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I found this article much better: https://wiki.alopex.li/DitchingDiscord
The OP article seems like a promotion for Matrix with only a cursory and not very well informed look at other options.
Also both articles glance over serious recent efforts to modernize IRC, such as https://github.com/ObsidianIRC/ObsidianIRC and https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma which in combination with a Mumble server is also a real Discord alternative.
I found this article much better: https://wiki.alopex.li/DitchingDiscord
That's a really fantastic (and humorous!) summary of, well... everything. Didn't realize Matrix worked so differently.
Movim is also an option. Based on XAMPP.
Didn't read the whole thing because I had to stop at the right column at the start.
Federated is "decentralized". The correct word the author is looking for is "distributed". And even then, direct exclusive P2P is only one form of "distributed". Hybrid/Multiple approaches are also wide-spread (torrents anyone!).
Not sure how a technical writer gets such a basic aspect wrong.
Also, beyond the closed source aspect, and being a closed up platform in general, Discord was always literal spyware. And pretending like open-source projects who chose to use it didn't know what they were doing, and glossing over the actions that ranged from collective nagging to almost literal fights in some communities because of such choices, reeks of willful blindness.
I would like to recommend stoat, but it is centralized. There is matrix, for example, while fluxxer is still in the early stages of development.
Stoat can be self hosted.
It can be, yes. "Centralized" means it cannot federate.
I'm not sure about it being a drop-in replacement for Discord, but after trying a whole bunch of these I liked SimpleX the most. YMMV.
