Given you propose to chose between 2 federated solutions, I assume you want a good robust federation. So it's easy: XMPP, period.

Anyone who has experienced self-hosting knows Matrix is several times heavier on memory and CPU than XMPP, and that's one of the reasons 99% of the Matrix users are on 1 server, while I actually dnn't even know which XMPP server is the largest.:

Matrix, and it's not even close.

Matrix clients suck, but xmpp ones are way worse.

I don't know what people use discord for, honestly. I just call up my friends on signal for the regularly scheduled gaming session and play. All I need is audio.

I don't understand what people need video or screen sharing for while gaming. Are they playing a game watching each other's facial reactions or something? And others talk about screen sharing... Are you guys gaming while watching the other person's screen? I'm puzzled.

Signal can audio and video calls with screen sharing 🤷

Matrix I only use for opensource projects or as a replacement or client for IRC (IRC sucks ass). There was also a time fosdem streamed everything on matrix. It was glorious. I wish more conferences (and fosdem itself) had chatrooms for every talk, rooms for different topics, and a general chat room for everybody. We don't have to fly and waste fuel to participate in conferences. Not everybody has deep enough pockets to pay 2k for a flight to Sydney and a further 1k for food and lodging there. Or worse, a trip to the US to get fondled by US border patrol and sent to Guantanamo bay for having said "Trump is a dunce".

I haven't found a solid answer for this...does XMPP support proper history nowadays? I remember using XMPP servers back around 2012 and if you didn't have your client open, you just missed messages in rooms. If that's still the case, ut's a lretty significant draw back...

The XMPP clients I've seen look unusable for large scale messaging, so between the two Matrix

Edit: Actually I need to look into Movin

From my digging on alternatives the main contenders are (in no particular order)

• Stoat
  • Essentially 1:1 on discords format
  • UK based, so its future there is uncertain
  • Infrastructure is lacking, was crippled by the initial influx after discord's announcement.
  • Missing some minor UI and UX features, feels unpolished.
• Spacebar
  • Reverse engineered discord
  • Greatest potential, IMO, but as of a few days ago all it has is potential.
  • lacks significant client development, relying on an external client named Fermi, which feels quite amateurish.
• XMPP
  • Highly mature, looks very promising, but lacks any kind of guild/nested channel grouping support which makes it unsuitable for my group, so I didn't look too deep at it.
• Matrix
  • IMO the most likely discord successor.
  • Minor functional hiccups, that vary from client to client
  • Of the clients I tested, Cinny is the most discord like, but I hear commet is closer.
  • Nested spaces provides the minimum format equivalence.
• Fluxer
  • Slightly sus vibes
  • Lacks self hosting instructions
  • Media is non-permanent, which is I guess fair to keep infra costs down, but its unsuitable for my groups media usage habits.
  • Looks promising, but I've not actually tried it given the lack of self hosting instructions.

One thing that's wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I'd like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links, server side channel ordering, and space membership over channel membership. But that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

EDIT: Forgot Fluxer. Added.

My gaming groups use Matrix, mainly for its stronger ecosystem and better long-term outlook. Despite developing slowly and not yet doing everything we want, Matrix is consistently improving and growing to serve more and more use cases. We're willing to tolerate some inconveniences for now, in exchange for having the contact networks we build today continue to grow for decades to come. We use Mumble for voice chat, because it's great, but might switch to MatrixRTC when Element Call leaves beta and becomes available in more Matrix clients.

I recently wrote up a few tips for Discord users considering Matrix.

If chat for a small gaming group was all I needed, I might choose XMPP. It's arguably easier to administer than Matrix once you learn about all the XEPs required for comparable features (ease of admin is relevant to me because I self-host) and I would be able to guide a small group through client choices and setup. But I have found XMPP's ecosystem to be a poor fit for large and diverse contact networks.

The problem is that "Discord" means something else for almost anyone and there is no alternative that 100% covers all the usecases.

For many public chats, IRC with a modern server and client is perfectly suitable, and for my private gaming sessions Mumble is as voice chat is doing fine even though friends are complaining that they can't just use it in a browser.

For general IM stuff XMPP is best, but I guess few people use Discord for that. Matrix is in general slow and clunky, no real point of using that except if you are forced to because some very specific FOSS projects insist on using it.

P.S.: I mostly use IRC through a XMPP gateway.

Why has IRC not been mentioned? The basics of Discords UX is based on it after all.

IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound and not driven by buzzword-development.

Xmpp. Looks less polished, but works better, and isn't mostly controlled by the ex-Amdocs Matrix Foundation.

I've personally not had terribly good experiences with Matrix. I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly, it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to, requiring both parties to regularly need to re-send messages until they finally unencrypted properly. This made it a real ball-ache to use, as you could send a message, and then hours later have someone else say they can't read it. I'm also not a fan of how much Metadata it spreads around.

XMPP on the other hand has always been snappy and fast, and I much prefer the clients available for it. It's currently the most promising federated option, IMHO, with Movim being the most promising client as a Discord replacement.

It's still missing some essential Discord-like features, such as groups of rooms in a server and drop-in voice rooms, but both features are being actively worked on, and a funding campaign was started to accelerate development.

But what it can do already is:

• Excellent text chats, including with very good optional encryption
• Group voice/video calls with screensharing (must use a chromium based browser to screenshare an app's audio)
• A neat integrated blogging feature for communities & individuals
• a built-in paint program to draw stuff to input into the chat
• Full working and proven federation thanks to the XMPP back-end

I prefered xmpp. But either xmpp or matrix arent discord alternatives

Having installed both this week, I much prefer XMPP. I want it as something more like signal/whatsapp just for my immediate family. Some are too young for a phone number, but I want them to join in the fun.

It was a but of messing around getting prosody to work how I want, but I'm really happy with it. It works with my letsencrypt certs. Phone and video calls just work. MySql just works with it. The tricky one was getting it to auth with same credentials as the mail daemon, but I got that going too. It's seamless now.

Matrix was 90% features I would not use.