Ventrilo. Been sitting in ventrilo for 30 years
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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i love stoat, free, open, can self host, just enough features compared to discord for it to be viable
still using discord since a lot of things i use depend on discord for many things, though. and if you haven't seen, there's stoat to discord and vice versa bridges.
Friday night and Sunday night I could not open discord. They seemed to have an outage based on down detector. I had already been toying the idea of switching to matrix but would rather have gamed than figure that out for my tech-normie friend.
Luckily steam voice chat is straightforward and good quality
Some of my friends have registered on Flux but still use discord. It's sort of just there until discord makes it unbearable for them to use but discord will never do that. They'll just slowly tighten the noose until you get comfortable.
They pay for nitro, which to me is bonkers.
when my nitro expired, I was astonished how much basic functionality was locked behind that paywall. The vanilla experience is so unpleasant.
Meanwhile on stoat, there is no subscription and most of discord's paid features are just... features. Sure, stoat is janky as balls, but so was discord when it was new.
Genuine question: as someone who has never used Discord's Nitro, what basic functionality am I missing out on?
There were 2.5 major ones for me:
- Higher upload limit for game clips/highlights. OBS didn't handle transcoding the stream down to a lower resolution without hitting the GPU hard enough to make the game stuttery
- Higher stream resolution/fps. This mattered less to me as the homies aged and played games less frequently
- Use the obnoxious custom emoji reactions between servers. I could upload some real egregious shit on a test server and use it in the homie server
This is one of the reasons these "let's replace Discord" threads are so tricky. I use Discord basically every day, and heavily twice a week for games nights with two different groups, for 6 years. I'm in there. And I have never uploaded a clip or streamed anything, so I never considered that this might be something people want, or are using the platform for. And I've seen a few custom emoji around, but never considered using some dude's emoji in a different group's chat.
So it's wild how different people are using it, and getting one replacement to do all of it is a big ask!
lots of customization options for both the interface and your profile, but more important to most people is being able to use emojis/stickers from your subscribed servers everywhere on the platform. This might seem petty, but there's no other software that I regularly use that requires me to pay in order to for example, change the theme of the interface.
edit: that does not include the stuff that I knew I was paying for and was on purpose paying for, like better stream quality and larger upload size and extra shit for my server.
Exactly, right? I remember streaming on discord was a pain because of all the lag and TeamSpeak + pigdin + Overwolf was so much better.
Now i use Legcord instead until my friends switch, which I hope is soon.
well, better streaming was one of the things that I was knowingly and intentionally paying for nitro for.
Very interesting. I've never really noticed the difference.
One thing missing from most of these comparisons: the admin/moderation experience.
Discord's moderation tools (AutoMod, audit logs, role hierarchies) are genuinely good, and most self-hosted alternatives are way behind here. If you're running a community server, this matters a lot.
My ranking for communities (not just friend groups):
- Matrix (Synapse/Conduit) — best moderation tools of the self-hosted options, rooms/spaces model works well
- Revolt — closest Discord clone, but moderation is still basic
- Mumble/TeamSpeak — voice-only, but rock solid for gaming guilds that don't need text
For just friends? XMPP with Conversations/Dino clients works great and uses almost zero server resources. I run an ejabberd instance on a $5 VPS alongside 5 other services.
Teamspeak 6 is looking reaaaally promising. Text chat, screen sharing, webcam support. Self hostable, not open source tho.
Looking forward to the first full release
out of the loop. what is discord doing to force an exodus?
ID check. This was also a few months after they had a major leak and hackers stole personal information.
They downplayed it but if it's like all the other social media platforms, it's going to be garbage.
Bringing in age-ID verification that they had to apply in the UK and Australia globally for all accounts to access NSFW channels and to be able to take the baby filter off of DMs.
They got heavy backlash for it, and have now delayed it.
Ok everyone. Hear me out. Let’s just all get in the same room and play the same game.
wish it was that easy,
My closests friendgroup dispersed around the province, one in kelowna, one in enderby, and im out on the Coast now. Discord (and now steam chat) kept us close
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Stupid question: why are they looking for a discord alternative, instead of a group chat/Slack alternative? What am I missing?
Because slack alternatives also have video and audio call integration (either with jitsi or something else) and are battle tested with companies.
Because Discord isn't just for friend groups, it's also for large open-entry servers open to the wider userbase. Slack-based/group chat alternatives completely lack this.
Not sure about slack alternatives, but Slack does have topic/general servers that people can join. SInce its mostly business/work targeted, a lot of these are tech focused (like for k8s, or pytorch)
Slack is also paywalled to a laughable level.
true
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