211–220 of 489 posts
Zulip actually looks pretty good if they made it a little sexier.
See also my and other users feedback about their UI in: Zulips values (24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953815
Discord became popular because it was free group/team voice chat. Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak all needed servers/clients, paid hosting etc. Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost. People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
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Matrix is the only one that offers the killer feature of Discord, which is being able to join many communities from a single login. Sadly Matrix has never had a good UX for me. IMO they spent too many complexity tokens on e2ee and there are simply not enough left.
Actually, the true killer feature for discord back in the day was something much dumber, but still heavily related to on-boarding and community transference. You could join a discord server with a single link. Account creation could come later. Considering the competition at its heyday was Teamspeak or Skype, the mere fact you could just actually see the hell you were getting into without some stupid ass "Hol' Up!" i…
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You can with dino. I wish I had the time to work on getting A/V calls back in gajim. It could be worth asking an NLNet grant for that… https://dino.im/
Yes it works but it lacks QOL features like automatic compression of videos or images when sending attachments. A bit too barebones.
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Of course I need another source. I think you're right too but this is just speculation. I thought you had access to some actual information.
They're getting sued for it.
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It also needs users, the network effect aka lock in is gigantic with discord, I don't see discord ever going away. Or anything else gaining traction.
Exactly, I’m in like 50 discord groups, that’s literally the only reason I use it. Those groups don’t exist elsewhere so there’s no other option.
A platform does not start growing because of network effects, that's what keeps a platform alive and growing later on, but it starts its growth because people really prefer it to the alternatives (which back then for me was Skype and TeamSpeak).
Nowadays I'm not too happy with Discord anymore, some of it because of enshittification, but most of it is me being spoiled by what we already have, and being used to having this huge centralized (as in, can handle lots of different activities without switching to another platform) social tool that does everything I want it to, without me having to think about it at all.
Thing is, the alternatives, are not as good as Discord, and it really isn't close enough for me. Matrix would be the one I would love most to succeed, but everytime I used Matrix and Element, it's been a massive struggle, encryption constantly breaks (still), joining rooms still fails, rooms are spread about randomly, either standalone or in the new Spaces, searching for rooms is usually broken except on the large matrix.org instance, recently a bunch of rooms migrated because the event syncing completely failed and the decentralized state was broken. Not to mention the contant CSAM attacks (Does anyone know why this happens so much on Matrix? Is it really only because of the bad moderation and the fact that it auto-downloads the illegal images? Just feels so disappointing...).
I really hope we get a really good Discord alternative, maybe even an open-source and decentralized one, if possible. I would really rather not jump onto another proprietary platform.
I'm sad to see XMPP missing from this list. I wonder if the author was simply unaware of it or simply ignored it. IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is stil…
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Of course I need another source. I think you're right too but this is just speculation. I thought you had access to some actual information.
They're getting sued for it.
If this is the case you’re referring to, then I don’t know that it is proof of your assertion, in fact maybe the opposite: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/31/us-author...
If the age verification/mandatory ID is the result of new laws, how exactly would switching to an alternative server help? Wouldn't they be forced to implement the same measures as well sooner or later?
I'm building an open-source, high-quality chat app called Inline. It aims to solve issues with Slack and Discord for work communication. Happy to answer any questions. https://github.com/inline-chat/inline https://inline.chat
Website doesn't have any info about the product. I don't know which features are there going to be. Screenshots would be cool as well to evaluate UX. Frankly the github readme is more useful than the website in that regard.