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Bring back the old BBs!
I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000’s IM landscape. Soon we’ll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn’t support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.
Hey… Trillian was awesome.
Lmao that is the exact program that came to mind.
I’m glad nobody is mentioning WhatsApp as an alternative. They released usernames a few months ago, all messages are end-to-end encrypted, will add voice and video calls to WhatsApp Web, many people and companies have an account there already… It would be an easy migration, but awful for privacy. Thankfully, the most similar suggestions I found were Telegram and Signal.
WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal aren’t Discord alternatives though? There’s no ability to have multi text and persistent voice channels in groups. WhatsApp doesn’t even support screensharing.
What’s app claims E2EE but it’s not really they store everything on their servers that any one of their staff can access at any point
Your cloud backups are not encrypted either, and you have to explicitly opt out of cloud backups. That means any chats or group chats that involve someone who hasn’t opted out are sitting unencrypted on Meta servers, even if you personally have opted out. Even if everyone has opted out and assume it’s encrypted, they still know who you’re talking to, when you talk to them, how frequently, etc.
That is false.
it’s absolutely true actually… whatsapp are the key holders and there was a leak a few weeks ago that showed meta staff can access anyone’s messages: they just need to raise a ticket and they get access to an app that allows them to pull up any user they like
this is always the case unless you’re the keyholder. any app where you can “forgot password” and get your data back you aren’t the key-holder (though recovery phrases are legitimate), or login simply via phone number and an SMS MFA or similar
it’s also true for apple stuff - despite being similarly encrypted - but they’ve at least on the surface displayed a willingness to protect user data from external threats
There was no leak. It was an ex employee who claimed that others were able to access everyone’s messages.
Regardless, the app is proprietary. You shouldn’t trust it.
Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
The enshitification of the internet as a whole killed so many forums. I used to scour forums (and still regularly visit old forums) for info, but now it’s on discord or some bs facebook group. I miss old school forums and wikis and I fail to understand why everybody got away from them :c how on earth is an endless scroll of a FB page remotely conductive to finding information vs searching for the right thread on a forum?! I have no experience using discord so can’t speak for them but seeing all these articles makes me think I never will either.
I absolutely love matrixs UI, but I wish they would make the device verification configurable. aware it’s a million times easier to say then implement though.
We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
I just set up mybb board a few weeks ago for old times sake. Brought back so many memories.
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It’s not search indexable or archivable. It’s more or less a memory hole.
Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.
I hope you’re not implying an old forum search was any good
Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence “search indexable”
I’m not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.
Not denying that it’s shit, I don’t know anyone who’s actually happy with it. But old forums also weren’t built nicely.
You say search indexable as if it’s a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:- moved somewhere
- renamed, so now the link is dead
- was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
- was edited to remove crucial information
- was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
- someone got butthurt so it’s now defaced
- all of the above and more.
So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can’t access it.
The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
If the old service is less convenient that fucking Discord, it’s not better.
The information is as inaccessible now, just in different ways.
We never had a good solution. We had different bad solutions, each bad in it’s unique way.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything
yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations
Yea… Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn’t great at…
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
oh yeah!
what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.
You don’t have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.
i haven’t seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.
Pripietary…
It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
Can Stoat be used as an alternative?
As an EU co, how will they navigate age verification
EU doesn’t require age verification (yet). It’s exclusively British thing for now, and we fight hard to keep it this way
Oh, good, ty. I just made an account last night and will check it out to see if it fits my needs, but this was nagging in the back of my head as others have just decided to bend the knee regardless of jurisdiction.
just decided to bend the knee regardless of jurisdiction.
yeah, I understand why companies do this tho
from their side it is cheaper to just put the same measures and requirements for every legislation and in discord’s case this is the perfect opportunity to get more data from their users
Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
Jitsi, simplex, mumble, matrix, lemmy.
I don’t really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
I would bet on the screen sharing not being that big of a requirement for most people. Voice and text chats though? Yeah, that’s the minimum.
A lot of people I know regularly use screen sharing through discord or opentalk. Both for work/productivity and while gaming (watching each other, helping, sharing what people are up to etc).
To get people to switch it sadly should support all features: text, voice, video and sending files/images/gifs/videos.
It’s tough.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.
Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.
I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.
Agreed. I think the fact that discord kind of does all the things is what made it attractive. But it’s not GOOD at the forum aspect, and it has its flaws for the other use cases as well.
Although there is some kind of fun with “real time chatting” on a forum. Back then, It kind of became that way when it got heated. It’s like a turn based game where all the players take their moves and execute at the same time lol
I also want this suite of things. I stream movies to friends, share games I’m playing…
These are core features to me now in a robust chat client
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can’t even tell the difference.
By reducing a complex topic down to one score that has “features” as only one of many factors, so that “openness” and “safety” push it to the top.
A lot of people don’t seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. There’s almost no platform that has all of them so you have to zoom out and look at more of the general purpose. The Discord “servers” I’ve used NEVER used anything but text chat.
I understand that but even the text chat is a different experience than what Discourse offers. Even people who only used Discord for text chat and want a replacement for that would be better on IRC.
IRC isn’t really a replacement either. Discord supports rich multimedia embedding and the servers preserve history (by default anyway).
It’s not the text chat they’re referring to. An annoying amount of open so it be projects use Discord as a replacement for forums specifically.
I’m aware but I don’t think this was the issue Ulrich was speaking of. If they were, I don’t think it was well conveyed.
Yeah, clearly everyone loves IRC, that’s why no one uses Discord /s
I honestly think the vast majority of people on Discord don’t know what IRC is, and therefore don’t have an opinion of it. However, I didn’t mean to suggest IRC as the best alternative anyway.
Okay so they know what Discord is, but they don’t know what IRC is, despite it being 20 years older. What does that tell you?
looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
I’ll keep you company in the minority, since that’s what I want too
Live chat is all I ever use but you never know
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?I’m thinking of something else, I think.
You’re thinking of Guilded.
Looks like Roblox forced everyone using Guilded to suddenly have a Roblox account in 2024, and then Guilder officially shut down about 2 months ago (end of 2025).
Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year
I love that Discourse is open. I hate that it’s just horrendous from a usability perspective. Flarum is much better than that, in my opinion, while being way more flexible. Examples:
I find discourse perfectly usable.
Cool 👍️
Discourse isnt free
And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service
This is misinformation.
You can self host it, for free.
That doesn’t seem to be communicated very clearly on the website, though I could always be missing something.
It also doesn’t seem like the average Discord user is the target audience. The website is for sysadmins, and the goal seems to be selling a Slack/Teams alternative to a business or government organization.
Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. “Rooms” (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, b
I don’t think that’s true anymore. it has been encrypted by default for quite a few years now
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
They should use some of the funds for UX.
For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXACTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.
Not whatever they’re doing now.
copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY
Please don’t. Please for the love of god don’t
I think that is one of the problems. People want an exact copy of discord but don’t ask if discord even has the perfect layout and if it should be copied directly. Anyway there are clients like cinny which look similar and other chat platforms like stroat(previously revolt) and spacebar which look exactly like discord and they are not doing massively well either so shrugs.
Look at Cinny if you’re looking for a Discord-like experience
Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, that’s why it’s in the position it’s in today, yet it gets ranked lower than… Rocket chat??
If we’re objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.
Discord got popular because it’s centralized and pretty
What functionality are we talking about? Genuinely curious here, since I use discord like a couple of times a year.
From what I’ve noticed, matrix can do basically the same, except for the voice chats which are a pain to setup (and are better handled by jitsi anyways).
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he’s going to include Discourse…)
Not a single reference to Zulip either (edit: I meant in the comments on this thread)
Personally, I really want Matrix to succed though, hope this discord diaspora (?) gives them enough push to smooth their problems.Either they edited it to add Zulip or you missed it.
shit I meant in the thread, I get my comment was confusing
Zulip is literally the 5th thing in the article.
yeah my bad, I meant here in the comments, I was thinking of the thread more than the article itself
Some other alternatives not reviewed:
- Spacebar
- TeamSpeak
- Root
Spacebar sounded really promising when I checked them out years ago.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are: Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
Unfortunately, seems like it’s still not at a point where it could cover basic Discord functionality.
Edit: I should be clear, I’m not trying to discourage it. I really hope it succeeds to the goal of parity with Discord! Love to hear from someone who has used it a bit.
Yeah, it was immediately clear based on the scoring that he was super biased toward Discourse. It’s not a Discord alternative, and had no place in that list at all.
I mean, it certainly is an alternative to all three morons using discord as some sort of forum for an app or similar. The same way discord is the worst for easily searchable info like a forum is basically the converse for discourse. And exactly the opposite for real time chat obviously.
He at least mentions outright it’s a forum tool. The real problem is having to include it because people misuse discord.
Kind of like anyone using SharePoint for anything. It’s not meant for it.
Why is SimpleX not mentioned anywhere in the article or the comments here? I thought it is similar to Discord. Am I wrong?
Is SimpleX based on Matrix? I have this recollection that it is, but I don’t if it’s a false memory or not.
No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.
God, I hated that terminology when I needed to talk with people about discord.
I can only assume it’s on purpose so average users really understand it wrong to avoid the associated negative view. Clever, really. But absolutely evil.
This wasn’t intended to be misleading. The term “Server” as in a Discord Server is because, be fore Discord were the days of Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. For many of us gamers used to have to run or pay for their own actual server to have that kind of functionality. Then we’d combine direct calling with Skype for small groups and video. The term made sense at the time, but hasn’t held up to the test of time. Basically Discord solved a problems of having to pay for those servers, and having to use two separate programs.
I’m a it professional (working in enterprise DCs) and have been running ts2 and murmur myself. It was misleading from the beginning and while I do understand your point I can not see a company doing this in good faith, I am too old for that.
You didn’t provide any evidence that it wasn’t intentionally misleading. Discord was clearly intended to replace communities like IRC, Ventrilo and TeamSpeak so they used language that was familiar to them, even though it was completely incorrect.
The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
I highly doubt that when you start a “Discord server”, there’s any new machinery spun up. There is a near 100% chance it’s just an entry in a database. Nobody’s running a server just for him. So I don’t think there’s even reason to be charitable.
Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that
If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
Apparently that’s already in the backend since december, they’re just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it
If they enable that and iron out the iOS app, it’d be a surefire migration for my whole crew.
I can’t even create an account on Stoat yet. New account confirmation emails take hours to arrive and by the time they do, they are already expired.
This is not a discord alternative yet and not be for a long time most likely.
They’re having issues with their email provider due to the hug of death effect, they did not expect to get so much traffic so fast
I understand, but they are losing the train I guess. People are giving up easily when they need a solution fast.
Their loss. They have at least a month to migrate, probably more before most users get forced to verify, there is no rush. That and an ad-free hobby-run project like Stoat doesn’t gain anything from a massive user increase unless it correlates to an increase in devs or money.
I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.
it is open source https://github.com/stoatchat/
I wish their Android version didn’t require Google Play Services. Real bummer.
