How about good’ol IRC?
No voice chat.
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
251–260 of 489 posts
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#252I 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…
>Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont…
Agreed 100%, can confirm same here. All true.
Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-spy-... Millennials and older generations witnessed this happening bit by bit, some of us tried to fight it, but ultimately it’s eve…
I am the person who asked for the source.
1) I do not believe for a second that Meta would actually implement something that would remove their own ability to read those messages.
2) We do not have any proof that their claimed e2e chat service is actually compromised.
The matter of fact tone of the parent made me think there was some actual proof or at least something more than speculation. That's why I asked for a source.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#254I'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…
XMPP's biggest failure is that there is no client which is on advanced on most of it's compliance suites. So if someone uses Windows for example, they're pretty much locked to "Well, you can chat, but no video/voice calls for you". I really hope this changes because XMPP does look interesting.
Gajim works on Windows and is the best non-mobile client.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#255Earlier 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.
>Is there a recommended or "blessed" server and client
Not sure about servers, but for clients there's Gajim, Dino, and Conversations. Not much else is super relevant these days. Profanity exists but is significantly worse than irssi or weechat despite looking superficially similar. Kaidan is a KDE/Qt alternative to Gajim but I'm not sure if it's usable yet. It may be worth switching when it's fleshed out to escape the bugs and slowness of the GTK-based clients.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#256Most 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.
Is it just element or matrix.org, but it feels so slow to me?
I would recommend using Nheko instead, and not registering on the overloaded flagship server. I have an old matrix.org account as a backup but I try to use smaller servers mostly.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what happens when the next guy buys that same number and registers on Signal? Phone numbers are recurring costs. And to keep a truly private one you must keep paying without ever disclosing personal info and that is really hard. Signal is a privacy nightmare for long term use.
There is a week long registration lock protected by a PIN. Your contact list is protected by that PIN as well. They cannot access your chats. All your contacts will get a notification that the contact has changed when they go to talk to your phone number or get a message from your number. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
This is good and means no one can impersonate you using your phone number, but doesn't solve the recurring costs issue, you still need to buy a new number when someone registers yours, and every financial transaction puts you at more privacy risk. And is terrible UX, imagine having to add your contacts new numbers every other week.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#258I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble. I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.
> I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server That makes you an even smaller minority unfortunately. Most people are not going to set up a home server.
Mumble servers used to be just a few dollars a year (haven't looked in a long time). But even that is enough friction to prevent adoption. Plus it doesn't support any of the non-voice features.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, GP already said it was perfection
Except the reason for Discords initial success, and the literal only reason I have it installed, is for voice chat when playing certain online games. I love IRC, I even wrote my own IRC client in the 90s, but it’s clearly not going to be suitable for gaming in this context.
IRC for main chat, Mumble for voice chat when gaming. Been solid for decades. I have at least 3 functional Mumble servers saved (including my own) in my client, most of them are associated with an IRC community. I occasionally hear "Anyone down for some Quake? Hop on Mumble." or something to that effect. Mumble is pretty easy to host, so if you're using it with a small to medium group of friends, I'd say just throw up a server on your LAN somewhere. It's got decent mobile clients on F-Droid as well if you need one.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#260What's the best alternative for folks who just want to voice and text chat with a small circle of people? Say, less than 50.
IRC + Mumble.