ngl, discord kinda had the best UX before the enshittification began

Well, Discord's UI is certainly not the holy grail, but it's quite functional and people are used to it. So it's pretty much logical you copy the concept to some extent when you want to appeal to these people?

I don't think it's necessarily the goal — Discord is just a helpful yardstick to compare things to as a baseline (and some people are looking for something that replaces Discord as closely as possible). Having to switch services is a pain, and whilst it's not optimal in the long term to just try to replace a thing with a clone, I can see why people don't have the executive function energy to think too hard about this.

It's literally on Fluxer.

Pros:

• AGPLv3, WITHOUT a CLA
• Familiar Discord UI
• Text and voice channels
• Images, attachments, gifs
• Emojis, reactions
• Screensharing and video calls
• Main server runs decently fast
• Federation is coming
• Not based in UK or US

Cons:

• Only 1 dude working on it
• You can optionally buy Plutonium, which isn't necessarily bad, they need money, and the code stays Open Source™
• No mobile app yet (they're working on it)
• The main server has had some downtime... which I think are just growing pains
• I don't have friends to invite to Fluxer

Do people really use screen share that much? (Sadly) I use discord to reach a lot of my friends for multiple years and we actually used screen share maybe twice? Three times?

There are actually many, many options. It's hard to guess which one will get the momentum and lift off though. You probably don't want to convince all your friends to switch to another platform just to see it die in half a year...

The MIT license of Voltage is a big red flag for me, as it could allow for either a corporate takeover, or for the company to abandon the open-source version in favor of a closed-source version that they can sell or enshittify.

Roomy has pretty much the same problem being licensed under the MPL license, which allows for the project to be packaged into a closed-source proprietary product. I'd avoid it too, despite it being federated. The license is just too risky, and the only reason not to choose GPL is because the devs likely want that capital purchase exit strategy.

There's a lot devs who know there's potentially a lot of money to be made in a successful Discord alternative. They smell the blood in the water, know the venture capital vultures it attracts, and they'll try to exploit the free labor that open-source projects bring, only to sell us out down the road after all the work has been done.

I'd say any option we move to must be licensed under GPL as a hard requirement, as that ensures it can never be exploited by corpos, and will remain owned by the community forever so that we don't have to migrate again any time soon.

The two best options on the table that fill that niche are:

• Movim (Pros: GPL, federated, encrypted, can do chat, voice calls and screenshare, based on the battle tested XMPP open standard. Cons: is currently missing discord-like rooms, but the dev is working in it)
• Fluxer (New kid on the block, still very buggy, but is AGPL licensed and plans federation and encryption in the future. Backend is still unproven, don't know how well it scales, but one to keep an eye on)