Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
https://spacebar.chat/ looks like it will eventually be good, it looks like it’s in its infancy right now though
Somebody needs to create an XMPP/Jitsi hybrid
Jitsi-meet is already using xmpp under the hood.
But there are some efforts to add multi-user video calls to full xmpp clients as well. Dino can already do it for a while, and Movim and Libervia recently added experimental support.
Its not quite a full Discord replacement, but for private groups it works quite well.
Do any of the xmpp clients have screen share?
Movim does, for Libervia and Dino I am not 100% sure right now, but at least for Libervia the browser version should have it as it is really more of a general Webrtc browser feature than client specific.
Isn’t the video the jingle part that Google added to jabber originally (before it dumped everything to remake it from the group up about 4 more times like a GSoC crossed over with groundhogDay)?
Today xmpp uses a distant relative of those original jingle specifications, which have been modernized to use Webrtc.
Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
I guess that’s the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.
Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.
mumble is great for VOIP.
Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.
revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there’s that. There’s also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don’t know much about how matrix works
a lot of modern technology and software is built on the foundation of work built by the web browser industry, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not necessarily a good thing either. Provides a lot of nice features, native integration into a web browser, industry standard security and encryption procedures.
That’s about it though, Outside of that, running a dedicated version of that app is almost always some bullshit built in electron, which is a horrible buggy mess with horrible performance. Nothing stops devs from integrating these features into a standalone application… But, they likely won’t since they’ve already developed a web browser version.
I also have some problems with the way web tech is generally built, it’s built with the expectation that you will host and treat it as a web app, which is fine, it works. But i prefer not to host services i use via anything web related as generally i find it both intrusive, and problematic, in the instance that a DNS server goes down for example. (it’s not very likely, i know, but still)
I also think a lot of the networking protocols are fairly bloated, but that’s not as big of a deal, it’s just annoying.
anyway, enough of my ranting. Matrix is actually a specification for a set of communication protocols based on the foundation of web tech, it’s highly universal, and inter-compatible, which is great. But it sort of stops there. There are several server implementations, and numerous front end implementations, none of which seem to be particularly, interesting. There’s numerous electron front ends, a few that aren’t (though they won’t support most features) etc, stuff like that, it’s just. Not clean.
Just remember your friend, https://discorch.org/
Matrix.
Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.
If you’re self hosting, it’s Revolt. But the default instance limits you to 20mb or something for files, which is a problem for me, personally.
Doesnt discord also have a max of like 25mb? Unless you pay for nitro?
It was 8mb then 25mb then 10mb now (for non-Nitro users)
I believe it’s ~100mb. I don’t mind paying for more. That’s not an option on Revolt.
Wait? I thought this was FOSS? Is there no settings to allow you to change the upload size of files?
Again, if you’re self-hosting, yes; If you’re using the default instance, no.
If that, depending on the type of file sometimes its 10mb
Yea that’s what I thought, cause I’ve had small files get rejected recently now.
Just use croc to share files. Then size doesn’t matter.
Yes that sounds super convenient…
Revolt is also an annoyance to self host and the apps don’t support self hosted instances without you rebuilding them because the server is hardcoded.
Why even give the option then lmao
That’s just it, it isn’t an option
rocketchat seems decent
Its been a while since I used Revolt, I use element everyday. But I’d prefer something more “third party” too. Revolt was servicable back in 2020, maybe it has gotten better?
TeamSpeak exists too
Teamspeak is alright, in fact we use it along with discord for inter-channel Comms. But discord does a lot of stuff that ts doesn’t touch
That’s a throwback. Let’s take it one step further and just get back on Ventrilo and play some DOTA. (For the younger folks who don’t get the reference: https://youtu.be/aTJncWndUB8 )
Used to use Vent playing Eve Online 19 years ago. Worked great back then. Apparently it’s still around, but still no Linux support after all these years.
I am certainly not one of the younger folks and had never seen that before. That is awesome, thank you for sharing.
Oh man, Basshunter was huge in the chronically-online gamer space in the 2000s. His other songs are pretty good too.
To put it in perspective, the fact that they’re gaming on laptops and LCD monitors was an enviable flex when his songs released.
I still have my copy. I cannot believe that song is like, 18 years old now. It was such a staple of my college experience.
Mumble!
Tmspk egssts tuh
Matrix is the way. It’s federated and you can have your own server.
if discord is going public they don’t need my turbo sub anymore
Cancelled mine when they redesigned the mobile app anyway. I don’t want a different interface on mobile vs desktop. I want a unified experience, which was their original purpose.
I’ve started my self-hosting journey having Matrix in mind - especially the Matrix bridges to cut off the need to use social media clients like Discord.
Today, I’m slowly convicting my friends to join my instance. So far, that’s just one of the closest ones (still win for me).
I hope one day decentralization in social media would take off!
I JUST managed to get my closest ring outside my family to join Signal.
We have a total of 7 people now.
I’d light up a server and host matrix/frendica/lemmy/mastodon/headscale in an instant if I thought I could get those 7 to join.
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I’m very excited!
I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.
I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different
Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.
The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.
Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.
It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.
What are you using instead? I only recently set up my synapse server and I’d be interested to head what the alternatives are
I’ve found SimpleX a much better solution than matrix for a discord alternative.
Synapse has seemingly improved since 2020. A word of warning though: if you join large rooms from your server, Synapse will eventually grow the DB to a huge size due to a “lookup” table state_groups_state, and will require manual cleanup. See https://www.sequentialread.com/matrix-synapse-out-of-disk-space-state_groups_state/
Woah nice heads up I appreciate it!
I’ll keep the janitor tool in my pocket for now as my instance takes up negligible space at the moment but someday that might not be the case.
Here’s the referenced tool for anybody else interested:
https://git.cyberia.club/cyberia/matrix-synapse-diskspace-janitor
Conduwuit is actively developed and works pretty nice for me. Single user, but bridged to hundreds of telegram, WhatsApp and discord rooms. As well as a few matrix rooms too.
