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Discord Alternatives, Ranked (taggart-tech.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 118 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Top three are:

  1. Discourse
  2. Rocket.chat
  3. Matrix
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  • [–] 172 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    I don't really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing... Or am I just in the minority here?

    For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.

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  • [–] 82 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all

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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.

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  • [–] 24 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.

    I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Although there is some kind of fun with "real time chatting" on a forum. Back then, It kind of became that way when it got heated. It's like a turn based game where all the players take their moves and execute at the same time lol

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    A lot of people don't seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. There's almost no platform that has all of them so you have to zoom out and look at more of the general purpose. The Discord "servers" I've used NEVER used anything but text chat.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I understand that but even the text chat is a different experience than what Discourse offers. Even people who only used Discord for text chat and want a replacement for that would be better on IRC.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, clearly everyone loves IRC, that's why no one uses Discord /s

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I honestly think the vast majority of people on Discord don't know what IRC is, and therefore don't have an opinion of it. However, I didn't mean to suggest IRC as the best alternative anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (1 child)

    I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?

    I'm thinking of something else, I think.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    I would bet on the screen sharing not being that big of a requirement for most people. Voice and text chats though? Yeah, that's the minimum.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    A lot of people I know regularly use screen sharing through discord or opentalk. Both for work/productivity and while gaming (watching each other, helping, sharing what people are up to etc).

    To get people to switch it sadly should support all features: text, voice, video and sending files/images/gifs/videos.

    It's tough.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Sure, a lot of people use it, because it exists. How many of those people would actually say it's a requirement to be built into it though? There's plenty of other options for screen sharing they could use. I don't know though. Maybe a lot of people actually do consider it a critical feature. I doubt it though. I've used it a few times with my group, but it's only ever a "do you want to see this?" It's just a bonus, not a requirement.

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I love that Discourse is open. I hate that it's just horrendous from a usability perspective. Flarum is much better than that, in my opinion, while being way more flexible. Examples:

    https://discuss.grapheneos.org/

    https://orionfeedback.org/

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Discourse isnt free

    And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    This is misinformation.

    You can self host it, for free.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    That doesn't seem to be communicated very clearly on the website, though I could always be missing something.

    It also doesn't seem like the average Discord user is the target audience. The website is for sysadmins, and the goal seems to be selling a Slack/Teams alternative to a business or government organization.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It's not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)

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