this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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So seriously, what's going to replace Discord? Everyone wants to leave, but to where?
And no, Matrix is not and will never be a viable alternative
Someone has made a large spreadsheet of discord alternatives, with comparisons of features, that might help people decide: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14vicw-V9Z5m7ckuburP5wxyDIIb_fFJFEjnxxHk8qRw/edit?gid=0#gid=0
I’m interested to know why matrix isn’t viable for you? I’ve been trialing it recently with friends and it seems to tick all our boxes. I do admit I don’t do large communities personally
The problem isn't that there are no alternatives. It's that there's like 50 alternatives. Centralization makes us vulnerable, but it's also super convenient.
There's a reason we preferred reddit and now Lemmy instead of different forums with different logins for everything.
The biggest problem with getting off Discord is fragmentation of communities.
Reddit can't die fast enough. I miss niche subreddits
Fluxer is the alterative it does 90% the same thing. Has a sub model for the users who need a centralized option or large communities they can't self host for
And it offers self hosting for free if you don't want to pay the sub. Self hosting has no restrictions.
But Fluxer is one dozens of platforms that do what Discord does. If it was the only one, it would be easier to move.
But as it is people who are on 20 discord groups don't want to deal with migrating to 20 different platforms, so they're just staying where they are.
Honestly I'd love different forums with only a centralized login system that can be optionally used, sorta how ezboard were at one point.
First one of those contenders that solves federation in a nice way would be a winner. Quite a lot of them has it on their roadmap so my hopes are not completely lost.
There's Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer. Additionally, Steam has many Discord-like features in app.
I don’t like how fluxer is already paywalling features that other platforms don’t. It feels like discord all over again
Fluxer is AGPv3, recently promised to remove their CLA so the software stays free forever, has an ambitious roadmap with federation, and is currently being worked on by one 22 yr old dude.
It's very different than Discord.
This chad needs help. I'm more than happy to support him. This is an investment in Open Source™ and the future. If he can't work on this full-time or near full-time, he's gonna need to work for Google or some shit. Then it's never going to be able to compete with Discord.
They're also not going to be able to run Fluxer on powerful enough hardware. Take a look at Stoat. Similar idea. No funding. Their main server is HELLA slow, which I don't think it's their fault. The app is written in Rust, but it feels like it's running on a potato.
I might be wrong here, but I thought you could self-host Fluxer to get around the paywalls. So you could do that. What a gift! And federation is on the way, so maybe one day you can self-host AND talk to other instances! Amazing!
Thank you for adding more information I’d only had a surface look at Fluxer
E: It seems like the documentation page for self hosting currently is incomplete
The cla removal is already done I thought on the Canary branch.
Fluxer. Literally just fluxer.
Just looked at fluxer's website. That shit looks prime for a copyright lawsuit; it looks exactly like discord.
I've seen mentioned these:
It has a built-in blog feature that communities or individuals can use to post announcements or articles to the whole instance, but it's pretty easily ignored by just clicking the messages tab, which doesn't show them at all, and makes the interface look more like Discord.
Saw this a few days ago.
It's literally on Fluxer.
Pros:
Cons:
Considering how many people are literally demanding and harassing the dev of fluxer to let him let them help him. I don't think the 1 dude working on it is going to be a problem for long lol
This looked perfect! Right up until the no API support. By no means am I asking of that either, just happens to look really nice but also lack that feature.
Seems like they have something: https://docs.fluxer.app/
Oh cool my bad! Didnt dig deep enough into it. I'll have to give it a look
I've also seen Roomy and Voltage mentioned around too but haven't personally looked into them.
The MIT license of Voltage is a big red flag for me, as it could allow for either a corporate takeover, or for the company to abandon the open-source version in favor of a closed-source version that they can sell or enshittify.
Roomy has pretty much the same problem being licensed under the MPL license, which allows for the project to be packaged into a closed-source proprietary product. I'd avoid it too, despite it being federated. The license is just too risky, and the only reason not to choose GPL is because the devs likely want that capital purchase exit strategy.
There's a lot devs who know there's potentially a lot of money to me made in a successful Discord alternative. They smell the blood in the water, know the venture capital vultures it attracts, and they'll try to exploit the free labor that open-source projects bring, only to sell us out down the road after all the work has been done.
I'd say any option we move to must be licensed under GPL as a hard requirement, as that ensures it can never be exploited by corpos, and will remain owned by the community forever so that we don't have to migrate again any time soon.
The two best options on the table that fill that niche are:
Thank you for the information on the license of both programs!
Stoat still doesn't have screenshare. It's also a bloody stupid name - I have no idea who thought that re-brand was a good idea.
Fluxer seems to support it though.
BNoth can be self-hosted, which is a nice bonus.
Why is "one-to-one clone of Discord" the goal for everyone? Why not set your sights on a making a good UX instead?
Well, Discord's UI is certainly not the holy grail, but it's quite functional and people are used to it. So it's pretty much logical you copy the concept to some extent when you want to appeal to these people?
ngl, discord kinda had the best UX before the enshittification began
I don't think it's necessarily the goal — Discord is just a helpful yardstick to compare things to as a baseline (and some people are looking for something that replaces Discord as closely as possible). Having to switch services is a pain, and whilst it's not optimal in the long term to just try to replace a thing with a clone, I can see why people don't have the executive function energy to think too hard about this.
With LiveKit for calls / screen share, it is for my group. Though I'm not saying it doesn't have issues.
Community-developed homeservers like continuwuity have gotten a lot of new support on the last few weeks. Clients like cinny are getting pretty close to a replacement ux wise (if you look at PR2599 on Cinny's GitHub, they are working on and will soon merge support for LiveKit in a way that is very close to voice channels).
I also generally think that the only way to replace Discord as an ecosystem where you talk to many people from different communities is a federated protocol, not a bunch of new silos, one for each community.
I have no first person experience but I've read Matrix' lack of "Discord-like server" grouping is terrible for moderation where you have to manually set permissions for each "room". If that's actually true it's literally impossible for it to become proper discord alternative.
A discord server-like would be a space, containing channel-like rooms. The main difference is that rooms can also exist independent of spaces, if you just need a single chat for some people instrad of a group of chats.
You can set permissions for a whole space, it's just that they currently work differently than Discord. Members have a power level, and you set the power level from which each function is available. So, e.g. Sending messages from Pl 0 (representing normal users), banning users from PL 50 (representing moderators), changing server settings from level 100 (representing administrators).
It sounds complicated, but once you get used to it it's pretty easy.
I've moved to Matrix from Discord for two small friend groups (<6 people each). Matrix is a fine replacement for the small friend Discord. But it has awhile to go before it can replace 1000+ people servers
The bigger issue is that reports currently don't federate. A report will always go to the admin of your homeserver (which might be you) not the admin of the homeserver the room you're in is on, nor the admin of the homeserver of the other users.
Most larger (1-2k people) communities get around that by just having you ping the mods in reply to the offending content, which is a band-aid.
A spec for federated reports is apparently being worked on, but not yet available.
IRC never left.
Does irc even have voice? Or game streaming? Or emojis? Or persistent chat where if you're out of service or offline but then you come back into service/online you can see what you missed?