221–230 of 489 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's called email
If you have to create a new password / answer an authentication check for every server you join that's a ton more friction than discord already.
Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.
Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.
Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.
Ditto on Mattermost.
Discourse is a forum.
Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.
Email + IRC (there are daemons that support chat history). Bouncers exist. Logging. This should be standard for OSS projects, not some private, unsearchable, data-mining platform. This is what happens when we reach for convenience over openness.
In my experience with the few communities I've dabbled in, it's more reaching for popularity than convenience. If I indulged myself with some grumpiness I'd say that's another source of enshitification that's rarely mentionned.
The Telegram drop off for doing something really bad recently? I have not seen a single person mention it as an alternative. I don't really use discord that much except for the few friends I have that are not on telegram. Actually all of my family and friends are on telegram, even my grandmother is on telegram. When playing games with friends we just do a group call in telegram. I don't even see it on this list thoug…
probably because it is classified as a "messaging app" and while it has a ton of features it still misses the "structure" of a discord alternative i just wonder why TeamSpeak is not there
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xmpp clients are completely awful on Linux desktop, and can't do voice and video chat correctly with clients on Android like Conversations
There is not a single good XMPP client for macOS or iOS either. There are a couple of minimally functional ones that are aesthetically dreadful, but nothing that would come even close to replicating what people would expect even from Signal or WhatsApp, let alone a monster like Discord. Certainly nothing that I could ask friends or family to use.
https://snikket.org/ are working on a new iOS client too (no release so far).
I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives. Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-wai…
why not just IRC?
If you don't use it with that purpose, there's tons of alternatives.