Teamspeak, ventrilo, mumble - but discord replaced them all with being easy to use.

Sadly, there is no real alternative with all the discord features. I mean, you could create chats in Zoom and use their voice/video feature, but at least one person would need pro.

Steam's built in voice chat replaced discord for my group of friends years ago. It was rough at first, but it has improved a lot and now we dont have issues anymore.

Technically, Signal, Rocket Chat, and Matrix all have multi-party voice chat built in. You probably won't have a great time with it, and if you want video or screen sharing, you'll have an even worse time.

Isn't that a multi-way call? Everything else is covered by forums (permanent) or IRC/Matrix/XMPP (quick)

Jitsi Meet.

I think Matrix has one as well that's integrated nowadays.

signal is the dumbest thing they couldve put in the list. its like "top 10 minecraft alternatives; number 1, microsoft Word"

Yeah, discord has so many features that not everyone uses them. Open source proponents seem to prefer text communication so they ignore most of the shortcomings

Matrix has a new spec coming that will fix everything (they say). But last I checked it's not finalised, and they have been working on it for years.

Do note that Root seems to be VC funded just like discord so that might just be the same thing happening later down the line.

Stoat isn't federated so they also have the issue of running costs but they do seem to have that figured out already (currently donation funded, apparently some user friendly plans on how to deal with costs should they exceed the incoming donation)

Depending on the client, XMPP can even replicate most Discord functionality. The Movim XMPP client can do group chats, group video calls, and I think screen sharing too.

I feel like XMPP is under rated, I used it in the past back when matrix was super new and not really production ready. I'm now revisiting them and matrix seems highly centralized in practice even if it was designed to be federated. There aren't that many implementations and so many people use matrix.org as their homeserver. Definitely still thinking XMPP is the best option.

Mumble still works but from what I can tell its software ecosystem seems to be decaying due to bots etc. not being updated and breaking changes in their dependencies, people can still get them to work if they really know what they're doing but it's difficult. It also has some quirks that make it confusing for people to use, I'm in a mumble server and any time anyone new joins someone has to explain to them that they need to go through the menus to "register" in order to join the main channel, even though this registration is entirely within the application and doesn't require email authentication or anything. There's also frequently SSL warnings and things like that.

No it doesn't, matrix was designed by people with no concept of ux. It focuses on things that are technically correct but something average people won't put up with. Like the forced verification of devices, normal people don't care and don't understand what that even is and will be annoyed that every time they try to log in they are prompted to insert a stupid key just so that they can see their chat history.

Doesn't help that tons of the clients especially the web one can't be bothered to remember being authenticated and you have to do it literally every time but even with that fix just having to do that in general is going to put people off.

Then there's just a bunch of base protocol stuff that's dumb the way they finally implemented custom emoji is the stupidest thing I've ever seen and makes what should be a simple easy click to add a sticker and then use it turn into this complicated mess that nobody's going to bother with. On a technical level it made sense sure but on a user experience level it makes no sense at all.

And I say this is someone that self-hosts basically anything I can get my hands on, I've got Seafile, immich, piped, jellyfin, microbin, among various others. I keep trying matrix and keep finding myself getting annoyed enough to stop using it