XMPP, by a landslide.

Stoat is probably the best competitor, although it shot itself in the leg by changing its name recently. It's also missing video and screen sharing last time I checked, and the audio functionality barely works.

Matrix is utter chaos as far as organization goes. When you join a Discord community, chats are clearly laid out and separate from private messages or group chats. When you join a Matrix community, you must individually choose extra group chats to join, and they are often indistinguishable from things happening outside that community. It's messy. And we haven't even gotten to video or voice.

XMPP makes Matrix look organized and feature-complete. Good luck corralling a group of people onto that platform and figuring out disparate servers and disparate apps... I wouldn't recommend it.

Basically, I don't think the open source space has an answer to this, and I don't think they can come up with one anytime soon.

Stoat is the best option imo

Stoat

Matrix is great as long as you know how to use it and keep it organized. It's Element client used to mix contacts and group chats but that's better now on web/desktop and on mobile you just need to add group chats to favorites and select the space you want to limit your browsing to (or use FluffyChat on mobile).

There's also Zulip, which is actually closer to Slack.

If you're on PC, use Discord as a gaming VoIP chat and you're already using Steam I'd tell you to take a peek at Steam's voice settings and either use that or disable Steam's overlay if you don't like it for whatever reason. In my experience Steam's chat performs much better than Discord but can be trickier to configure for some.

XMPP has an experimental XEP for group spaces too, but who knows if it'll be ready soon or used in apps for all major platforms.

Damn, no Jitsi or Mattermost talk? Instead people are bringing up non-battle tested projects?

So many indie games and open-source projects (ironic right?) use Discord.

It's ridiculous.

Genuinely grateful.

Simplex is a project made by a very weird dude who's very weird about his politics, and they are jumping headfirst into cryptocurrency and NFTs. I would have said it looked like a promising project a couple of years ago, but no longer.

(From a technical standpoint, it's also just a messaging app with groups. At that point, you might as well use Signal or Delta as a backup)

I'll take delta chat thanks

Strange, I used an alias with them years ago and nothing ever gets sent to it.

It would probably be easy to break with a fake ID but people are iffy about those methods and refuse to speak about the existence of them.

Some accpunts require you to type stuff, and on linux if you added a repo youll have to type to remove it.

Might go faster with a toy so you can have both hands free.