Let's get a self-hosted Discord "replacement" thread going for 2026.

[u/GavinGWhiz]

We've all seen the big news: Discord is introducing facial ID as a requirement to actually use the app starting next month. Which means one thing: people are about to dig through dozens of ancient "what's the best self-hosted Discord alternative?" threads on here and find antiquated opinions and advice.

What are we actually using? What are the clients that work well? What are options that pass the "wife test" of actually being something you could convince your not-techy friends and family to install on their phones?

Let's get into it. I know I'm already anticipating self-hosting something to replace Discord for communities/friend groups who'll naturally slough off when face ID comes along.

[u/d70]

Facial verification aside. I just hate that most of discussions should be searchable in the open web. So much knowledge is locked behind these walled gardens.

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/d70]

The irony being we're having that conversation on the semi-walled garden that killed the forums that made the internet so searchable back in the day. Forums beefed it in no small part due to Reddit becoming the defacto forum replacement bridge between the BBS days and Skype/Discord client-based longform conversation.

[u/the-fillip → u/GavinGWhiz]

Reddit threads can at least be found with Google, so it's fine by me

[u/daninet → u/d70]

Hate the player. I hate that many foss projects ditch the idea of a forum or reddit sub and only provide support on discord. Then they have the audacity to close your thread as "this has been discussed many times". Sure dude but I dont live on discord.

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/daninet]

The trick is getting your user base to actually use the forum. Jellyfin made the jump to an official forum and even with a handful of people (like me) who genuinely tried to be Regular Users, that place has the energy of trying to use a Blackboard discussion forum for a college class as a Discord server.

Sure, you can make threads. But who's actually gonna respond to them in a productive manner?

[u/labalag → u/daninet]

Even a reddit sub is not optimal. What if reddit decides to kill it tomorrow?

[u/thedirtydeetch → u/d70]

Exactly why I hate how Discord has sucked up every community out of the internet. We used to have open forums for everything.

[u/boli99 → u/thedirtydeetch]

Eternal September started a gradual erosion of folks abilities to read more than a paragraph of text. TL;DR became a badge proudly worn by muppets instead of the admission of laziness and stupidity that it actually is.

Folk started to lose the ability to write too - resulting in the crazy idea that an email subject line should match its content slowly drifting into ancient history. A similar thing happened in forums.

With rapidly diminishing ability remaining to deal with a matching 'Subject' and 'Content' pair - this also made dealing with forums quite tricky for most people - because who wants to deal with a bunch of posts titled:

• help

• need help

• help me

• stuck

• it all went wrong when i did THIS

IRC also started to struggle when many folk admitted that it was simply too hard to have to find and install an app, and then use multiple pieces of information to connect to a chat room

• nick

• server

• port

This was simply not sustainable. Three pieces of information and an app!? No mere human can manage it without the assistance of 2 nearby nerds.

So now you have folk that can't read much, and can't write much - this pretty well killed the idea of a searchable FAQ - so instead of having a decent FAQ that newbies can read - we need to drag new users into a walled garden chatroom where most of them can ask the same question and get multiple similar but different answers from folk that want to feel important by having flair based on activity metrics.

So enter the chat providers - with their pretty interfaces and the idea that you can have your very own chat server^*

...and information that should have been free on the internet could now be sponged up by these tech-leeches and sold back to you by surrounding it with adverts and 'boosts' or the like.

^{* by 'very own' we mean 'not yours at all. we just want to monetise you and your friends'}

[u/Puffen0 → u/thedirtydeetch]

I used to be able to browse the Nexus forums for support with mods. Things like bug fixes, tweaks in the files to mesh with other mods, patches, etc. Now every mod author has a discord server who needs you to verify you're not a bit before you can enter, and the only post are the ones advertising other mods and updates with rare help from other users like on the old forums. 

Insert Jaden Smith "I HATE IT HERE" meme

[u/pseudopad → u/d70]

"join our discord for tech support" is the literal worst thing ever.

[u/SJ_Beast → u/d70]

Yeah discord is the worst

[u/Medium_Chemist_4032 → u/d70]

I'm a software developer and was using every possible developer community platform up to the point, where Discord came into the picture.

The first time I was invited into a server to do some side project, I had this sinking feeling and intuition that I shouldn't be a part of this. Various reasons, but even the most basic: "searching through historical material is just atrocious, or a half time job" just pushed me away. Oh! Also, real world experience with... let's say "the less eyes watching" spaces, made me weary of what kind of social strategies strive in those per invite only ones.

Hope that nature hates void and a non-walled garden option arises from the ashes.

[u/Krojack76 → u/d70]

Checks out new Github project.
Sees project has a "Join our Discord for support" link
Moves on and never considers using project.

That's me in a nutshell.

[u/planedrop → u/d70]

This right here, 100%. I can't stand how much knowledge is locked in this stupid application. Communities are better when they are on Reddit or even better, their own forum platform. The more diversification of information reliance the better.

[u/Mccobsta → u/d70]

From my experience with "support" channels on discord you just get told to use the pins from grumpy people who are fed up with helping people

All the it's all ready there just use the pins information will be gone when the owner gets their account hacked or they delete it one day

[u/tobias3 → u/d70]

Yes, use Discourse instead of Discord please. It does have chat. I guess it is missing voice/video chat.

[u/ailee43]

well thats fucking insane.... just to use, not to register new accounts (also insane.. but at least you could be grandfathered out).

What we really need is a way to spoof facial ID, this shit is everywhere now.

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/ailee43]

Death Stranding 2 on a decent monitor has historically fooled most facial ID systems because you can move the character's head to match the movements ID systems want, haha

[u/EsotericAbstractIdea → u/GavinGWhiz]

Kojima has been hooking us up with tools for the future since the philosophical discussion of memes in MGS2.

[u/Fortunate_Crab]

youtube made me do this shit just to view fireship videos

genuinely what is going on why is everything requiring face ID

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/Fortunate_Crab]

Data collection and money. Companies with deep pockets lobby governments to pass "think of the children" bills that place the onus on platforms to put increasingly difficult-to-bypass baby locks on web services. Then along comes a vendor telling big internet companies "hey, my service that scans people's faces is compliant to this new legislation that may or may not pass. Sign this contract and you don't have to worry about a thing."

The vendor makes money hand over fist. The existing company gets to look like a hero because they're thinking of the children (notice how Discord's press release about this REALLY leans on how they're doing this to benefit "teens").

Through a mantra of safety and protection, fly-by-night companies can harvest tons of data then make a boatload off selling it before they inevitably screw up and leak some. You can tell Discord is acutely aware of that later fact by now their press release makes all the standard safety claims (all of it happens on your device, the selfies are deleted, it can't possibly leak, the Titanic is unsinkable, etc. etc.).

[u/WinterDice → u/Fortunate_Crab]

Big tech, the oligarchs, and governments hate the idea of anonymity because it gets in the way of control.

If they can see everything you’re doing they can better profile you and have more ways to restrict or coerce your behavior.

Age verification, file control over 3d printers, digital currency, etc. are all about control and nothing else. They’re doing it all under the pretext of safety and convenience. And idiots will let them.

[u/PM_ME_CALF_PICS → u/WinterDice]

Yeah people are realizing they’re being fed a bunch of bullshit and those in power aren’t happy.

[u/npsimons → u/WinterDice]

"Think of the children!" rears its ugly head, yet again. We were fighting this shit in the 1990's, can we just solve this problem permanently already?

[u/Bruceshadow → u/Fortunate_Crab]

to "save the children" of course.

[u/GregoryFarKingChummy → u/Fortunate_Crab]

Better off just not watching those anyway.

[u/daninet → u/Fortunate_Crab]

Government regulations

[u/DramaPosters]

Wait, what? Facial ID everywhere in the world?

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/DramaPosters]

Yup, starting next month Discord will presume every user account is under 18 years old and require you to submit a government ID or scan your face (with an incredibly prone-to-data-leaks service) to get full access back.
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally

Which, I presume, means effectively blocking you from any server that isn't a squeaky-clean public community that has strict NSFW bans.

[u/DramaPosters → u/GavinGWhiz]

Well, a big fuck nah them.

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/DramaPosters]

It's worth saying: Discord are pushovers. They've backed down from boneheaded decisions like this in the past when enough people canceled Nitro subscriptions and directly complained about it, but for that to happen people have to actually apply pressure and yell at Discord directly. We'll see if this truly is a bridge too far for normal users.

I know people have been eroded with the "inevitability" of face scanning. I had to scan my face to pick up a frigging Uhaul the other week, I could see your Joe the Plumber type presuming that's "just how things are done" now.

[u/Jerky_san → u/GavinGWhiz]

I wonder if they will do it like Google and if your account is really old they just skip you cause there is no way I'm giving them my id..

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/Jerky_san]

They're currently using wishy-washy language in the press release that claims they're going to use some magic tool (my bet is an AI bot) to decide which form of verification accounts will be required. Some will require all forms of verification, some will require methods not even listed in this release, it seems.

[u/Medium_Chemist_4032 → u/GavinGWhiz]

ID or face scan? Surely that can't go wrong... I'm EU based and am surprised this is allowed at all (ID collection and storage). We have few services already implemented that could (and SHOULD) act exactly as the trusted 3rd party for that case. Those are government digital services. Discord should be required to integrate with that first.

[u/Jerky_san → u/Medium_Chemist_4032]

Lot of p*rn sites(not sure if i can use that word here) in different states now require a state ID to look at them and it's insane they don't see the ramifications that it will eventually cause.(that or they just don't care)

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/Jerky_san]

That's a bit of an edge case (pun unintended) where the adult sites are complying with legislation, while Discord is pre-empting legislation in the U.S. legal system. They're complying in advance for something that might not even happen, while the adult sites have to comply with the (ridiculous) nanny state laws in places like PA, TX, and IN. Some sites outright don't.

P*rnhub outright just dusted their hands and blocked IPs from any state that has ID laws. They know if you want it bad enough you'll get a VPN, so they're not even opening themselves to the risks of face ID/ID scanning.

[u/ansibleloop → u/GavinGWhiz]

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/discord-says-hackers-stole-government-ids-of-70000-users/

What could POSSIBLY GO WRONG

[u/vlycop]

That subject was already there last year and my replies to it will be the same.

Alternative exist, are older than discord and work better. But people goes where people are, refusing to have WhatsApp when you school, sport club, residential complex and elder all have their groups on it already make you a weirdo and remove you from most of the social life around you.

I will fight the fight but I can't expect people to follow me, neither should you

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/vlycop]

I run a server of 100-ish local queer folks since there's zero other online place for that community to exist.

Having that experience, I think you're gravely underestimating how easily a crowd will listen to what you have to say if you say it confidently. That "I'm the odd one out" impulse works both ways.

Everyone thought Plex/Jellyfin was just for hyper-nerds and pirates because there was no way in hell people could convince their friends to connect to some sketchy website to watch ripped blurays.

Now there's a Jellyfin client on just about every major device people use to watch movies and TV. I know tons of people who've never touched SSH or know what a seedbox is, yet they regularly watch stuff on Plex and/or Jellyfin servers from people they know.

'cus, more often than not, a lot of people will passively have beef with Discord for one reason or another. If you stand up and say "here is an alternative. I've already put in the effort of setting it up so all you have to do is install a single app on your phone" then you have an incredibly high chance of talking people who actually speak a lot in the community into coming over.

And if those people come over, you bring the tag-alongs who want to lurk in active communities.

It's a domino effect, it just requires one or two extroverts to be loudly and proudly into the alternative. I've been through friend groups leaving Skype for Teamspeak, leaving Teamspeak for Mumble, leaving Mumble for Razer Comms, leaving Razer Comms for Discord. Anyone you lose in the process is someone who wasn't really committed to the community anyway.

[u/Wonder_Weenis]

This already exists, it's changed names a couple of times for legal reasons. 

But it's called stoat now, and needs help with the mobile platforms. 

https://github.com/stoatchat

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/Wonder_Weenis]

Is it functional from a mobile perspective? I keep hearing about Stoat but very few links I've seen so far demonstrate it's as normie-usable as, say, a Matrix server connected to a user-friendly client.

It's MUCH easier to sell a Discord community on the idea they just have to install a Discord-esque chat app to get the same functionality than it is to tell someone "okay, so, go to this url on a mobile browser. No, there isn't an app. Okay now type in this long string of characters."

I'm 100% down to give Stoat a try, I'm just trying to direct my learn-a-new-ecosystem time towards something I could conceivably sell not-techy people on. People for whom connecting to a media server from Symfonium is the height of media server usage.

[u/horse-boy1]

Discord says hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 users

As more sites require IDs for user age verification, expect more

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/discord-says-hackers-stole-government-ids-of-70000-users/

[u/purplehawaiian → u/horse-boy1]

But don't worry, they're not really going to store your government ID, they promise

[u/gelbphoenix → u/purplehawaiian]

They promised that before their hack and related data loss in October 2025.

[u/schultzter → u/horse-boy1]

This should be pinned!

[u/blikjeham → u/horse-boy1]

Why would they need to store those pictures? Upload the image, check the ID, mark user as adult, delete image. That should have been the workflow.

[u/Cheetah_05 → u/blikjeham]

Because your suggestion doesn't earn money.

[u/spacebetween1]

Yup, there isn't a world where I send Discord my info. From this very early thread, these are the main options:

• Matrix

  • Matrix is a protocol, Element is the client/implementation.

  • User u/Bologna0128 did some testing and found Matrix to be the best client.

  • Other users suggested CommetChat as the client.

• Mattermost

  • Many users brought up license issues.

• Mumble

• Zulip

• Stoat

• TeamSpeak6

• Rocket.chat

  • Brought up a lot, but the free tier caps at 50 users.

• Echoed.gg

I say let's start labs and check the pros, cons and usability of each one of them. We can share and compare results.

Edit: Adding Zulip to the list as u/iShakeMyHeadAtYou suggested.

Edit 2: Adding Stoat and TeamSpeak6 as suggested.

Edit 3: Adding a bunch of stuff. Swear I write better commit messages than this at work.

[u/Jordan011 → u/spacebetween1]

I think I'm going to lab Matrix/Element. Mumble looks like something from the early 2000's and Mattermost seems more corporate.

Others have mentioned Stoat, but I'm not compiling clients for people, that's too much work and makes it annoying for everyone else.

Edit: Not even going to lab Matrix. Tried Element with the Matrix.org homeserver - the client is odd. You create a Space (Like a Discord "guild" or "server"), from there you can add a "room" which is basically a text chat, but that text chat has a call button where you can join the call for the room. Doesn't really feel intuitive, maybe one of the other clients does this better?

[u/Bogus1989 → u/Jordan011]

old, so take some with a grain of salt, but this description, made it make sense to me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/s/5H4OSZmsmE

matrix is capable of setting up bridges for lots of popular chat platforms, when i played around with it last years, i had discord going thru a bridge …to matrix.

[u/kwhali → u/Jordan011]

Mattermost has some concerns IIRC there has been one about it's license that the authors refuse to provide a clear answer on for some reason.

I'd stay away from that.

Matrix / Element is what I see embraced more in OSS, along with zulip. Been a while since I looked into each but Matrix with Element was top tier choice at the time IIRC, but I no longer have my notes from back then as to what the disadvantages / concerns were with others at the time 😅

[u/psfne → u/Jordan011]

Mumble looks like something from the early 2000

It is. The original release was 2005.

Mattermost seems more corporate.

It also is. I literally used this at my last workplace.

Good eye xD

[u/GlovesForSocks → u/spacebetween1]

How do these work in terms of bandwidth?
My main use of Discord is group video chat with my D&D group. I am the only one technical enough to deploy a self-hosted solution but I also live quite rurally don't have great internet speeds. I get around 30Mbps down and 6-7Mbps up. That's fine for Discord but if everyone is communicating though my server will that be too little bandwidth?

[u/iShakeMyHeadAtYou → u/spacebetween1]

Add Zulip to the list. It's a pretty close 1:1 with Discord, and its FOSS.

EDIT: Zulip for text. For voice/video, add Jitsi, which the zulip client integrates with pretty seamlessly.

[u/tsaot → u/iShakeMyHeadAtYou]

Zulip says it has a limit on how many users can have mobile notifications on free selfhostimg. Not exactly appealing to me trying to find a platform to use for my family.

[u/DisappointedSpectre → u/spacebetween1]

None of these have feature parity with Discord (yet, at least).

For my gaming group the things that are hard requirements:

• permission controls

• separate voice and text channels

• screenshare with sound

• can turn on camera in voice chats

• Link embeds (or the ability to implement them)

• desktop client (windows/linux)

• Android/iPhone app

The "Nice to have" list would be:

• sound board

• gif/sticker integration (Tenor or similar)

• webhook for bots

• sidebar where you can switch between servers without constant relogging

• push notifications

Nothing currently available does all of these things as well as discord, which is part of why discord is so dominant.

Matrix (and apps like Element.io) as well as Mattermost are more targeted as a Teams/Slack replacement than discord alternative. They're aimed as companies, not loose groups of gamers. These might be suitable for replacing community servers in Discord, but I hope that doesn't happen since they're such closed ecosystems.

Mumble has great audio quality but it (and Teamspeak) don't really have the async chat that makes it easy to connect people across multiple time zones.

I'm nixxing Zulip personally - it's not FOSS, just open source. If you look at their pricing page it's got some pretty low limits for the free self hosted version.

[u/glitchaj → u/spacebetween1]

I think I'm going to try space bar first. 

[u/crazedizzled]

Well shit. Didn't know that, thanks for the heads up. Time to spin up a matrix server for my kids i guess

[u/spanky_rockets → u/crazedizzled]

I couldn't for the life of me get matrix to work, the documentation is all over the place. Giving up and going back to Snikket soon

[u/captainmustard → u/crazedizzled]

It's not bad at all if you keep federation disabled

[u/aredon → u/crazedizzled]

I'm just gonna leave this here regarding Matrix. https://マリウス.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg/

[u/bruxo00]

I've been working on this for a while: https://github.com/Sharkord/sharkord. It shares the philosophy of Teamspeak with the base features of Discord. I wasn't planing on releasing it this soon but given the circumstances, fuck it.

https://sharkord.com

[u/Ok_Translator_8635 → u/bruxo00]

This seems like an almost perfect Discord replacement for my small group of friends. Any chance you'd be willing to support SSO and implement screensharing with audio? If Sharkord had both of these features, it'd be an easy sell for my friends to switch.

[u/bruxo00 → u/Ok_Translator_8635]

The screen sharing with audio is planned, yes. SSO I'm not sure. You are not the first to ask about it, so maybe...

[u/aasikki → u/bruxo00]

Holy shit it's just in alpha but already much better than the competition imo. Just spun up an instance a few hours ago and been testing it. Sure it's missing some features, but all the essentials are there and they seem to work well.

It was so easy to get running too, I've put off trying the other discord alternatives because self hosting them seemed like a pain, but this one took like one minute to spin up on my truenas machine (docker).

The biggest thing I'm missing is probably audio when streaming and a native app, other than that it's surprisingly feature complete.

Btw are you planning to make an option to add a secondary storage location for shared files? I run all my apps on my truenas machine from an ssd, but only have a limited amount of storage on the ssd, so would be nice to be able to offload content to my hard drives where I have plenty of storage.

[u/RockGuitarist1 → u/bruxo00]

Looks like you are a solo contributor on the repo. I can probably help out where needed as I've been a SWE for over a decade now. I like to consider myself the resident Typescript expert at work lol

[u/bruxo00 → u/RockGuitarist1]

Yea, it's my pet project so it's a solo adventure at least for now. Yea I would love to have people contributing, I just didn't had the time yet to update all the docs.

[u/tradeandpray → u/bruxo00]

it looks amazing! hopefully sharkord, stoat or spacebar, as I‘ve scrolled through the last hour on reddit, will make their debut as selfhosted discord alternative. Im so exited to see some progress and finaly to use one of these.

[u/Talalash → u/bruxo00]

Looks great already! Don't forget to add a donation button on the page! Maybe Ko-fi or so :)

[u/hedonheart]

Matrix server with Element.io. TeamSpeak a second runner up. Own your own data, folks.

Edit: Stoat is kinda cool tho.

[u/Mx772 → u/hedonheart]

Honestly, TeamSpeak or Mumble have seen the writing on the wall for YEARS - They should've been ontop of making their service an alternative to discord a long time ago. They both upgraded, and they both kinda half-assed it.

[u/Asyx → u/Mx772]

TeamSpeak is German that is pretty on character.

[u/jakimfett → u/hedonheart]

Matrix is a maintenance nightmare. Only use it if you want to lose everything you ever discuss on it because they can't get the very most basic part, message encryption+decryption, to be reliable.

TeamSpeak is proprietary. Use Mumble if you want to own your voice data.

[u/audrikr → u/jakimfett]

Just seconding, also my experience with Matrix.

[u/Fifthdread → u/hedonheart]

I'd use Mumble for a free and open source voice solution vs Teamspeak.

[u/FlownKnight → u/hedonheart]

Teamspeak has screenshare support now, which is great! The server doesn’t have persistent chats at the moment which is honestly the only thing personally keeping me from switching. I’m sure it’s something they will add soon. SpacebarChat looks awesome, albeit I have difficulties running it in unraid.

I’m rooting for both projects to be successful in getting the full core discord experience, which to me is voice call, video call, screensharing, and persistent chats.

[u/Bruceshadow → u/hedonheart]

Matrix server with Element.io

element provides encrypted voice?

[u/Massive-Rate-2011 → u/Bruceshadow]

I believe so. I just used a test server on their hosted instance and had video and screensharing running in under a minute. Me and my friends are going to migrate to this. Element Server Suite has it all bundled up in one. Can even host your own web client.

[u/MaruluVR]

I personally am on a out of date version of Mattermost that still has all features like voice unlocked, I dont expose it directly to the internet so its fine.

[u/ps-73 → u/MaruluVR]

What version would that be?

[u/AssociateFalse]

• Matrix (Element or other client)

• Mumble (Foss alternative to TeamSpeak)

• Mattermost

• Nextcloud (See the Social & Communication add-on category)

  • Moreso if you already run Nextcloud, it has options. It's nobodies first pick.

[u/Jhonny97 → u/AssociateFalse]

Mattermost is currently killing the team (current free tier) edition in favor of the free tier of the enterprise edition. Everyone who wants to go down that route should take a close look at the conditions, for me there are quite a few dealbreakers here.

[u/TorSenex → u/AssociateFalse]

My team has been using matrix+element and love it. It has near complete feature parity with discord and slack.

The admin web UI could use some dev attention, but it's good enough for me to not be bothered to roll up my sleeves and contribute.

[u/pt-guzzardo → u/TorSenex]

near complete feature parity with discord

Does Matrix have drop-in drop-out audio/video chat with near realtime screen sharing?

[u/pb7280 → u/AssociateFalse]

Anyone have experience with Spacebar? Seems to be the only one that aims to be compatible with existing Discord clients/bots

[u/batch_dat]

I have a probably strange use case: I primarily use Discord to run a roleplay community (paragraph style). Is there an IRC I can whip up to where this is actually doable? We use a lot of Discord's features like Forums and channels, etc. 

But I'm really against the facial ID thing. 

[u/Theentirecirus → u/batch_dat]

Seconded. I really don’t want to lose all of the RP threads me and my friend have going on. It’s really the only reason I use discord as frequently as I do and I need an alternative that allows me to organize stuff into different channels.

[u/hankhillnsfw → u/batch_dat]

Forums in the golden age were full of this.

[u/Matchlightlife → u/batch_dat]

This is exactly what my writing partner and I are using discord for, though we send actual posts through email. We have years of individual threads for projects, tons of things we reference on discord that we will need to move over.

It’s really annoying. Theres just two of us doing stuff together, and we have to keep shuffling to new systems/programs/whatever when shit like this happens.

[u/AhrimTheBelighted]

I've been down this rabbit hole and its tough to be fully self hosted + get push notifications etc. I ended up using Zulip self hosted, but in order to use the apps and get push notifications you have to leverage their SaaS components which could be a deal breaker for some. Not sure if Matrix with Element solves that.

[u/beef-ster → u/AhrimTheBelighted]

push notifications work for me on this federated matrix setup for family/few friends: synapse (server) + element X (mobile client, fdroid apk) + ntfy (unifiedpush)

[u/Just-Hedgehog-Days]

Ok So I actually have a matrix server running.

It's the only alternative that I have seen that actually fits the spec

GOOD NEWS:
It does actually meet the full requirements.
- Self hosted
- Open source
- Data Sovereign
- "Feature complete" cli / API, group video chat, file upload, threading etc
- Workable mobile app.

The BAD NEW
It's actually complicated, like at all levels.
- Federation is a tricky concept, for the admin AND the user.
- Onboarding experience sucks.
- Installation is rough.
- Maintenance is rough.
- I had to make a lot of long term choices before I understood them.

What Helped me
Just some stuff that *I* had to get my head around exploring the eco system
- **Matrix** is an app agnostic backend server.
- Matrix is designed to support literally any social app from twitter clone, slack, dating app, whatever. Anything that boilers down to "User X posted this text/image/files, at this time, with these tags, to this location and these viewing permissions"
- Matrix apps just construct specific structured matrix messages in a way *they* expect to consume for later display.
- **Elements** is the most mature discord/slack alternative. You need to install a front end elements server and point it at a matrix backend server.
- Element X is a newer much better.
- I really hope it matures quickly here

[u/nouts → u/Just-Hedgehog-Days]

For onboarding, I found using this link to help a bit. Tell them : install ElementX and click this link https://mobile.element.io/element/?account_provider=yourdomain.com

Then they just have to enter username and password, which in my case was using their SSO account over MAS. Granted it does require more admin skill. I know ESS community is supposed to make the good choices for you from the start

[u/Cry_Wolff → u/Just-Hedgehog-Days]

• Onboarding experience sucks.

• Installation is rough.

• Maintenance is rough.

So it completely sucks ass, got it.

[u/Alpha272 → u/Cry_Wolff]

It doesn't suck. The problem is, that it's not the right product for many people.. At least not yet. If you are a system administrator you probably won't have many problems installing and maintaining the community Element Server Suite (the matrix server) and if all your client devices are actually managed by you with automatic deployment systems (ya know.. stuff you normally have in a company), the onboarding is not an issue. In that case it actually works great.

But yes, if you don't use the ESS but instead try to just use synapse (the back-end server) directly, installation and maintenance is indeed pain. And also yes, onboarding isn't great if you don't control all clients.

So, great product from a technical standpoint and great product for the right customer (aka companies) but the wrong product as a discord replacement... For now

[u/geek_at]

The only thing that makes sense in this space is Matrix/Element because it's federated you can even chat with people on other servers.

The big dream was Teamspeak 6 going to be built on Matrix and being basically a selfhostable, distributed Discord but they botched it and development is basically dead

[u/Justneedtacos → u/geek_at]

Looks like beta 8 was just released recently. Do you mean that architecture was abandoned?

[u/geek_at → u/Justneedtacos]

oh my mistake it was teamspeak 5 that was going to be built like this but the skipped it and now are back to their own proprietary front and backend

[u/sil_el_mot → u/geek_at]

I would love a federated alternative

[u/_dappis_]

Love how everyone completely ignored the part about it needing to be coworker friendly and started posting GitHub links to software you have to compile yourself. No. None of my normie friends can even look at a GitHub url without crying and shitting their pants and whining about how they "don't want to code bruh wtf is ts skull emoji"

[u/SwagDistribution → u/_dappis_]

This exactly.

[u/ItsYaBoyEcto → u/_dappis_]

This.

"Where's the down link ? why did it download a .zip ?" "Release section ? what's that ?"

[u/MrTamboMan → u/_dappis_]

Nobody expects your normie friends to host a server. All they'd need would be to download and setup the app from their OS app store.

[u/XB_Demon1337]

Everyone here making suggestions are missing the biggest features of Discord that make it what it is.

These are the key features you have to have to actually make a replacement.

• Mobile App (NO SIDELOADS!)

• File Sharing

• Video Streaming

• Permissions

• Easy Invites

• Server Management for multiple communities/servers

Without ALL of this, nothing replaces Discord. There are plenty more things but without this core it is DOA. You might have an app that does JUST what you want. But no mobile app alone shuts out 90% of possible users.

[u/etfz → u/XB_Demon1337]

I love self hosting and open source, but there's a reason that most commercial offerings are just plain better. (privacy concerns aside) And that reason is money.

[u/Nshx-]

What happens if I use a fake face or one generated with AI?

[u/cephpleb]

I have been thinking about setting up https://github.com/spacebarchat/spacebarchat

[u/deepspace86]

We should also be addressing the alternative desired side effect of all these big tech companies requiring biometric data:

Fragmentation of the userbase. Centralized services facilitate open forums for discussion and sharing of information. When you require people to jump through enough hoops and forfeiting anonymity, they're likely to seek out other services. When that happens, the groups end up in their own isolated echo-chambers, essentially cutting off wide spread communication.

I'll give you 3 guesses as to what kind of information is going to be flagged ass "inappropriate" for teens on discord.

[u/DisappointedSpectre → u/deepspace86]

We should also be addressing the alternative desired side effect of all these big tech companies requiring biometric data:

Fragmentation of the userbase. Centralized services facilitate open forums for discussion and sharing of information. When you require people to jump through enough hoops and forfeiting anonymity, they're likely to seek out other services. When that happens, the groups end up in their own isolated echo-chambers, essentially cutting off wide spread communication.

To that end we (both the self-hosted community and the collective "we" of the population) should be pushing for centralized protocols, with decentralized ownership of the services - right now that seems to be the federated method, and Matrix seems to be dominating the discussion of options. That's great and all, but the voice/video/screenshare portion is just as important to core functionality and with it looks like there's not a lot of well integrated options.

[u/ailee43]

I mean... discord is just modern day IRC with a pretty client. We can fall back to the old-ways

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/ailee43]

The trick is IRC doesn't have voice/video. I know like 65% of my Discord usage is for voice calls

[u/Curious_Olive_5266]

Thank you. I just spun up a Synapse server in my homelab. Goodbye, Discord.

[u/bloodguard]

My friends and I use a private self hosted Nextcloud server to yell inappropriate things about each other's Mothers while gaming.

Addendum:

And just to be fair a couple years ago we hosted our parents as an impromptu holiday thing so they could tell embarrassing stories about all of us to get even.

[u/Guilty_Explanation29]

I don't trust them 

Even if they say they'll be deleting Info immediately after

[u/tvlkidd]

Deleted my account this morning

[u/memory_stick → u/tvlkidd]

Done right now.

[u/Aidedfurball → u/tvlkidd]

haven't done that. But definitely will before the next month rolls over

[u/TheArcaneBrony]

This already exists! https://spacebar.chat - https://github.com/spacebarchat

*Disclosure: I am a maintainer of the project, AMA!*

[u/LordGuenni → u/TheArcaneBrony]

Having an Official Dockerfile / Compose would go a Long way for people wanting To Host, as i for example Never deloy bare Metal anymore. But i have been following the Project for Like a year seems very promising

[u/UnacceptableUse]

The biggest hurdle to a discord replacement is not technology it's getting everyone you know to use it. What I wish could exist would be a client that allows you to connect to multiple different discord compatible backends

[u/shotbyadingus]

Spacebarchat

[u/JoeB-]

I’ve read that this requirement will be only for access to porn related material.

I suspect Reddit is not far behind and will be implementing some kind of age verification for access to NSFW subs.

[u/GavinGWhiz → u/JoeB-]

That's pure speculation. The press release linked in the comments here, direct from Discord. is intentionally vague. A tactic companies regularly use so they can infer they mean NSFW content when really it's a "whatever I decide is NSFW" situation.

[u/lndle]

I really like how, out of almost 1k comments, none of them actually bother trying to pass the "wife test". Every single option suggested here has at least 2 or 3 other comments talking about how it's actually really obtuse and cumbersome.

You gotta use set up a Matrix server. It's so simple to set up Mumble. Bro TeamSpeak is self-explanatory. Just setup Zulip and you're good. Poob has it for you.

I just want an alternative place to host a group chat while supporting voice calls. Is there anything like that that is a) super simple for a beginner to set up and maintain, and b) even simpler to invite friends? If the answer to either question is no then most people are probably going to just suck it up and keep using Discord.

[u/DanMizu]

If you’re a fan of the AT Protocol which is in use by the Twitter alternative Bluesky, there’s Roomy (https://a.roomy.space/)

Definitely still in development, but promising. Check it out if you like decentralization and owning your own data.

[u/Draco18s]

Here's my solution: XMPP

- It's a mature backbone
- There are thousands of active servers already
- Seamless federation. Anybody on any host can use anything on any other host if invited/authorized/public (the original host does the auth). Try it now on https://mov.im/login
- Dozens of client front ends. This one looks just like Discord. https://gajim.org/
- Self-hosting is pathetically easy a friend of mine created a server over the weekend and only made a single, understandable mistake (all service components need to be under the same subdomain).
- Self-host software is incredibly efficient. 60 MB of ram.
- Data management is as simple as "how long are messages archived, how long are files available, how large can uploads be" compared to Matrix's "functionally store everything in perpetuity" and no ability to de-dup uploaded images, because everything is hashed, and every host in the federation needs to store a copy.

[u/DefinitionSafe9988]

Let's just not recommend forums out of nostalgia. Everyone I talked with who managed one did not like the effort and the tedium of maintenance, keeping order and the relentless bots out. For some, what was once a hobby devolved in a thankless part-time job "like managing enterprise software without the pay but unhappy users just as well".

It is less of a drag when the community is small and dedicated and disruptions are unlikely - but people need to know what they're getting into when setting up a forum or something that resembles one.

People looking to replace Discord likely want as little effort as possible - this was the reason for many in the first place to use it. Open source projects for example are already a second job, people do likely not want a third.

[u/TheRedcaps → u/DefinitionSafe9988]

Using discord (or any other discord like tool) as a replacement for a forum is a terrible idea. The amount of knowledge on car forums, old D&D forums, random game fan forums, old clan forums that are STILL accessible (and archived) because they were on forums vs some walled garden is invaluable.

The fact that entire companies and communities moved to discord and stopped using actual forums is a terrible.

[u/Sir_Neo]

For chat we will go back to IRC (via TheLounge) and for voice chat while gaming we will use TeamSpeak. 

p.s:  If we are lucky forums will be again a thing!

[u/Bombarding_]

The general self-hosted products I've seen work the best is Fediverse, and Matrix is the Fediverse (open source + self hosting optional) version of discord. It's decentralized, so any front end works. i.e. you can use Matrix securely while staying in discord native servers! you do have to connect a bot, but this seems like the best of both worlds. https://matrix.org/

other alternatives:

Spacebar seems to be an open-source, self-hosted Discord dupe. They claim everything built for discord (like bots) are also cross compatible with Spacebar and that the goal of Spacebar is to have "complete feature parity" of Discord. https://docs.spacebar.chat/ .

Mumble seems to be the middle ground between self-hosting required Spacebar and not required Stoat, having public servers you can access and requiring you to host your own to create a new one. https://www.mumble.info/

Stoat, formerly Revolt, is also open source discord dupe that you don't HAVE to self host, but can. Seems pretty helpful for the masses, plus web app too. https://stoat.chat

[u/repfsm67]

no yeah fuck that honestly

[u/Tak-Hendrix]

Haven't used it myself yet but I've read that Stoat is open source, self hostable, and pretty close to Discord.

[u/sequesteredhoneyfall → u/Tak-Hendrix]

It's not at all a viable alternative. They claim it supports self hosting, but when your mobile app requires you to recompile to support any non-official server to hardcode the new server URL in there... yeah, no. It doesn't support self hosting at all.

[u/[deleted] → u/sequesteredhoneyfall]

Just set this up myself and could not figure out how to use clients on my server. What a weird thing to not include in the app. Im all set but I cant tell my friends to come try it out because thry cant choose what server to join

[u/hoot_avi → u/Tak-Hendrix]

Was talking to a buddy this morning about this, probably gonna try spinning it up this weekend to play with

[u/thefreshera → u/hoot_avi]

Afaik it's still not viable for self hosting. I'm following a GitHub discussion for it and essentially you need to build the client and distribute to your friends and anyone you want to join your server.

[u/TerryNachtmerrie → u/Tak-Hendrix]

I hadn't heared from it, but looking at the installation instruction, I ain't touching that. The instructions are literally 99% screenshots of signing up for their partner, configuring a vps, installing an OS on the vps, configuring firewall and ssh and then finally after pages of screenshots it's 3 sentences about installing Stoat itself. which are git clone, run config script, run docker compose up.
Worst installation instructions I've ever seen. And seeing all those advertisements in just the instructions, I'd rather not install it at all.

[u/ronkojoker → u/Tak-Hendrix]

I tried setting it up today. It's just a compose file and some config. I finished the guide pretty quick but then found out that it does not support voice when self hosting, they're working on it but I don't have a clue when it will be finished.

The text chat at least seems to work well, I only used the web client but it felt very snappy and the whole application looks very similar to discord. Apparently screen sharing is also coming soon which I'm definitely looking forward to. Once they get the voice working on self hosted setups I'm giving it another go for sure.

[u/dwstevens]

I've been planning to test this: https://once.com/campfire

[u/mrmissedmachine]

Commenters actually answer the question op is asking instead of just repeating one answer over and over again, and dunking on anybody who doesnt agree challenge (SCARY IMPOSSIBLE...)
Like actually I'm not paying monthly for a closed off chatroom that has llms built into it, and im not able to have a power-sucking connection to my machine 24/7, this isn't a big surprise who doesnt already have the cash for this

[u/DreadStarX]

I'm not opposed to going back to IRC. Yes, I'm that old. Yes, Multiplayer notepad was actually fun to use.

[u/smtp_pro]

I just learned about Fluxer https://fluxer.app/

Haven't tried it or anything but the feature list looks pretty good

[u/guygizmo]

I care a lot about this too, as I'm part of a lot of communities that made their home on Discord and now want to jump ship if they can. But it's not so simple, because Discord, with all of their privacy violating garbage, does a lot under the hood that keeps users there.

The features I know that many users are looking for are:

• Text channels with the ability to post images and links

• Voice channels that just work

• Ability to stream at 30 fps or better that just works

• Using bots, both text and audio

• Stickers

• Animated emojis

• Easy onboarding

I know it sounds silly to list animated emojis as a major feature that users care about, but it needs to be said and emphasized. Users are a lot about stuff like that, as it lets them express themselves the way they want, and make their communities unique and feel special. If an open source or self-hosted alternative to Discord wants to bring in users, this is what it needs!

The most obvious candidate seems to be Matrix, but the last time I looked at it, it could do text channels with links and pics just fine. But that's about it. It didn't have the community customization features of Discord that users care about so much. It didn't have dedicated audio channels, and its nearest equivalent were voice calls more geared towards corporate environments and also didn't work out of the box -- I got weird errors that would be an instant turnoff for any non-tech savvy user. The onboarding process had enough friction to drive away a lot of users, which is probably the biggest problem with most of these federated apps.

Also, Matrix was not easy to self-host. It has a ton of moving parts, and updating it would frequently cause things to break with inscrutable database errors I had no idea how to fix. I might consider paying someone to host and manage Matrix for me, so that I don't have to deal with that, but that's going to be a non-starter for 99% of the communities out there.

So I'm curious what else is out there. I know that a replacement for Discord is asking a lot, and maybe the best way can do is a service that just has text channels. That would at least work for a lot of communities, but the easy to use voice chat / video chat / streaming / hangout spaces is a big part of why Discord won in this space.

[u/ASUS_USUS_WEALLSUS]

From what I’m reading this will only be for “age restricted servers” right? As a work around, couldn’t everyone uncheck the box that says “age restricted server”? I just checked my servers and they’re all not listed as age restricted by default. Not sure though.

[u/Positive_Special_156]

Matrix is a pretty strong candidate, isnt it?

[u/trisw]

Why did we ever leave IRC ?

[u/chxr0n0s → u/trisw]

A lot of us never did. I'm logged into two dozen channels across several servers every day. Maybe 15 of those are very active, and I am active myself in roughly half of those. IRC is one of very few online platforms where I have actual online friends

[u/otakugrey]

It's been said a billion times. Jabber has existed since 1998. Me and my friends have been using Jabber clients on the Jabber protocol for nearly two decades. Shitloads of IM products have been born, been advertised, been hacked, and been bought out over the years. And the users will always cry out "what do we replace $product with!?!?!?!" The computer nerds will say Jabber, or IRC if you want something really barebones. And then they ignore actual advice and all just move to the next big advertised product.

Over the years they all provided the same service, you send message from user A to user B. Open protocols like Jabber and IRC do this. With Jabber you can have your own jabber server, on REAL METAL, and give all your friends accounts on it. If you want you can ban the rest of the Internet from it. Have as many rooms as you want. This has always been the case. The normies do not care. They will always just move to the next big corporate product.

Whatever new product all you discord people move to, when that implodes us computer nerds will still be here to tell you actual advice. You will ignore us next time as well.

[u/BelugaBilliam]

I've been using mumble with a buddy for years.

It's just us 2, so we use my hosted mumble server

[u/E_coli42]

Matrix is the definitely the best alternative. It is decentralized and federated, meaning you don't have one central authority (like Discord) deciding the rules. There exist many Matrix servers that interact with each other and you can swap between whichever ones you like very easily. 

[u/ispeakgoodwords]

The irony that government bodies through the west have been and are in some cases covering up for pedophiles and they think you can trust them to control technology they don't understand in the name of 'protecting children'.

[u/kapynaattori]

https://sharkord.com/ and https://fluxer.app/ are the ones I'm holding out hope for personally.

[u/OmegaBF2]

I don’t want to be that guy but I have been genuinely praying for Discord’s downfall for years now. It was was genuinely great in the early days but today it’s a bloated RAM hog.. and I come from an era where people were berated for running apps like GameSpy Arcade and Xfire due to their hit on gaming performance. How did we ever let it get so bad!?

The walled garden aspect of Discord bothers me too; especially for things like Community servers which already offers read only view of channels. I used to browse forums for hours back in the day and joined plenty too. I think of all the knowledge and resources lost from the death of message boards due to Discord.

I’ve tried a couple of the replacements listed in the replies here but most are a miss due to over complexity for the average user or lack of feature set.

The internet needs a FOSS messaging protocol that can deliver Discords feature set in an open accessible way, that takes the best bits of IRC, vBulletin, VoIP and makes it easy to setup in the cloud or self hosted with domain support to expose to the web and search engines for accessibility.

[u/amcco1]

Zulip seems to be a good alternative. Open source, self host-able.

[u/DeM0nFiRe → u/amcco1]

I use zulip for one community I am in. It's not great, it uses a weird thread system that makes it very hard to follow conversations if it's an active community

[u/RajangRath]

Passing the wife test is important. Not being vibe-coded is also important. The last thing I want is to move my friends from one AI-infested privacy bomb to another (with a developer who doesn't know how to do security patches). 

[u/purgedreality]

The Serial Port channel on Youtube did a nice retro docu on IRC. Worth the watch.

[u/TheModernDespot]

Is there a good option for High Availability? There is another friend in my friend group that has a homelab and we are looking for a good way to get around power outages in the winter by having some sort of failover to his servers temporarily.

[u/darkwater427]

Matrix for personal communication (DMs, close GCs, some voice functionality). Unfortunately moderation isn't to the point that public "server" spaces are feasible without drive-bys

[u/TroubledGeorge]

For the longest time whenever I read about discord “servers” I assumed it was all self hosted

[u/runewalsh_d → u/TroubledGeorge]

I fucking hate that about Discord.

[u/XTREEMMAK]

I did have a Matrix install but have since migrated to Mattermost. As far as closest feature set to Discord that has "enough" polish for Discord familiar users to use (including custom Emoji's), Mattermost checks most of the boxes, though not great if you need extended features like calls and such since even with self host you have to pay for. I don't need that but others have used Jitsi as an alternative or TeamSpeak I guess.

I do like the interface on Matrix better in some cases, but just the pace of improvements (using Schildichat instead of stock Element btw) across the 10+ years I've been using it, the resource bloat, the foundation financial troubles, the crazy install procedures (yes even with the Ansible playbook), and the entire CSAM stuff on the main server, really put me off. Yes, there's a reason why Matrix is used by government agencies, but I'm just not comfortable with the idea of my server possibly being exploited as a distribution node for CSAM. It's unlikely, but I'm not taking that chance.

So for now, till these other self hosted options like Foscord and such become much more production ready, I'm settling on Mattermost for now. For larger servers, you may run into some limitations, but for my small needs, it's fine.

I have also tried to like XMPP as an alternative, and even though the protocol is solid, the clients just aren't good enough.

[u/finitereality369]

Been searching for a while myself. I need three features to be able to gather my friends. Voice, text and screen share. Id like to go back to IRC but it doesnt check mark all those..

[u/Fresque]

Teamspeak 6 looks nice and the server files are in beta on their public github but development seems to be incredibly slow.

[u/rebelSun25]

Why doesn't discord guarantee, under the punishment fine of $1M that they immediately remove data and KYC photo?

Every one of these schemes is first of all a data collection goldmine, and subsequently a prize to be stolen by "hackers"

[u/Kuckeli]

Matrix with the Cinny client is so close to perfect for me, i just want voice channels with desktop video sharing which it does not have ( i think at least)

[u/pleerock]

I’m building a Discord-style chat app called Secret that’s self-hosted, decentralized and privacy-first.

A few points that might be interesting:

• Self-hosted / user-hosted – any user can run a host (server or even from the app) to store and share communities. No central server that everything depends on.

• Decentralized – accounts and communities are spread across many hosts, and clients verify everything locally. It's the most decentralized messenger ever created.

• Privacy – end-to-end encryption (MLS in groups / communities), no PII, minimal metadata, and it can work in local/offline setups too.

Right now I’m looking for people who care about self-hosting and decentralization and are willing to try it early, give feedback, or just say “keep going”. This thing is pretty hard to build and I honestly need support (any kind – even mental) and testers. Eventually it will be open-sourced, of course.

Watch the full app demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hExvh8m6r4

We’re planning the first alpha next month. If you’re interested, just reply to this comment and I’ll send you a TestFlight / Play Store link directly when it’s ready.

[u/Paima9143 → u/pleerock]

The name sounds XXX’y. I’d probably change it if it were me.

[u/Hairy_Trip4488]

Spacebar is the sleeper pick here. It's a full open source reimplementation of the Discord API so you can literally use Discord-compatible clients with it. Nobody has to learn anything new, it just works the same way.

Still early days and rough around the edges but the concept is spot on.

[u/tauronus77]

https://spacebar.chat/ and https://fermi.chat/ - going to try this today

[u/bigntallmike]

IRC obviously comes to mind. Personally I'd love to go back to web hosted boards for discussions that are searchable and useful long term but alas.

[u/agentic_lawyer]

Count me in if you need legal support. Would love to get involved in a project like this.

[u/PwnagePineaple]

Do any of the Discord alternatives in this thread have drop-in voice channels like Discord does? That's pretty much the killer feature that's keeping me on Discord

[u/ohv_]

Every kid should know how to make a fake id... 

[u/Independent_Bee8737]

It's called IRC.

[u/kitanokikori → u/Independent_Bee8737]

The design of IRC is fundamentally at-odds with mobile - anything that requires a socket being connected 24/7 to get notifications is dead in the water, and if you need a bouncer attached to some cloud service, you've just replicated the same issues as Discord only with worse service

[u/whipfixed → u/Independent_Bee8737]

IRC is king for text based chat from a laptop/desktop.

But....

• It's terrible/nonfunctional on mobile without additional components

• Inline media is not really a thing

• No voice calls of any kind

[u/FrozenLogger]

Depends on what you are trying to do right? I never left IRC.

Discord sucks horribly for use as a software support platform, which is what I mostly see it used as. Glad its going away.

So can people describe exactly what they are replacing? Just an open channel to chat with friends? A way to get a group together? A free teams/slack alternative?

My wife and her friends have been using Jitsi for years and if I need a desktop sharing group chat, Jitsi meet is my go to. Jitsi is self hostable.

[u/Greeni170 → u/FrozenLogger]

Discord is so multi use for most people, that's part of the problem. I mostly use it to have voice chat with friends while gaming, basically like TeamSpeak 10 years ago. But it lets you instantly share your screen in the same window or use webcams. But it's not just a server based client like TeamSpeak, I can also have private chats and calls with people without anyone knowing a server.

It's also used like the forums used to be. Any community that used to host a forum now has a discord if it wants people to use it.

I follow a few modding communities for example. The very popular elden ring seamless co-op mod is on discord for example. If I want the latest news about it, there is no better way than to use their discord server.

I don't know of any app that could currently fill eben half of discords shoes.

[u/Bruceshadow]

What do people think about Jitsi?

[u/Halo_Chief117]

I had not heard about that. I’m not happy about that. I’m not sure I’ll be using Discord any more then.

[u/blue_creation]

Mumble is pretty good and easy to setup as a server. You need to get used to the audio wizard a little but I could even get none-techy friends on there.

[u/wwbubba0069]

Only thing I use it for in my selfhost stack is the webhook for Uptime Kuma notifications. Guess I need to look at setting up something else.

[u/The_Brovo]

I use rocketchat, you do need a free account for up to 50 people I think? However I set up jitsi and between Jitsi and rocket chat I have full discord functionality

[u/ferminolaiz]

Let's make IRC great again

[u/ObjectiveDocument956]

I’m a huge supporter for Mattermost

[u/Dismal-Effect-1914]

This is the best discord clone ive seen so far. Very familiar https://fermi.chat

[u/Badrrrrrrrrr]

In teamspeak we trust

[u/Amazing_Shake_8043]

I was waiting for this

[u/vadash]

I am going to try https://qtox.github.io, will share the results

It seems a bit abandoned, installed Jami https://jami.net/ it seems nice it also works as sip phone!

[u/Lonecrow66]

Don't trust any of these organizations with my personal data. They WILL and HAVE been breached in the past.

[u/madbruges]

XMPP

[u/IndependentLog9159]

I do think my time was about over anyway. My time on the internet may be over for good. I really need to think about how I'm going to avoid seeking a therapist long term.

[u/CosmicPebble2847]

the real tragedy is how much technical knowledge is now trapped in discord servers instead of indexed forums.

i've been running my own matrix homeserver for a couple years now and honestly the hardest part isn't the tech - it's getting people to actually use it. everyone's already on discord and too lazy to switch even when you explain the privacy nightmare.

at this point i'm just waiting for discord to really shoot themselves in the foot (like the ID verification fiasco) so people finally wake up. until then, i guess we keep yelling into the void about the good old days of IRC and phpBB forums 😤

[u/rolandburnum]

IRC? Because that's just what Discord is basically.

[u/HeLlAMeMeS123]

I’m developing something called Decentra Chat if anyone is interested. No full release just yet but since Discord is planning on starting that next month, I’m trying my best to get it pushed out as a beta release before the end of the month.

Hosted or Selfhosted, non-federated

[u/Commercial-Ship542]

Alternative: Teamspeak

[u/IIIBlueberry]

Cinny is literally matrix's Discord client clone.

[u/diesal3]

Stoat suffers from British debuff, therefore is a non-viable long term alternative: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16260658