61–70 of 489 posts
Most Discord alternatives fail not on tech, but on polish. Signal → private but bad for communities Matrix → flexible but rough UX XMPP → powerful but fragmented Discord → centralized but frictionless Users pick frictionless every time. We probably don’t need new apps or protocols we need a client that works well.
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This has been brought up on HN before, and people smarter than me identified that this view is about 10 years out of date. Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently that include all of the things any other similar tools do. It sounds like only very niche old/minimal XMPP clients don't support encryption by default for example, and virtually all servers have supported it for many years.
Is there a recommended or "blessed" server and client combo for someone who just wants to migrate their friends off discord? The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.
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No message history while not logged in.
That's a feature
I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
Here is a quick promo video as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekOxAg7leXM
This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat. I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s
Yeah it’s so odd that none of the open-source alternatives have this feature. No video calls are not an option. We need video/voice rooms!
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isn't IRC only Text? What about the Voice Chat?
IRC does not even have offline messages, unless you pay / host a bouncer. Which you first have to know about. I'm not sure if any client has solve this, but what about image / video / file hosting? You can't just drag 'n drop a image into a chat. You have to host it on a 3rd party site and link it. I do wonder how server management is now adays. In Discord you can host your own server with a few clicks and make it ea…
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IRC does not even have offline messages, unless you pay / host a bouncer. Which you first have to know about. I'm not sure if any client has solve this, but what about image / video / file hosting? You can't just drag 'n drop a image into a chat. You have to host it on a 3rd party site and link it. I do wonder how server management is now adays. In Discord you can host your own server with a few clicks and make it ea…
In Discord you can't "host" your own "server". You can create a room (internally called a guild, misleadingly referred to as "server" in ui and by a lot of people) on THE discord server, their server, and that room can be split into channels. But the room and the server belongs to discord.
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The problem with XMPP is that it's a suite of RFCs. It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely. XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people. (I am still a proponent of XMP…
This has been brought up on HN before, and people smarter than me identified that this view is about 10 years out of date. Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently that include all of the things any other similar tools do. It sounds like only very niche old/minimal XMPP clients don't support encryption by default for example, and virtually all servers have supported it for many years.
If the answer to "it's confusing" is "there are apparently standardised sets", it sounds like it is, indeed, confusing :-).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been brought up on HN before, and people smarter than me identified that this view is about 10 years out of date. Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently that include all of the things any other similar tools do. It sounds like only very niche old/minimal XMPP clients don't support encryption by default for example, and virtually all servers have supported it for many years.
Is there a recommended or "blessed" server and client combo for someone who just wants to migrate their friends off discord? The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.
That software list, how it's done and how it's ranked is literally confirming my initial point of critique :D
Last time I tried out several chat clients, most of them were alpha software, had lots of bugs appearing in normal conversation flows, well, or were so broken that they broke compatibility in subminor version updates to their very same client apps.
I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.