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What are some discord alternatives that we can suggest to our friends? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) by FirmDistribution@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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With the recent news about discord asking for face or ID scan, what other alternatives are there that we can recommend to our less tech-savvy friends?

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[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 32 points 6 hours ago

Looked around for a while now, these are the alternatives I found.

Zulip: More like a Slack alternative for an organization/team/group, can be self hosted, seems to be pretty mature and well made. Has good client apps. No screen sharing/voice chat.
Stoat: Seems to be mostly similar to Discord, doesn't seem mature though, self hosting documentation doesn't seem refined, could be okay if you use their server, not sure about mobile apps
Spacebar: 1:1 Discord clone, voice chat features seem to be incomplete but seems pretty good otherwise, I tried to install their server but it doesn't run for me..
Matrix: Feature complete, but kinda buggy, may work well enough for some but my friends complained for poor UX
Mattermost: Gotta self host or pay, there seems to be some weird limitation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861331 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594673
IRC: maybe not for non-techies, but IRCv3 has some "modern" features and Goguma(Android)/TheLounge(Web) looks quite decent
XMPP: Seems like it should be good, but I'm having trouble setting it up so can't tell
Tailchat: UI looks just like Discord, but I just heard of it now so haven't tried

[-] naught@sh.itjust.works 15 points 5 hours ago

Ive spent hours configuring stoat and spacebar and I have to say they are absolutely not ready for self hosting. They also lack vital features my friends and I use, like high quality screensharing or video.

I'm trying my hand at matrix, but it's rife with problems too. If you want high throughput video, you need to set up Jitsi alongside. I haven't been having a good time.

[-] hesh@quokk.au 2 points 4 hours ago

So Stoat has screensharing but only with low quality? Looking into self hosting it

[-] naught@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago

It seems to be a bit "bleeding edge" at the moment, and the instructions for self-hosting are not really sufficient (at least for me).

https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313

[-] loanrangerofpeanuts@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago

I did the same search today and found out that teamspeak just got updated to a more “modern” UI and feature set. While it is still proprietary software, it’s more feature complete than a lot of the other FOSS alternatives.

[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 points 2 hours ago

it seems like they're using matrix under the hood

this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026

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