this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.

Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?

Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Avoid Revolt as there moderation is questionable

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Way too few mentions of Jitsi.

I use it with friends, it has good server config, and I'm pushing it on businesses.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I've been tinkering with old BBS software :)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

If you're self hosting, it's Revolt. But the default instance limits you to 20mb or something for files, which is a problem for me, personally.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Revolt is also an annoyance to self host and the apps don’t support self hosted instances without you rebuilding them because the server is hardcoded.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Why even give the option then lmao

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

That’s just it, it isn’t an option

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

That's a throwback. Let's take it one step further and just get back on Ventrilo and play some DOTA. (For the younger folks who don't get the reference: https://youtu.be/aTJncWndUB8 )

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Matrix is nice, and you can have jitsi for calls integrated. It seems to be pretty popular; Lemmy has a field for matrix @ in user profiles. Never heard of revolt before.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

I use Jitsi for a non-profit, and I like the mute someone else function, but oh wow the noise cancellation needs improvement. So many voice comm apps have disappeared (there used to be one our group used all the time, then the devs dropped it (the client app) and just became on API or something).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (19 children)

Why use Element for matrix?

From what I can tell it collets and links data to you: Location, identifiers and contact information.

How is that private or better than Signal?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I use Signal for private and personal messages. I use Discord solely for gaming and voicechat. A good alternative doesn't need to be overly private (although that would be a bonus of course). It just needs to have a good UI and feature parity with Discord.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.

Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.

Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Somebody needs to create an XMPP/Jitsi hybrid

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Jitsi-meet is already using xmpp under the hood.

But there are some efforts to add multi-user video calls to full xmpp clients as well. Dino can already do it for a while, and Movim and Libervia recently added experimental support.

Its not quite a full Discord replacement, but for private groups it works quite well.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Element/matrix all the way

if you want something that looks like discord there are themes for the clients, there's even commet.chat for a discord like experience (but they haven't added calls yet)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

rocketchat seems decent

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This would be the perfect time for someone to throw up a nice UI for a webrtc based voice chat platform in the browser. Nothing to install, no crazy permission/server setup. Just create a room and invite your friends. Boom, team based voice chat.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

Jitsi-meet does that. Easy to install as well.

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