this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Only option available is Matrix. It has its problems, but they're being worked on.
Right now it lacks the gaming/voice chat parts of discord - so for an OSS alternative for that part of discord specifically, there's Mumble.
For everything else, Matrix is a good alternative. Just be sure to pick a discord-like client. (E.g. Commet or Cinny)
Damn, I've been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn't do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it's just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don't want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I'ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord's bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.
Technically speaking, Element does have "voice and video rooms" available as an experimental feature, but until it's out of prime time it totally makes sense to wait.
Gotta remember that Element/New Vector (the company spearheading Matrix's development) is getting funded mostly by orgs who are looking for a replacement for internal comms like Slack or WhatsApp.
i self host matrix and some other docker runs the voice for it, so it is there if you got a server. which i mean, not everybody does so that sucks. it was a bit of a pain but im not the best at server stuff
Yeah, my primary concern is I'm part of a community of ~350 people who games together, and while there's probably some folks in there who could swing a server, right now discord isn't costing us anything and does everything we want (chat, voice, streaming, etc). If we were to consider moving we would probably need a reasonably beefy server and some software with all of those features, and right now that just doesn't seem feasible.
yeah you could all pitch in and get one hosted on a server farm somewhere. hard to beat free fitty tho. ive got friends who wanna stay on discord too so im still on it. as long as its free. mostly did the matrix thing to move family chats off off whatsapp. only used whatsapp bc ios sucks about sharing full quality pics and videos with non ios.
i say all of that bc i didnt host it to move from discord, but now that its up i got an easy out if discord goes all in on enshittification
It does voice via Jitsi https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-communication-service-with-matrix-and-jitsi/
This is outdated and no longer preferred, it now has its own internal system called Element Call (aka an implementation of MatrixRTC).
i use coturn for voice on mine
I meant for video. The classic coturn connection is fine for voice - though I wish it had push to talk. 🥲
oooo yeah video is the one thing i have missing to have more or less feature parity with discord. wonder if theres gonna be like a coturn video type thing anytime soon
I use Jitsi for my voip / screen share
Works great if you don't want/need PTT.
That's what we've started using my friends and I, can't complain, sure it doesn't integrate all the gaming shit but we just have it running in the background so we can talk anyway
Yeah, I've done the same and it works quite well.
The only thing I was really missing from Discord was Ai noise cancellation like Krisp - and I got that by installing Easy Effects
Seems like you have to keep something running for it to work. Some obscure service relied on it as a support channel and last thing I remember is that matrix server stopped working. Though it would help so much if it would be p2p.
"something running" - do you mean the server binary? Because, yes, if you're using your own server you do need it to be running. Same for the client, I guess? I guess I don't really understand what you meant by that.
That's an issue with any federated service, yeah. If the server is down, it's down. But as a bonus, unlike Discord, when a server is down you can just move to another. So, honestly, I see that as a boon.
As far as p2p goes, there was an effort to make that a while back, but it looks like people lost interest.
Though, personally I think federation is good enough. That's why I'm on Lemmy/the Fediverse, after all.
I only mean that the requirements are high enough for someone to stop using it at some point, losing users of that server in the process. It might be different if it didn't require running a server. Or they could choose to host their rooms on some existing server, I guess.
I mean, that's sort of the point, right? Don't host unless you want to.
There are lots of great, long lasting servers with open registration out there. This blog post has some good examples: