Element is a good alternative, OpenSource and federated
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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soooo, honest opinions of discord users here: hows matrix nowadays? what are the other options?
It really depends on how you use Discord. Matrix was never trying to be a Discord alternative so for some usecases it's fine, but for a place to hang out with your friends and play video games it's not.
Element x is pretty solid but not perfect, matrix-rust-sdk needs to have desktop clients, servers need to support all the new stuff, I give element 5 years before it's a top tier messenger
I quit discord a year ago for Matrix or XMPP. never looked back.
Please give me a federated, self-hosted Discord alternative! I'm tired of these bullshit platforms.
Not federated, but Revolt can be self-hosted and is very similar to Discord in the look and feel from what I have seen (I have it installed, but haven't tried getting friends to install it and am not hosting). So it could be worth looking into for folks that are used to Discord.
It's not federated, the developer is specifically against federation. He didn't even support self-hosting properly and officially, until the community made pullrequests in this regard themselves. Revolt is mainly made to be hosted by the developer himself. Probably just another Discord. Open-sourcing the code doesn't do anything.
Good to know information, I haven't looked into it beyond installing it to see how similar it was. Still could be a starting point for some folks that have the option to self-host and more specifically have large friend groups that have issues with only liking the UI of Discord. A very specific scenario for sure, but still nice to have options if one like that were to happen.
No.
I cant even get in my discord because I never get the verification email. Each time I have to contact customer support. F that platform.
The moment this becomes an obligation for each person, no matter what, I’ll just quit Discord. I’m tired of stuff like this.
If people want to do bad stuff, they will find a way no matter what anyway.
there's already real time AI aging filters, once they realise this doesn't work it's going to be IDs next, i'm so sick of this bullshit
if a kid wants to find porn, they're going to find porn, no amount of laws is going to stop them, but the more laws there are the more safe websites and online spaces to explore the new feelings will be inaccessible to them, leaving only the worst possible resources to be exposed to as they discover their sexuality. people writing those laws behave as if they've entirely forgotten how it was to be a teen, nor have met a teen in decades
I mean at least in the US the median congressional age is 64.7 so yeah gramps doesn't remember being that age much less having internet access. Doesn't consider that you can't find porn mags in the woods anymore.
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For a brief moment, I had a a FB/Instagram account for testing purposes. After about a week, Meta started asking to see my face on camera. Needless to say, that experiment hit a brick wall.
I was just following and liking stuff here and there. Didn’t even post anything, but apparently that was suspicious enough for Meta.
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Future headline: “Discord users begin testing Discord alternatives”
Already started. Revolt seems like it could be a near 1 to 1 replacement soon.
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Controversially, I cheer on the quickening of the inshitification of Discord. The sooner more folks are convinced to move away from that place, the better. I hope for a return to indexable and searchable old school forums (or their modern equivalents—Discourse is so nice).
Problem is folks won't move, they're too entrenched. Look at twitter, it's still going ok despite having been a cesspit for years now. Or reddit, where some moved, but they moved to yet another enshittified platform: Discord. The amount of crap people ( especially the ones on discord ) will put up with is immense before they even consider switching.
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Discord was shit from the beginning. Enshitification is useless here.
Sadly parts of my social group are currently migrating to discord.
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Reminder that we have a european alternative called Revolt we can always switch to!
Another alternative is Element for chatting and Teamspeak for Calls/Screenshare!
Element really needs to get push to talk. It's an incredibly basic feature to be missing, and for me personally and I'm sure others the lack of it is a deal breaker.
Element/Matrix does calls and screen share also by the way!
(Teamspeak can do screen share? That’s news to me!)
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insane
Cool. I'm out then.
I've always hated Discord since the very beginning. At least now I have yet another really good reason.
Never used it, never will. Ventrilo for lyfe.
For me it's Mumble. Open sourced and completely free with encryption, and temporary chat logs.
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Need alternatives to have built-in, easy to use screenshare with audio. And of course great noise filtering on voice chats.
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