Selfhosted

Personally I got all my friends to move to Element on Matrix. Not all of them are particularly technical, and they still have no problems on Element. I’m inclined to recommend Element / Matrix.

Not entirely related, but why do so many people use Discord? What's the appeal? I only ever used it as a replacement vor teamspeak or ventrilo. And I honestly hate most online games.

if discord is going public they don't need my turbo sub anymore

Time to dust off my old Mumble server!

mumble is great for VOIP.

Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.

revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there's that. There's also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.

XMPP?

Mumble?

I've started my self-hosting journey having Matrix in mind - especially the Matrix bridges to cut off the need to use social media clients like Discord.

Today, I'm slowly convicting my friends to join my instance. So far, that's just one of the closest ones (still win for me).

I hope one day decentralization in social media would take off!

I've also been comparing Element and Revolt. Both seem really solid, both are open source and both are self-hostable. Hard to find any downsides there.

There's a discord server that me and a bunch of friends use as our main hangout. They've raised the prospect of bailing before things enshittify, and of course I've been tasked with pitching a replacement. For my money, Revolt is the way I'm going to go, specifically because it's basically a one for one clone of Discord. The people I'm pitching this to are a mix of technical and non-technical, so I think something that looks and feels like what they're used to will be the easiest transition.

It also feels like Element is geared pretty heavily towards being a replacement for Slack / Teams rather than a replacement for Discord. Their pitch seems a lot more focused on the enterprise market. Revolt seems more focused on gaming, casual hangout, that sort of thing.

I like Element a lot, but for me it doesn't feel like the right solution to this specific problem. But if I was pitching something to my work as a Teams replacement, Element is definitely the way I'd go.

Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.

If you just need voice comms and basic chat mumble/murmur has worked great for me for ages.

Way too few mentions of Jitsi.

I use it with friends, it has good server config, and I'm pushing it on businesses.

Just remember your friend, https://discorch.org/

Ever looked up XMPP ?

Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.

Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?

Matrix is nice, and you can have jitsi for calls integrated. It seems to be pretty popular; Lemmy has a field for matrix @ in user profiles. Never heard of revolt before.

TeamSpeak exists too

Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.

Avoid Revolt as there moderation is questionable