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”.

  • Kuvwert@lemm.ee
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    23 hours ago

    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!

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      19 hours ago

      Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.

      The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        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.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      20 hours ago

      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?

      • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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        20 hours ago

        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

    • farcaller@fstab.sh
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      12 hours ago

      Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.

  • pory@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

      • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net
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        1 day ago

        Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:

        1. Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
        2. 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.

        • aleq@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          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.

          • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net
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            24 hours ago

            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.

            • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              20 hours ago

              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?

              • white_nrdy@programming.dev
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                20 hours ago

                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)

          • hobovision@lemm.ee
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            21 hours ago

            Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?

            It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.

      • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        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?

      • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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        19 hours ago

        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.

  • Forester@pawb.social
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    1 day ago

    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

      • Forester@pawb.social
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        19 hours ago

        It was so featureless back when I last used it. I don’t remember it having half the features ts3 had in 14

        • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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          19 hours ago

          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.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        19 hours ago

        If they add federation I’m sold. Honestly it would be nice if it integrated with Activity Pub

        • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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          19 hours ago

          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?

    • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        : ( 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

        • Forester@pawb.social
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          19 hours ago

          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.

        • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          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)

          Guide

          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.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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          1 day ago

          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.

          • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world
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            23 hours ago

            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.

            • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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              23 hours ago

              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.

    • SatanClaus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • Turnbomb@lemmy.ml
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    15 hours ago

    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.

    • RichardDegenne@lemm.ee
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      12 hours ago

      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.

  • XiberKernel@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.

    Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?

    • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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      16 hours ago

      Discord is not even necessarily Electron. I’m running it as Datcord, which is a Firefox based wrapper.

      Discord has a searchble chat history, which is what sets it apart from IRC. Everything else can be emulated by modern IRC clients, such as emoji and embedded / unfurling images and link previews.

      However imagine the chat history as if you had a bouncer that has 100% uptime and joined all possible chat channels from their creation, along with offering you search and buffer.

      If not IRC, either Matrix or XMPP should be capable of this.

      I’m fairly sure Discord’s popularity was due to aggressive marketing, likely during their venture capital funding rounds. Something which FOSS does not have.

    • echolalia@lemmy.ml
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      15 hours ago

      In addition to the replies you got already, discord has screen sharing/streaming. An experience kind of like zoom (I don’t use it and dont see the appeal but maybe someone who does can elaborate more. My partner uses this feature sometimes).

    • Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml
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      16 hours ago

      The main benefit I remember from jumping to Discord from IRC back in the day was the ability to easily see past messages. That said, I’m not sure if that’s a problem anymore on IRC since I haven’t used it in ages. Even then, I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to whip up a self-hostable fediverse competitor to Discord. It would essentially be IRC++.

      It’s probably more of a critical mass issue, though not near the level of Reddit vs Lemmy or Twitter vs Bluesky vs Mastodon. Every Discord server is essentially a walled garden. A Discord server doesn’t hold much advantage over a Slack server, GroupMe, Teams, or IRC. For that reason, it would be a lot easier to move individual communities over.

    • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      The problem is that performant screenshare (to multiple users) more or less requires infrastructure. That requires money, and it’s impossible to compete on price with services that have the VC-enshitification model.

      You can get around this in a few ways, but they’re all tradeoffs that are in some way or other worse than discord.

      • P2P - sacrifice latency, reliability
      • direct multi-stream - sacrifice PC performance and/or bitrate
      • paid infrastructure - sacrifice money
      • foggenbooty@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s simpler and by it’s very nature doesn’t require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.

        Plus, don’t forget screen sharing in discord isn’t very good as is (720p30) if you’re not a paid user.

    • loiakdsf@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 day ago

      honestly that isnthe only thing that stopd me from going all in on teamspeak/mumble

      i just need a screen sharing solution (not necessarily built into those tools)

  • assaultpotato@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    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.

      • assaultpotato@sh.itjust.works
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        22 hours ago

        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.

    • johntash@eviltoast.org
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      16 hours ago

      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

    • Lumun@lemmy.zip
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      17 hours ago

      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!

  • Stop Forgetting It@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    man I wish mumble had a better interface and a chat function, it could real FOSS competition with Discord, but the lack of a chat feature is holding it back

      • splendoruranium@infosec.pub
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        24 hours ago

        It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.

        Unbelievably so. Mumble is… basically one setup command. Don’t even need a domain. And it needs absolutely no resources, can run on a Pi Zero.
        Setting up my own Matrix server was honestly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever attempted in decades of non-professionally using computers and I’m still not sure I’d be able to properly take care of the installation if it breaks. Sooo many moving parts. All the federation-oriented projects that rely on adoption rates reaaaaally desperately need setup wizards before any other additional feature.

        • The Bard in Green@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz
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          21 hours ago

          I’ve set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.

          Matrix is like “Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn’t work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that’s NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?”

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            19 hours ago

            You forgetting the part where the server starts using crazy resources because you entered the main Matrix chat. Does the server need to send you everything that’s ever been said? Apparently yes

      • Stop Forgetting It@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        24 hours ago

        Its been ages for me, so I may be incorrect now. I think the chat is not persistent and I am pretty sure there is no channels. Its most definitely not set up how discord is where its more of a chat client that has voice rather than a voice client that has chat.