this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Just use fluxer...
Stoat has no voice chat and streaming.
Movim does, and it's federated and offers encryption! :D
Using Stoat's main server raises a privacy concern because it’s UK-based and AFAIK lacks E2EE—UK authorities could seize server data without our knowledge. That effectively means private use requires self-hosting.
Issue with self-hosting Stoat is, it's currently more complicated than Matrix. This user created a detailed GitHub guide that documents their research and pitfalls for getting Stoat working with voice/video: https://github.com/javif89/stoat-selfhost
The official self-hosted guide (https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted) looks simple at first, but if you look at the compose file, it requires FOURTEEN containers to run and doesn’t yet include voice/video support which will increase complexity.
By contrast, TeamSpeak’s self-hosting appeal is its simplicity: only two services (or one with SQLite) and it works out of the box today.
But I agree — moving from one closed-source silo to another isn’t ideal. I just wish Stoat were easier to run behind the scenes.
For me, a combination of matrix for text chat and mumble for voice is the simplest and most privacy respecting way to self-host a discord alternative.
When the alternative is Discord that's no different. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The official self-hosted guide is actually quite simple and straightforward. I had it set up and going in a half hour or so, and that's even with removing Caddy and using my existing nginx reverse proxy. It's intimidating at first-glance, yeah.
That being said, the official self-host guide is also 5 months out of date. The alternative you linked requires jumping through a bunch of hoops because it's just a small community of enthusiasts hacking together the current version of Stoat for self-hosting.
So I acknowledge that self-hosting current version of Stoat with voice is rather complicated and frustrating right now, but hopefully it becomes as simple as the official self-hosting guide eventually.
The paid tiers are only to support the development and the official server costs. If you self-host you can do whatever you want. And federation is on the roadmap of the project.
There's also Movim, which doesn't even require an email, you can join instantly with just a username and password.
Those are extremely negative things for a community platform. Like absurdly negative.
That just means it's going to be attacked by endless bots, impersonation, and general user confusion.
I legitimately can not think of a single stupider thing for a community platform for normal users.
Fluxer is doing the same thing, no email signups right now on its homepage.
It's no different from how lemmy/piefed function. Some instances require email, others don't. My instance, as an example, doesn't require an email to sign up, but it does require you to write a short message as to why you're interested in joining the server, and what communities are appealing to you. This weeds out 99% of bots or spammy users, and the handful that get through that are quickly banned.
Movim currently has so few users that the main server is trying to put as few barriers as possible to adoption, other servers can and do enable the Email requirement.
If it becomes more popular and bots or spam accounts become an issue, they could easily activate the email requirement, or even implement a system similar to what I described above. Instances that don't take appropriate measures to those threats as they become a problem can just be defederated as they are here. It's worked out pretty well so far.
Yeah honestly. Running the teamspeak server executable is hardly selfhosting, and they're just another closed source proprietary service. Cool they're still around after all these years I guess but they shouldn't even be considered as a migration option.
Stoat and Fluxer are both open source, very straightforward and familiar, and I believe self-hostable. Much easier for casual users than Matrix too.
I set up Matrix accounts for my parents this weekend and was completely horrified at how inconvenient the experience is for normies.
I tried to get friends into Matrix before and they were confused by it. So can confirm it's not that simple for everyone.
Though to be fair, one of them wasn't able to post without including an emoji in their message, that shit confused me too.
Yeah honestly. Like I work in IT, have my own home server, run linux on everything, etc etc etc, but even I found Matrix to be a convoluted mess, and most clients have their own issues. I can't imagine trying to get someone who's not tech-savvy to try it out.
It’s all about friction. As long as the user has to pick an instance they will always hesitate to pick any federated service. The average user will always choose the path of least resistance.
Proprietary services spend a lot of time trying to reduce friction, and it works.
The only solution I can think of would be a three part one:
This would of course require some federated account login system. Hard but not impossible. It could be some sort of Casandra style ring based account service where nodes are part of the ring.
This eliminates the new user friction.
It works anywhere any time with corpo style low friction. You don’t need to think about instances at all till you are ready to.
I just spent a week trying to set up my own server and good lord it was such a battle I gave up. Matrix? Up in like half an hour. Shame because my friends are so much more interested in Revolt lmao. Just gonna give them some time to sort out their business before trying again.
Im seeing a huge increase in people using stoat. And its been fun.
If anyone is interested in Retro Games: https://stt.gg/GJh5JHy2
I'm not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.
XMPP!
Stoat is dead in the water due to dependency on the UK and not an easy solution to deploy yet.
Fluxer is dead in the water due to license.
I don't get why so many people are saying this. Afaik, it doesn't have channels within servers like Discord and Slack, which I feel is a defining feature in the text chat part of the apps.
Oh that is like the second most common thing on XMPP! It's rooms/chats/conversations on servers/conferences/salons, etc. Like, come on, even IRC has that and that was made before I was born.
The one thing that's complex, or at least bad in the UI I've seen for most XMPP clients, is that searchability of rooms is not very good. Like, discoverability is, but to my knowledge there's no way to actually filter for rooms based on a keyword, you either get the whole roomlist for a server or nothing.
Oh shoot, is it? I'm using Cheogram and Conversations on my phone and I can't figure it out. I guess it depends on the client?? I'm a bit confused.
I think Iambalicious may be confusing terms. AFAIK no XMPP client has discord-like rooms within channels. The Movim client is actively working on implementing that feature (it can also do group video calls and screen sharing), but it's the only one doing that unless I'm mistaken.
Thanks! Yeah because I've been scratching my head over their comment for some time now as I'm not able to figure out how to use it like I used use Discord.
Oh you mean nested rooms? That's just normal rooms with a different organization. I think there is one XMPP proposal for them but I don't know of any server that implements it (they are unneeded since you can just create temporary chatrooms, same as in IRC) and then you need client support, of which apparently only Movim and Dino are working on it yeah.
There's a bit more to it than just their visual organization. In Discord, a user only needs to join a single community to access all of that community's rooms (they don't have to manually join each one to have it in their feed).
The admins of that community can then seamlessly create or delete rooms within that community (the users don't need to do anything for those changes to be seen and applied on their end), and can independently adjust what the base requirements are to view, enter, or interact with each room, and then give an individual granular permissions of what rooms are visible within that community.
Oh yeah that already exists in XMPP, it's called "Server spaces" and grouping can be done by admin or by room owners, but it's experimental so there's no direct way to know what servers or clients are using it or not.
Interesting, glad to see it's headed in that direction in the base-spec!