Hi everyone,

I just had my account deactivated from Discord for ToS violation (I didn’t do anything wrong, I just tried to send a friend request), but that’s not the most important thing.

Now that I no longer have an account, and I’ve been wanting to leave Discord for a while for a better, self-hosted, open-source alternative, this is the best time.

I know of Matrix, XMPP servers and applications that work very well, but none of them work in the same way, or have the same feel as Discord. I see more alternatives for professional use than for gamers or communities.

Revolt exists, but last time I checked, you can’t really host it yourself, and I haven’t read good things about it. (I don’t remember the website listing all the negative aspects.)

That brings me to my two questions.

  1. Can you list some alternative to Discord that I probably don’t know ?
  2. If you want a alternative to Discord, what are your requirements to using it ? I’m not saying I can or will, but I think I can try to create one.

PS: I already trying to get my account back (but I have the same response from the support and I can’t send request to “Appeals & Age Update Requests” because of ToS violation) and even if I manage to get it back I really want to leave discord right now.

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    173·
    2 months ago

    Discord’s main killer feature is Discovery of who is currently voice chatting in a room.

    I’ve not seen any alternative platform that has the same level of voice discovery that discord does. Discord makes it easy to have a community, oh I see Bob’s online, let’s jump in and say hi.

    It really is the local bar, you can just walk up and talk to anybody. That is absolutely critical. It’s open discovery, it’s effortless communication of status.

    • Dragnansia@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      2 months ago

      This is a feature I really love on Discord and this is one I try to find, but like you say I dont find any alternative as good.

  • loganb@lemmy.world
    37·
    2 months ago

    Look into mumble. It’s NOT a discord replacement but does provide a good quality, low latency, OSS voice chat. Mumble + Signal group chat is what my friends and I use for gaming. Seems to work well.

    https://www.mumble.info/

    Tip: Turn on text-to-speech to get narrated announcements when users join channels. Also works for text chat shenanigans. 🤣

    • Dragnansia@lemmy.worldOP
      10·
      2 months ago

      The “problem” is that most people only want an app that does everything, and I’m sure some of my friend don’t want to have two app to do the same thing one app can do.

      I prefer to have two perfect app for one task, but not everyone want this.

      • LemoineFairclough@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Programs that do multiple things are not simple, so successfully using or understanding what they do is less likely to be possible for you. I expect that wanting to avoid interacting with many programs will lead a person to use programs that are nonfree more often than they otherwise would, so it would be more likely that a program controls the users.

    • typhoon@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 months ago

      It isn’t really a privacy alternative yet. They are open source and can be audited, they are implementing E2EE for DMs and Chats (Discord has for DMs). If Revolt gets the E2EE right they pass to be an interesting alternative.

  • FiveMacs@lemmy.ca
    9·
    2 months ago

    I swear I must be one of the few that wants nothing that discord offers and would much rather if my core group went back to using vent.

  • telepresence@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    2 months ago

    i’ve heard pretty good things about matrix. discord is still ok imo, but i am also trying to move away from it as they feel all your messages into the summaries ai thingy.

  • steeznson@lemmy.world
    6·
    2 months ago

    Not a gamer but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.

  • BRINGit34@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I think Element has the best chance of being a viable discord alternative. Especially with matrix 2 around the corner.

    Element X (their new mobile app) loads as quickly as discord and supports e2e calls as well as chat.

    It is a different app than discord though. It does not feature the nice server layout that discord is kind of known for but it is planned with spaces.

    I say give Element another year or two and it will be a very formidable chat program.

    And I have no doubt they are doing well financially and will continue to push improvements as matrix is very widely used. I mean hell apparently Nato uses it

    • Schlemmy@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 months ago

      Element X is fast Indeed.

      There are more cool organisations that use Element.

      • US navy
      • US space force
      • French government
      • German defence force

      It’s more a Skype alternative at the moment though.