Forums are great for being forums. Real-time instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing are all a very different use-case. They’re two entirely separate products, and comparing them is apples and oranges. People are looking to replace Discord with Discord-like services, because forums don’t fucking do what Discord does.

The big problem (and the reason everyone seems to compare the two) is that Discord started eating forums, as companies realized it was easier to create a Discord server instead of creating (and hosting, and maintaining) a support forum. And that’s a perfectly valid complaint. But that doesn’t mean forums are a valid replacement for Discord.

Wire exists.

Obviously the problem isn't you and your friends, the problems is services that use discord like it's a forum, dispatcharr for example "oh do you want support? Join our discord". Fine, I'll figure it out myself.

My group of friends, like yours, we have a discord server with 9 channels, more than half aren't used, and one of the channels is to share links.

Same :)

They were suffering with email issues due to the "hug of death" effect, try again now maybe it'll work

I haven't tried mumble yet.

You pay for the hosting resources yes, but you can host it anywhere. I've been playing around with it using a docker instance in my homelab.

I haven't followed the development communication much, but yes, screen sharing works now. It wasn't working on wayland like 8mo ago, but I tried again a month ago and it's now working.

Sure can

Voice chat isn't inherently costly to host, usually the server acts as a broker and then people connect P2P. Do you remember jitsi? It was used as an alternative to zoom during covid, it was a webpage like Google meet where you opened a room, and people joined with the link. Actually under the good the first one that joined the room acted as a host so all voice communications never reached jitsi's servers.

Jitsi still exists btw, although I understand that a more integrated solution like matrix is preferable. Matrix IS the federated discord-like solution, although last time I read about it it had some issues with scalability and the typical foss Dev drama.

Didn't have much of an aim beyond trying to cook it up from scratch as a personal research project. That includes the protocol, since I'm handling priv/pub keypairs in a creative way to facilitate both encryption and user identity verification.