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Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Yea… Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn’t great at…
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
oh yeah!
Can Stoat be used as an alternative?
As an EU co, how will they navigate age verification
EU doesn’t require age verification (yet). It’s exclusively British thing for now, and we fight hard to keep it this way
Oh, good, ty. I just made an account last night and will check it out to see if it fits my needs, but this was nagging in the back of my head as others have just decided to bend the knee regardless of jurisdiction.
what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.
i haven’t seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.
Pripietary…
It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. “Rooms” (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, b
I don’t think that’s true anymore. it has been encrypted by default for quite a few years now
Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, yet it gets ranked lower than… Rocket chat??
If we’re objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.
Discord got popular because it’s centralized and pretty
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
They should use some of the funds for UX.
For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.
Not whatever they’re doing now.
copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY
Please don’t. Please for the love of god don’t
Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year
I don’t really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can’t even tell the difference.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.
Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.
I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.
Agreed. I think the fact that discord kind of does all the things is what made it attractive. But it’s not GOOD at the forum aspect, and it has its flaws for the other use cases as well.
I also want this suite of things. I stream movies to friends, share games I’m playing…
These are core features to me now in a robust chat client
looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
I’ll keep you company in the minority, since that’s what I want too
By reducing a complex topic down to one score that has “features” as only one of many factors, so that “openness” and “safety” push it to the top.
A lot of people don’t seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. There’s almost no platform that has all of them so you have to zoom out and look at more of the general purpose. The Discord “servers” I’ve used NEVER used anything but text chat.
I understand that but even the text chat is a different experience than what Discourse offers. Even people who only used Discord for text chat and want a replacement for that would be better on IRC.
It’s not the text chat they’re referring to. An annoying amount of open so it be projects use Discord as a replacement for forums specifically.
I’m aware but I don’t think this was the issue Ulrich was speaking of. If they were, I don’t think it was well conveyed.
Yeah, clearly everyone loves IRC, that’s why no one uses Discord /s
I honestly think the vast majority of people on Discord don’t know what IRC is, and therefore don’t have an opinion of it. However, I didn’t mean to suggest IRC as the best alternative anyway.
Okay so they know what Discord is, but they don’t know what IRC is, despite it being 20 years older. What does that tell you?
Live chat is all I ever use but you never know
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?I’m thinking of something else, I think.
You’re thinking of Guilded.
Looks like Roblox forced everyone using Guilder to suddenly have a Roblox account in 2024, and then Guilder officially shut down about 2 months ago (end of 2025).
I love that Discourse is open. I hate that it’s just horrendous from a usability perspective. Flarum is much better than that, in my opinion, while being way more flexible. Examples:
I find discourse perfectly usable.
Cool 👍️
Discourse isnt free
And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service
This is misinformation.
You can self host it, for free.
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he’s going to include Discourse…)
Some other alternatives not reviewed:
- Spacebar
- TeamSpeak
- Root
Spacebar sounded really promising when I checked them out years ago.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are: Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
Unfortunately, seems like it’s still not at a point where it could cover basic Discord functionality.
Edit: I should be clear, I’m not trying to discourage it. I really hope it succeeds to the goal of parity with Discord! Love to hear from someone who has used it a bit.
Why is SimpleX not mentioned anywhere in the article or the comments here? I thought it is similar to Discord. Am I wrong?
Is SimpleX based on Matrix? I have this recollection that it is, but I don’t if it’s a false memory or not.
Yeah, it was immediately clear based on the scoring that he was super biased toward Discourse. It’s not a Discord alternative, and had no place in that list at all.
I mean, it certainly is an alternative to all three morons using discord as some sort of forum for an app or similar. The same way discord is the worst for easily searchable info like a forum is basically the converse for discourse. And exactly the opposite for real time chat obviously.
He at least mentions outright it’s a forum tool. The real problem is having to include it because people misuse discord.
Kind of like anyone using SharePoint for anything. It’s not meant for it.
No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.
God, I hated that terminology when I needed to talk with people about discord.
I can only assume it’s on purpose so average users really understand it wrong to avoid the associated negative view. Clever, really. But absolutely evil.
This wasn’t intended to be misleading. The term “Server” as in a Discord Server is because, be fore Discord were the days of Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. For many of us gamers used to have to run or pay for their own actual server to have that kind of functionality. Then we’d combine direct calling with Skype for small groups and video. The term made sense at the time, but hasn’t held up to the test of time. Basically Discord solved a problems of having to pay for those servers, and having to use two separate programs.
I’m a it professional (working in enterprise DCs) and have been running ts2 and murmur myself. It was misleading from the beginning and while I do understand your point I can not see a company doing this in good faith, I am too old for that.
You didn’t provide any evidence that it wasn’t intentionally misleading. Discord was clearly intended to replace communities like IRC, Ventrilo and TeamSpeak so they used language that was familiar to them, even though it was completely incorrect.
The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that
i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.
My friend group also jumped to that first, unless it’s federated though it’s not going to be “like discord” enough in the long run.
Part of what makes discord so good to many is that it’s one app where you can connect to various different friend groups/modding groups/artists/etc…
Matrix does allow that with its federation model, ts6 does not 🤷
i HATE when i have to connect to other discords for that purpose. finding information on discord is the worse of all possible outcomes. if i am running into trouble i much prefer a searchable forum. as for different friend groups, i think team speak has the ability to save multiple friend groups servers.
Idk what you people are smoking, forums built in search functionality was always ass.
However results showing up in search indexes were fantastic. I have a whole rant about that in another thread already.
If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
Apparently that’s already in the backend since december, they’re just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it
If they enable that and iron out the iOS app, it’d be a surefire migration for my whole crew.
I can’t even create an account on Stoat yet. New account confirmation emails take hours to arrive and by the time they do, they are already expired.
This is not a discord alternative yet and not be for a long time most likely.
They’re having issues with their email provider due to the hug of death effect, they did not expect to get so much traffic so fast
I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.
it is open source https://github.com/stoatchat/
It seems there’s also Spacechat.
I don’t know if anyone else has had this issue but I tried multiple times to sign up for spacebar/Fermi and it just didn’t go through. Do they block VPN’s for signups or certain privacy browsers?
I’ve not had an issue with signing up for any other FOSS sites with my setup. Just curious if anyone else was having this issue
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
