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Discord Alternatives, Ranked

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Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#371

Post by Saris »

TechSquidTV wrote: post #284
riskable wrote: post #281

Everyone talking about this seems to completely forget WHY everyone's using Discord: It's fun . Discord has animated (custom) emoji, loops videos properly, silly bots, and fantastic voice chat with screen/game streaming to a HUGE amount of simultaneous users. The end user can pick and choose who they want to watch on-the-fly while remaining in the same voice channel. The entire concept of a business using Discord for…

They dont just not care that it's centralized, that's the only option they would ever entertain. A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization.

I doubt people hate decentralization directly, it's just that the decentralized services out there are difficult to use and lack features people are used to.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#372

Post by colordrops »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #237
popcar2 wrote: post #222

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…

>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…

"Discord alternatives aren't needed because I'm different from the majority of millions of people that use it differently than me."

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#373

Post by tabbott »

popcar2 wrote: post #222

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…

This article looks rather rushed -- the description of Zulip is not accurate, and I suspect that folks working on the other products may feel the same way about how their projects are described.

I lead the Zulip project, and I'd like to clarify that Zulip's free community pricing does not have user limits, either in Cloud or self-hosting. The 10 user limit for free mobile notifications only applies to workplace/business use. Larger communities are encouraged to submit a simple form to get approved for notifications beyond 10 users.

And this complaint seems quite strange:

> Even for self-hosted plans, anything above the free tier requires a zulip.com account for plan management.

How would a paid subscription work without an account for managing it?

This is an important and timely topic, but I wish a more deeply researched article was the one being widely circulated.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#374

Post by Saris »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #75
Elosha wrote: post #55

One of the main problems in suggesting Discord alternatives is that Discord itself is an amalgamation of several apps. For some a Discord alternative needs to be a voicecall, for others it‘s game streaming, and for others it‘s just a chat, a bulletinboard or newsgroup, while they never used the Voice features.

> We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform. Doesn't Matrix essentially satisfy all of them? Although the bulletinboard/newsgroup feature is something that I don't know but I feel as if that can be on matrix as well. Yes, I kno…

No not really, Matrix doesn't have voice rooms or game streaming.

It has voice calls and meetings but that's not the same thing and has much higher friction to use.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#375

Post by gusgus01 »

cheikhcheikh wrote: post #349
cheeseomlit wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers

By definition it should obvious the million-user server is a popular feature since it has a million user.

Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.

Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#376

Post by BikiniPrince »

jeltz wrote: post #196
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is real time chat, I thought matrix was not? And discord comes for gaming, voice chat is a key feature

Matrix is real time chat and it also supports voice chat, but I have not used it so I do not know if voice is good enough yet.

I spent 10 minutes on it this morning. I would rather go with ts6.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#377

Post by AceyMan »

cheikhcheikh wrote: post #349
cheeseomlit wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers

By definition it should obvious the million-user server is a popular feature since it has a million user.

obligatory citation: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." —Yogi Berra, MLB HOF catcher & manager

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#378

Post by neutronicus »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #237
popcar2 wrote: post #222

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…

>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…

I don't join massive servers, but I use Discord almost exclusively with strangers.

All my IRL group chats are WhatsApp. Discord is for the local board game bar, various regional tabletop gaming scenes, my favorite basketball podcast, my favorite miniatures game, etc.

When I want to get into a community, these days I get a Discord link (which I guess I prefer to the Facebook Groups of a decade ago).

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#379

Post by hoten »

Do any of these support migrating the content of a Discord server (from some 3p archive tool)?

Can anyone suggest a good archive tool? The open source project I help run has ~10 years of conversations, bug reports, feature requests, etc. sunk into Discord, and obviously I want to preserve all that (not sure we'll end up leaving the platform, but it's good to have backups anyhow).

Our bug reports / FRs are in forum channels, and I've written a script to extract those and potentially import them into some bug-tracker. But I'd like something good that can archive the entire thing in a reasonable format.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#380

Post by BowBun »

ahhhhnoooo wrote: post #282
BowBun wrote: post #279

My take: Discord will slowly enter the arena with the likes of Google, MS, Meta, Apple, Valve for their massive user network. The amount of resources needed to sustain free offerings for so long make it a nearly insurmountable moat for others to compete. Even if one could reproduce their tech (which I doubt, they are top-tier), individuals would drown under hosting costs. They've positioned themselves incredibly well…

Discord's technical moat is not that large. They've done well, but it's not the same as something like Google or Microsoft or valve.

Having read their tech blogs about both the local video capture tech and their infrastructure optimizations, I disagree.
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