always been so meh, and I don’t expect anyone I know to use it.

So my question is what discord alternative have any of you implemented into your life? Ideally I’d like to have encryption but my main concern is just handing over a government ID. I’ve been pondering this question forever. It’s especially tricky for me because I have to find a good solution that my peers could implement.

Tbh, I don’t think there is an officially GOOD discord alternative. Discord is just simple, easy for public or private communities to communicate. Even my college classmates rely on it for school. But maybe I’m overlooking an option that recently came out???

I’d love to self-host a private server for mumble but that’s a major learning curve for me. If someone has advice or a good learning guide to follow, I’d be willing to learn it.

Sorry if I sound all over the place, I have a headache lol.

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That’s tough one. I don’t think there is an actual full replacement. However there are some apps, unfortunately usually not free …

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I use Nerimity and Matrix (Nitro Chat) a lot (I actually own a Nerimity server or two, and that’s for my YouTube channels).

Rocket Chat is MIT licensed and self-hostable as far as I’m aware. Stoat is absolutely toxic, and I’m actually persona non-grata on the main Stoat instance (personal reasons I can answer via DM), Zulip is quite nice, despite the UI, and Quiet I’ll need to take a look at.

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Rocket Chat can be self-hosted, but last time I checked the requirements were quite high.
I don’t know Stoat, I just know that their new name is dumb and I don’t like it :person_shrugging: :smiley:
Quite has a different approach. There is no server, everything is shared between the clients.

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I was a member of Stoat for a couple years, so I know a thing or two about the basics of its workings. I wouldn’t recommend them due to proprietary blobs, and the fact that they violate AGPL-3 big time.

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The fact that this topic appears right now is quite the timing.

Yesterday night I dreamt about what the perfect such app would be (don’t judge me). I’m drafting a mock-up right now, as I might actually make it a project (I’ll probably make a post about it when this is all ready, although I don’t think this website is appropriate to self-advertise on).

As it turns out, there seems to be quite a few good alternatives to Discord. I don’t know Rocket.chat and it seems rather solid. If anyone has some inputs to give on what this (or these) apps are lacking, I’d be very happy.

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I don’t think there’s a need to create anything new, there’s already Spacebar in development:

Spacebar is a free open source reimplementation and extension of Discord’s client-server API, with the goal of complete feature parity with discord.com, all while adding some additional goodies, security, privacy, and configuration options.

They probably need more contributors though.

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I still need to test Mumble over a Tailscale network at some point.
You’re pretty much self hosting everything at that point, but Mumble itself works remarkably well in my experience.

The main issues are that you’re stuck with the (functional) default server setup unless you learn how to edit the setting files and you probably don’t want to mess with the network settings to make it accessible to people on the wider internet.

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Yeah, still lacks three killer functionalities, but I’m glad at least someone is tackling the privacy part.

I’m still at my job, but I’ve decided to quit (actually seeking advice about this was the very reason I joined this place). At the end of the year I’ll be free and will therefore to contribute significantly more to the privacy world (among others).

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Yeah I’d love to see Spacebar eventually have a fully featured stable release, perhaps with support for E2EE. It’s sorely needed but it’s a lot of work to do.

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If you really want an alternative, use matrix.org. It’s free open source software, end to end encrypted and server plus client side decentral. Especially the last thing is important, because if they start to enshittificate the client, just use another one without loosing contacts. If you do not agree with their server-service anymore, host your own or move to another community-server which is still in the same network, so you also don’t loose contacts. This way you avoid the most common reasons to leave a plattform with all the contacts.

Matrix has everything you have on Discord. On official servers you are currently able to send files up to 100MB. You can chat, call, stream, use it on every plattform native installed or on browser. The downside is, that some features are less polished, but I don’t think there is a better full-featured alternative. This will improve over time (donation can accelerate development).

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I wouldn’t recommend the matrix[dot]org homeserver, as Matt (their admin) doesn’t really like when people disagree with him in some cases. He’s deactivated accounts because of what he disagreed with.

The better recommendation is to use a homeserver that doesn’t have ties to Matrix themselves. NitroChat is one such example that I use.

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I did not recommend Matrix homeserver. The previous link is to the official Matrix homepage, which just contains all information.

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Has anyone here used Jami? Is it a good alternative?

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Jami sounds great on paper, but in practice it falls apart.

Both parties have to be online at the same time to even work (or use proxy servers) and calls dropping/not connecting all the time make group chats a terrible experience.

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You might not like to hear this, but Matrix is your best bet despite being “meh”. I know you tried Element and didn’t like how it felt, but Element is just a skin for Matrix, and you can try different skins, such as:

  • FluffyChat - most Messenger-like, familiar UI
  • Cinny - web-based, looks modern and clean
  • SchildiChat - Element but with better UX

Matrix can be self-hosted, or use public severs that don’t require ID verification, E2EE by default in private chats/rooms, works without phone numbers, multiple client options, voice/video calling works (though not quite as smooth as Discord… maybe use Mumble for that), and is cross-platform (desktop/mobile/web).

Biggest hurdle is getting others to switch, but that’s true for any alternatives.

Some tips to get people to switch:

  • Set EVERYTHING up for them, removing as many friction points as possible (making accounts, installing apps, joining first few rooms/spaces)
  • Choose the right client (probably not Element)
  • Don’t lead with “privacy/security”, instead focus on:
    • “Discord is requiring ID soon, this doesn’t”
    • “It’s free and has no ads”
    • “No nitro paywall for good features”
  • Don’t try to convert everyone at once, just need your small group first
  • Have a bridge period where you’re on both Discord and Matrix
    • But be more active and responsive on Matrix
  • Have compelling reason or event for them to move over
    • Only need to start with ONE use-case rather than everything
      • “Family updates will be posted here now”
    • Better response on concrete change than random switching
  • Be the “tech support”
    • Be patient and responsive when anyone has questions
  • Partial adoption is okay
    • 50-70% adoption is realistic
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17

The React Spacebar client is no longer actively maintained. Because of growing issues, the client has been taken offline.
Please check out Fermi as an alternative client which is actively maintained and offers way more features than this client ever did.

- Puyodead1

It seems Spacebar will focus on the server-side of discord parity and Fermi is the client-side.

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For those who care about the technical details (all other can ignore my post):

It is not really a different skin. In fact, they are completely different chat programs agreeing to the same chat protocol standard called “Matrix”. And each developer team has different goals they want to achieve. Some focus on multi-account support and text only, others want to support the full specs and so want to be a full alternative, and some just want to be as light weight as possible to get integrated into Linux phone SMS program.

As you see there is a good reason to have different clients. Beside of the use-case, the main benefit however is, that they are completely independent of Element (the official chat program) and so if Element becomes bad, there are plenty of alternatives that probably make it better (whatever you call “better” is up to you). That would not happen on “just skins”.

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What is your actual use case?

Since you mentioned “playing games with” and you are willing to try “Mumble”, I guess you are primarily interested in live voice chat with groups?

And you have other means to contact your “play mates” via chat?

For chat and community, I really like what the Techlore Team has done with “discuss.techlore.tech”.

For Group Voice Chat, I’d say Murmur (the Mumble Server) would be the best solution. I played with it a few years back but just within a local network.

Here are other services that came up and I have personal experience with:

Matrix (Synapse) - Great for Organisations to have their own MS Teams / Slack / WahtsApp like infrastructure. But presumably not great as a discord replacement.

XMPP (Prosody) - A lot of Work to setup, if you want all the features to work. Android and Linux Clients are great, others are not and the client selection causes me to switch (mostly) to Matrix instead.

Nextcloud Talk - Has great integration with Nextcloud and is only a good Option, wehen you want to build your own Nexcloud based eco system. To use it properly, you have to install the High Performance Backend, which was to much work for me till now.

Mumble (Murmur) - I can’t barely remember but don’t think it was that hard to setup.

RocketChat - I gave up on that one after screwing up my attempt of a working server setup.

Jami - This is client only. It wasn’t very reliable and the Apps crashed a lot.

Signal - Works great, requires a phone number, but still my favorite communication tool for chat, audio- and video-calls.

Jitsi Meet / Big Blue Button - For Video and Audio conferencing. I used them and really want to setup my own server soon.

That’s it - at least assuming you want primarily a real time audio conferencing solution for playing games together. - I hope this was helpful to you.

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No, it is for general use and especially not made as MS Teams replacement only etc. For that purpose there are other solutions as AnyDesk. Matrix wants to build an infrastructure for everything from secure IoT over fully replacement of Discord for everyone and organizations (just without the gaming tag and gamification gimmicks to make you pay money) to secure intranets. And everything decentralized. The chat program is not even the core project here, the vision is larger.

However, the public Matrix home server costs a majority of donations and public servers are for people like us, who want an easy start. Organizations do not need such, because they host their own servers. That alone tells that you are wrong about this point. And it is a good reason to spend 1-2 Euro or Dollar per month.

Moreover, with Element Calls they want to create a service where people can stream everything in as high bandwidth as available on there home network (if you have not enough bandwidth, 4k streaming would not even be possible on Discord). They will route every stream peer to peer to make the streaming scalable as much as technical possible.

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