It looks like discord. There is no replacement. No other project comes close.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games.

I think this is the important part that’s missing from a lot of these discussions, including from users themselves looking for a new place to go. Some people use discord as an IRC chatroom replacement. Some use it was a small group text, essentially, between friends or co-workers. Some people use it as a Patreon perk to get access to a community around an artist and interact with that artist and their other fans.

And I’m in some “servers” of all of those. So anywhere that’s using it as IRC can be replaced with XMPP or Matrix no problem. Or IRC, but with gifs. Cool. But my other group that hangs out in there async every day and the occasionally jumps onto an ad-hoc voice chat when people are available to game, or sometimes shares my screen so someone else can watch what I’m doing? None of those things do that. But mumble kinda does, but not in a persistent or integrated way. Mumble is a great way to talk, but an awful place to hang out. Jitsi does screen share, but is not casual and also isn’t a good hangout.

And we could limp by with an XMPP room for chat and then a link to a Jitsi or Mumble or something when it’s time to do something. But there’s something tight about having the “just call” button right there, tied to the chat you’re already in, and in being able to see “huh Alice and Bob are playing GAME right now. I should pop in!”

But if you’ve never been in a discord server like that, you make a recommendation of IRC or something, and a gaming friend group user checks it out and is like “this is even close to doing any of the things I need it to…”

Gonna say it aloud for the unweaned masses in the back.

The main problematic issue with most “we need an alternative for Yplatform in the Fediverse!” speech is the use of the singular. We are never going to get a good thing going if we push for “everything-app” platforms because they’ll be everything-apps, and the push of power is irresistible. Also, everything apps are much harder to develop for the same base feature set (“share a message” is easy in text, quadratically much harder on video), which is why VC-funded capital can do it.

We have to accept that what we need is alternatives, plural, to the various things that Discord and other platforms centralize. Because half the point here is we are against centralization. And allowing each project to focus on each problem separately allows them to take advantage of their own strengths, up to and including funding and provisioning (“get storage for a million items” is trivial on text; quadratically much harder on video).

We need a text messaging platform? XMPP already exists. Let’s go help.

We need audio chats? Mumble already exists. Let’s go help.

We need instant notifications? Surely something already exists. Let’s go help.

We don’t need “a walled garden but on the Fediverse”.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?

Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.

I’ve looked for alternatives lately and the most promising one I’ve seen is Spacebar. I would like to see it federate eventually, but I think the way to attract users fleeing Discord isn’t to make them adjust to a less-intuitive or less-featured alternative. People switched to Discord because it combined feature-rich text chat with group voice, video, and streaming all in one central place. Going back to Mumble, Teamspeak, etc. for voice, Matrix or XMPP for chat, etc. is a downgrade and people will just put up with Discord if that’s the alternative.

Unfortunately, there are no fully feature-complete alternatives with Discord’s user-friendliness yet. Spacebar is at least going in the right direction, trying to completely replicate Discord’s API. It seems they had voice working at one point but it’s currently broken due to a compile issue, hopefully the influx of new users will expedite a fix. The only major other thing they’re lacking then is streaming, though that doesn’t sound too hard if they already have voice working. The devs have said they’re open to federation as a future upgrade but the current focus is fully implementing the Discord API. A self-hostable Discord is pretty much what I’d want as a replacement. I’ve used Mumble and I’ve used Matrix and I agree with the idea that neither are a proper replacement for Discord. Matrix’s communities are a loose collection of independent rooms, which is not the same as a proper Discord guild/server. Matrix is great if you want secure, encrypted chats, but synchronizing keys is a pain I don’t see most Discord users accepting.

We need a damn federated Discord!

Do NOT reply to me with Matrix. It’ll be a federated Discord when it actually gets some uptake for more than just Fediverse instance rooms.

I feel like I’ve explored every alternative, and there’s one feature that’s missing from everything: audio with screen share. Not a single service lets me share my system audio with the people watching my screen