I used revolt, and its far from discord sadly, i heard the Roblox one but eeeh, had some issues there aswell, are there not anything else?
Matrix - you can also add bots to expand the core functionality.
Sadly, there aren’t voice channels like in discord, and you can’t see if there are people in the room, just video rooms in Element.
No screen sharing/streaming
It is more a Teams/slack alternative that is lacking features right now, not discord.
It is also 5€ per month, per user!
If you go matrix without element, then you can self-host it, but only text chats. You can self-host Jitsi for voice/video, but I have yet to actually join a public server that has a voice chat, so I haven’t tested it.
5 dollar to use basic features? Kinda expensive
Any #XMPP-based solution. Check out Snikket.
Matrix/Element has a beta that allows p2p calling and group calling besides what the Matrix platform is known for (chat, rooms, file transfer,…) “Element Call - Florian Heese” (Youtube) goes into the details - might be of interest for you.
I don’t know the specifics, but I heard matrix is a thing.
In a way, Discord is to Matrix as Reddit is to Lemmy. Where Discord/Reddit are centrally hosted by the company that owns them (meaning they set the rules, their downtime is your downtime, etc.), Matrix/Lemmy are federated platforms mostly hosted by other users. If you understand Lemmy, you get the basic idea of Matrix, except that it’s meant for live chat instead of threaded forum discussions.
Something people get stuck on about Discord is the expression “Discord server”, in the sense of “Join my Discord server.” This is technically not accurate: Discord servers are more like subreddits are on Reddit, in that Discord is actually hosting all of them and to some degree in charge of them. They’re not servers in the Lemmy/Matrix sense, as in “the place where you come from”, like lemm.ee or lemmy.world are, they’re more like individual communities.
The equivalent of this on Matrix (i.e. a Discord “server”/Reddit subreddit/Lemmy community) is called a space. From there, the analogy follows in a pretty straightforward way. You sign up with a homeserver and join whatever Matrix spaces (“Discord servers”) are interesting to you. Like Discord, you can either use Matrix from your web browser or download an app–unlike Discord, there’s tons of apps instead of just the one official one.
That’s the concept. It works pretty well, sometimes. I’ve been using it daily for about four years, and when using a PC, it’s pretty good. There’s several fairly mature web/desktop apps, including the quasi-official one, Element. The problems start when you look to use Matrix from Android/iOS. All of the mobile apps offer a heavily degraded experience compared to desktop or even competing platforms like Discord–and that’s including the fact that the official Discord app is awful.
None of the mobile apps are in a complete or stable enough condition to be sensible replacements for Discord unless you heavily temper your expectations. If you want to use Matrix on your phone–and it’s 2025, so you probably do–you basically have to be ideologically invested in Matrix to make it your primary live chat platform. If you can deal with the problems because you believe in the ideals of decentralization and end-to-end encryption, then Matrix is workable.
I see. Thanks for the breakdown. If/when Discord becomes enshittified to the point of being unusable (there might be some time after the IPO where it’s still decent), I’ll see if I can get my friends to switch over to Matrix.
Hmm, proboly stay with discord then! Thank you! Dont really need encryption for what i say, but it would be nice tho. Maybe i will wait for revolt client relaunch being good!
TeamSpeak. We fired up a private Teamspeak Server on a Raspberry Pi. But there are also many Public Servers to join. Or you could also rent a private one together, there are many providers for it and it doesn’t cost much. Teamspeak v6 also now has similar features to Discord, Screen Sharing and so on… Latency and voice quality have always been better on TeamSpeak and therefore the preferred choice for pro gamers and on tournaments.
From my own looking into this, only Matrix seems close and it’s still not quite there.
What are the main issues with revolt? Have not tried it yet. Looked promising at a first glance. All just empty marketing?
Notfication is pretty bad, pictures dont really work to send, which kinda turn me off, otherwise it would be good for me! And the phone app is a mess
It doesn’t have voice chat yet
I am looking to an alternative to Slack, which may cover similar needs.
Right now, it boils down to:
- Mattermost (US-made, but open source)
- Rocket.chat (US-made, but open source)
- Whaller (EU-made, but not open source)
I just checked Mattermost, Zulip and Rocketchat but all of those seem to be based outside of Europe too legally speaking.
Zulip is great, it really deserves more recognition
