Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I’m very excited!
Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.
The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.
Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.
It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.
What are you using instead? I only recently set up my synapse server and I’d be interested to head what the alternatives are
Conduwuit is actively developed and works pretty nice for me. Single user, but bridged to hundreds of telegram, WhatsApp and discord rooms. As well as a few matrix rooms too.
Synapse has seemingly improved since 2020. A word of warning though: if you join large rooms from your server, Synapse will eventually grow the DB to a huge size due to a “lookup” table state_groups_state, and will require manual cleanup. See https://www.sequentialread.com/matrix-synapse-out-of-disk-space-state_groups_state/
Woah nice heads up I appreciate it!
I’ll keep the janitor tool in my pocket for now as my instance takes up negligible space at the moment but someday that might not be the case.
Here’s the referenced tool for anybody else interested:
https://git.cyberia.club/cyberia/matrix-synapse-diskspace-janitor
I’ve found SimpleX a much better solution than matrix for a discord alternative.
I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.
I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different
mumble is great for VOIP.
Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.
revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there’s that. There’s also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don’t know much about how matrix works
a lot of modern technology and software is built on the foundation of work built by the web browser industry, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not necessarily a good thing either. Provides a lot of nice features, native integration into a web browser, industry standard security and encryption procedures.
That’s about it though, Outside of that, running a dedicated version of that app is almost always some bullshit built in electron, which is a horrible buggy mess with horrible performance. Nothing stops devs from integrating these features into a standalone application… But, they likely won’t since they’ve already developed a web browser version.
I also have some problems with the way web tech is generally built, it’s built with the expectation that you will host and treat it as a web app, which is fine, it works. But i prefer not to host services i use via anything web related as generally i find it both intrusive, and problematic, in the instance that a DNS server goes down for example. (it’s not very likely, i know, but still)
I also think a lot of the networking protocols are fairly bloated, but that’s not as big of a deal, it’s just annoying.
anyway, enough of my ranting. Matrix is actually a specification for a set of communication protocols based on the foundation of web tech, it’s highly universal, and inter-compatible, which is great. But it sort of stops there. There are several server implementations, and numerous front end implementations, none of which seem to be particularly, interesting. There’s numerous electron front ends, a few that aren’t (though they won’t support most features) etc, stuff like that, it’s just. Not clean.
Honestly, I am ready to go straight back to TeamSpeak.
I miss hosting my own server and having full access and control over it
I used to just host it on a piece of shit. 2003 Dell XP machine I put Ubuntu on
TS 6 looks so good. I can’t seem to figure out it’s release window though. Along with the mobile app being updated. Once those are done I plan to move over.
There is also Mumble. TS3 era voip and text chat features, but it’s FOSS.
If they add federation I’m sold. Honestly it would be nice if it integrated with Activity Pub
It’s not that kind of application. Federation would be massive overkill for a project like Mumble.
It’s a voip server and client for video gaming, with a couple adjacent features sprinkled in.
It doesn’t even really have accounts, and adding servers is just matter of configuring their IPs. What would you even use federation for?
It was so featureless back when I last used it. I don’t remember it having half the features ts3 had in 14
Oh, it’s basic af. But it did what it needed to do, and still does, for some.
I havent used it in ages, I have no clue what sort of stuff continued development has enabled. If anything.
My friend group went first from Skype to the massively better TS3, and finally to Mumble. I don’t remember really missing anything.
Hell yah, TS3 crew all the way. (Or TS5 for the zoomers…)
My nerds herd recently also set up a cluster of Matrix Synapse servers so we got our little “We have Telegram at home” set up. Getting non-tech people to accept that this is how to find me has been tricky without sounding like a digital prepper.
: ( i was too dumb to follow the playbook correctly
i wanna have a matrix sever!
but I’ll use snikket for now until i skill up
We believe in you, there are other write-ups and guides on how to get it working. Its was great learning expirence for VMs and Proxmox (thats what I did and it did make it harder, but I feel more confident when im cosplaying as a sys-admin)
This one is pretty close to whats needed, but go into it expecting each step to open a new tool/application that needs to be researched before you press enter. Also look up how to set it to a PSQL db before you start inviting users, it defaults to SQLite and that will cause problems eventually.
Why would you down-grade from Snikket to Matrix?
If you want to skill up a bit add a Slidge.im gateway to your Snikket xmpp server to access Matrix (and Discord etc.) from there.
that is actually what I’ve been thinking. xmpp with encryption seems good enough for me! plus I’ve heard some stuff isn’t encrypted in matrix, (metadata? emojis? not exactly sure)
i am heavily leaning towards scaling up to snikkets big brother, prosody.
The currently common older implementation of e2ee in xmpp has the same issue with only the message body being encrypted. There are newer specs of OMEMO that have better metadata protection, but its adoption in xmpp clients has been very slow.
Prosody is more of a sandbox, with Snikket being a preconfigured version of it, but yes running Slidge will be a bit easier with a normal Prosody server.
If you try to do calculus and don’t have the understanding of the underlying math then you won’t have a good time when ansible breaks. I’d advise it’s normally better to learn how to manually install and manage software from the command line.
I used to have a free lifetime server from someone that was giving them away, but he shut down after a few years.
Did he die?
Maybe it was based on the “lifetime” of their hamster 🤷
Why use Element for matrix?
From what I can tell it collets and links data to you: Location, identifiers and contact information.
How is that private or better than Signal?
Does it? On Android, it never asked me to grant location permission unless I try to share my location to another user. Similar with contacts and calendar, it’s working perfectly fine without them. Where exactly does it link those identifiers and with what?
This is what shows up when I check Element. Every other Federated app that I use doesn’t collect any information. Voyager, Pixelfed, Peertube, Mastodon all come up with “No data collected”
I use Signal for private and personal messages. I use Discord solely for gaming and voicechat. A good alternative doesn’t need to be overly private (although that would be a bonus of course). It just needs to have a good UI and feature parity with Discord.
There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.
Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.
Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?
You know the app still works if you deny it loc permissions, right?
still means they’re willing to collect data
Because people don’t use discord for privacy. They use it for gaming, voice chat, communities and streaming.
@Nikelui is 100% right: a chat room may be private, but it’s not secure. Even in an encrypted room, every additional person you add reduces your security. I’m sure there’s some paper out there that studies this, and that the graph of # of members vs security is an inverse power ratio.
If it’s a public chat, there is no security.
However, with Matrix, if you run your own server and restrict access to your friends, at least you can be fairly certain your chat room isn’t being used to train an LLM, or to harvest information about you for advertising.
There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.
Public chats are not my concern. That’s information I’m putting out there willingly.
Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.
Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?
Are you specifically referring to the mobile client of Element? i wasn’t away of anything with the desktop client that has anything to do with location.
This is what shows up when I check Element. Every other Federated app that I use doesn’t collect any information. Voyager, Pixelfed, Peertube, Mastodon all come up with “No data collected”
I just looked in detail through their privacy policy, and it looks like if you use their “service” they are collecting quite a bit of data, certainly more than I would have expected. I only use stand alone, non-federated homeservers and I have everything disabled as far as telemetry, etc, but I think you’ve convinced me to keep an eye on the other clients. I last test drove several last year and all of them were either lacking features I needed or had issues.
I don’t know. I don’t use Element; I wasn’t aware it requested location service access. I switched to FluffyChat ages ago; it only asks for notification.
But that’s just for group chat. I’ve been using Jami lately, and it does ask for location access; that’s because it has a “share location” feature, that - if you use it - shows a little map with your location to the person you’re sharing with. Maybe Element has implemented something similar?
This is what shows up when I check Element. Every other Federated app that I use doesn’t collect any information. Voyager, Pixelfed, Peertube, Mastodon all come up with “No data collected”
Huh. I just checked Fluffy, and it asks for location, camera, and phone. I just denied it everything but notifications, so VOIP won’t work, but all I use it for is chat rooms anyway.
In any case, it doesn’t look any better than Element, in that respect.
The Element web client will break encryption when you clear your browser data.
Does it? I think it logs you out and after logging in again, you need to provide your encryption key/verify with other device again in order to access the history. Or wdym with breaking?
Signal is centralized and require a phone number to register, it’s not private at all.
That’s bullshit.
A) Privacy =/= anonymity
B) They have usernames and the option to hide your number from searches for those interested.
C) Signal has absolutely no way of accessing any of your information: https://signal.org/bigbrother/ They publish all their subpoenas and there is no information that are able to collect. It’s all encrypted.
D) Phone numbers are an easy way onboard the normies and Meta addicts that don’t value privacy.
Your phone number is tied to your identity, there are no reasons to ask it to begin with.
Isn’t the data sharing optional? I’m pretty sure it asks you on first startup and you can decline.
revolt developers have openly said they aren’t a free speech platform and argue constantly amongst themselves. I’d do Matrix
https://spacebar.chat/ looks like it will eventually be good, it looks like it’s in its infancy right now though
Way too few mentions of Jitsi.
I use it with friends, it has good server config, and I’m pushing it on businesses.
Explain more of this Jitsi, sounds interesting for my business
It’s voice and video calling with chat and screensharing. I intend to use it for a language school. It’s extendable, for instance you can also self-host a whiteboard, where everyone can draw. You can see the drawing in real time, which is good for asian languages, where direction of the stroke is important.
Free, open-source, packaged in Debian, runs without issues, used it with friends for multi-hour voice chats during gaming nights.
On the server you can configure things like FPS for screenshare. I have yet to adjust that and try streaming video/game through it.
This does sound extremely useful and good.
I’d say the only issues software like this have is there’s a lack of beginners guides to self hosting, so people either know too little and instantly have their server botted / hacked, or know enough to be too paranoid and afraid to set up their own server because they know of the risks.
As for me though, I’ll probably look into implementing this and play around with it for our DnD group first.
That sounds great, let me know how it works for you.
There is also BigBlueButton if you are looking for another similar project.
they are owned by a Nasdaq-listed company. does that not the defeat the purpose when OP is trying to avoid Wall Street-ownership?
Just self-host it? It’s open-source, that will last you a lifetime.
Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.
Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.
Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.
Its been a while since I used Revolt, I use element everyday. But I’d prefer something more “third party” too. Revolt was servicable back in 2020, maybe it has gotten better?
TeamSpeak exists too
Teamspeak is alright, in fact we use it along with discord for inter-channel Comms. But discord does a lot of stuff that ts doesn’t touch
Mumble!
Tmspk egssts tuh
That’s a throwback. Let’s take it one step further and just get back on Ventrilo and play some DOTA. (For the younger folks who don’t get the reference: https://youtu.be/aTJncWndUB8 )
I still have my copy. I cannot believe that song is like, 18 years old now. It was such a staple of my college experience.
Used to use Vent playing Eve Online 19 years ago. Worked great back then. Apparently it’s still around, but still no Linux support after all these years.
I am certainly not one of the younger folks and had never seen that before. That is awesome, thank you for sharing.
Oh man, Basshunter was huge in the chronically-online gamer space in the 2000s. His other songs are pretty good too.
To put it in perspective, the fact that they’re gaming on laptops and LCD monitors was an enviable flex when his songs released.
I’m running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I’ve set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.
Are you saying you can import chat history with a bridge some how? I don’t remember that being an issue, but would be very handy
I’m messaging Facebook users over Matrix via the bridge.
Did you follow a guide, or know one you could link? I’m thinking this is the path for me and my friends too.
I can try to write some stuff up, it’s not super complex. Core requirement for my setup is Docker + a domain. I recommend Linux host but you can make Docker Desktop work.
Let me write some stuff down this week.
This is my wiki, no Fb bridge, but telegram, WhatsApp, discord and signal bridges yes
https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=matrix%3Astart
Check the sidebar, its closed by default on mobile.
This sounds great. If you end up writing something for the other commenter using a Linux server and the Messenger bridge I would love to hear if there were any pitfalls to avoid!
Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
I guess that’s the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.
Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.
Somebody needs to create an XMPP/Jitsi hybrid
Jitsi-meet is already using xmpp under the hood.
But there are some efforts to add multi-user video calls to full xmpp clients as well. Dino can already do it for a while, and Movim and Libervia recently added experimental support.
Its not quite a full Discord replacement, but for private groups it works quite well.
Do any of the xmpp clients have screen share?
Movim does, for Libervia and Dino I am not 100% sure right now, but at least for Libervia the browser version should have it as it is really more of a general Webrtc browser feature than client specific.
Isn’t the video the jingle part that Google added to jabber originally (before it dumped everything to remake it from the group up about 4 more times like a GSoC crossed over with groundhogDay)?
Today xmpp uses a distant relative of those original jingle specifications, which have been modernized to use Webrtc.
it’s Element/Matrix if we’re lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won’t be a “platform” you have to leave when it goes corporate.
Revolt is F/OSS
https://github.com/revoltchat/
It’s not just a company with a clone of Discord, all the server back end, etc is open.
That doesn’t really change that it’s one company hosting it. Unless you’re willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren’t willing to join each others instances?
I guess the easy solution here to to make it use oauth2 authentication. Then you can just authenticate using one account elsewhere. If fediverse services also at some point become oauth2 providers, then even better.
That’s still not a solution. That entails non unified communication, access, and search. Making it easy to log in to others still doesn’t solve easy sharing between others. Also oauth2 is a pain to set up, and many people hosting their own instance aren’t going to bother.
Sorry but what exactly do you communicate and access between discord servers? Are you talking about PMs which are by default independent of servers?
Unified search could easily be achieved through third party tools at the least, like for IRC. I don’t think even discord has unified search between servers.
Oh hey, you’re totally right, that’s crazy. I use Beeper (hosted matrix setup) to aggregate my chats and I guess I’ve always been using that to search across all servers without realizing. Fully thought the DM search would also search across servers.
DMs are definitely also another case though - you can’t easily DM people on another server if that requires you to log into another server.
That’s true about DM, however DMs are not a core use-case for discord-like services. It’s the group/voice chats etc. I could see a workaround like lemmy does, where if you want to DM a user in another server, you might be able to do it through your fediverse instance (i.e. a DM simply has your fediverse instance DM their fediverse instance), but I’m sure there can be more elegant things like. However DMs by themselves are a weird thing by themselves, so much so, that even bluesky had to bolt DMs on-top and outside of their protocol.
Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:
- Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
- Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it’ll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.
Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.
My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.
That said I’ve had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.
Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.
Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker.
The federation itself is a deal breaker
Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
Because the person they’re responding to said the lack of the optional feature was a deal breaker for them on a different piece of software.
I’m might be being dense but… Still: why would an optional feature be a dealbreaker? You just restated, you didn’t address the confusing logic.
but also with request ratelimiting
I get why Federation can cause issues (most of the time it’s moderation related), but why would an extra option be a deal-breaker? Federation can always be disabled on a per-domain basis if you prefer. In fact, I’d argue it’s best practice to only allow domains on a case-by-case basis to prevent spam and abuse.
On the converse, you can’t enable Federation on a platform that doesn’t have it.
They were talking about matrix itself, not a specific option. And I’m not going to lie, having to hand hold your servers federation choices seems like a hassle. At that point why not just use a self hosted, non federated option?
I think the point they’re making is you can effectively have a self hosted non federated option with Matrix. Just disable federation as a whole (which I’m pretty sure is completely possible. Given companies use matrix for comms, and might not want federation, for similar reasons to what is being discussed here)
…theoretically for now
It a centralized server controlled by the devs
Host your own then
Nheko provides an interface that is reminiscent of Discord. Fully featured and fast Matrix client.
Thank you for the recommendation. I tried element a while ago and found it lacking. Matrix must be the way forward. Disregarding IRC of course.
Sadly I found out yesterday:
Matrix is not a community-based software, it was born [00] in Amdocs [01], a multinational corporation founded in Israel.
https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html
Many were claiming its impossible to get contributions merged as well.
I would be happy to find out this information is wrong or outdated.
Matrix is nice, and you can have jitsi for calls integrated. It seems to be pretty popular; Lemmy has a field for matrix @ in user profiles. Never heard of revolt before.
I use Jitsi for a non-profit, and I like the mute someone else function, but oh wow the noise cancellation needs improvement. So many voice comm apps have disappeared (there used to be one our group used all the time, then the devs dropped it (the client app) and just became on API or something).
Just remember your friend, https://discorch.org/
