Theres also zulip, but I havent tried it yet, but its supposedly open source discord, but you have to host the server yourself I think.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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On one hand, it's cool that you have an excuse to ditch Discord. The platform sucks in several different ways and the more people leave it, the better off the world is.
But on the other - you seem to be aiming for the wrong goal. I know what it's like to have one thing blocked after the other, so I know for sure that migrating every time something gets blocked is just not a sustainable long-term strategy. You might replace Discord for unrelated reasons... But I strongly advise you to look into censorship circumvention methods. Especially stealthy ones, like they use in China. Set it up for your family and friends (maybe distributing the server costs between them). You will need it.
XMPP/Jabber has whatever interface you choose (determined by the client you use), and does voice pretty darn well.
I'm currently using Jmp.chat as a SIM/data provider, and they provide an XMPP account via Snikket. I can connect to that account with pretty much any XMPP/Jabber client.
To me, XMPP/Jabber is the most flexible, because it's a protocol, and you choose which parts you want. And you can choose which clients you use. I have 2 clients on my phone and one on my laptop. They all work fine with the same account, with messages showing up at all simultaneously. One client (Snikket) has multiple accounts in it. The thing is XMPP/Jabber as a protocol is like SMTP - it's a standard, so all clients can communicate with each other, if they support the same features (eg OMEMO encryption, which is popular now).
Alternatively check out:
Teleguard, it's from the folks at SwissCows. They claim E2E, and from the way you connect devices, and that you can't recover an account from them, I tend to believe it. Though I haven't seen a third party evaluation (I belive they're closed source, unfortunately). So do with that what you will.
Simplex Chat, self hostable, they claim it's very secure. I've used it some, the phone app is a bit heavy on ram use.
There are numerous others out there.
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If you or one of your friends can self-host, my group used mumble before discord. I still don't really know why we switched.
I think that's most of the alternatives. Revolt is the best of the bunch, if you ask me.
One more is https://tryquiet.org/ but it's SUPER basic at this time...
Revolt: Voice chat is not stable. They do not accept new registrations.
That's news to me. Where do they not allow new accounts signing up????
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I'm in the same boat and also looking for a privacy-respecting platform for communicating with family and friends. So I'd also like to add items that are not yet mentioned to the list of suggestions:
- Jami
- Peer Calls - can be selfhosted; you can try it out straight away using their flagship instance located here.
There's not a great 1:1 replacement. I'd suggest some sort of hybrid approach. Personally, I use mumble for voip and matrix for text. I haven't experienced any significant stability issues with matrix, but self-hosting probably plays in my favor there.
Your experience with XMPP will vary depending on the client you use. It's not a 1 to 1 replacement for discord, and I'm not sure if there's a client that can do group calls, but It can do 1 on 1 calls and group text chats. I'd recommend Cheogram for mobile, and possibly movim for desktop.
For group audio calls, if you found matrix unstable, then Mumble is likely your best bet, or perhaps Signal, if that's not banned as well.
self-hosting matrix is possible, and after I got it set up, it works fine. That said, push notifications were acting up a lot at first (might have been fixed by an update since that hasn't been an issue in a while), and it is rather annoying to get your desktop and mobile clients set up to not be annoying about not being verified (iOS apps seem more fiddly with verifying than Android apps in my experience)
Despite my annoyances at first, the Element client really is the best and most mature one out there, and I do recommend it. Don't bother with any of the other ones; despite what the fluffychat settings want you to think, Element is the only client that can do any kind of audio/video calling, and most of the other clients only have web apps, so there's no hope for getting push notifications on mobile.
Ultimately it has worked for me, but my demands are three humans in a voice call once a week, no screenshare (use Parsec for that), and occasional text messages.
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Guilded is really similar to Discord, but Roblox bought them so you need a Roblox account to use it. It's great for voice chat.
I don't think it's great to change one walled garden for another. If you are willing to change, better switch to a protocol instead. Even if there's something wrong with the server, witching between different instances is much easier than between entirely different products.
I agree, but after I tried three FOSS ones that were hard to set up and had very bad voice quality I gave up and tried Guilded which is working great. The most important feature I need is ability to locally mute people which not many apps have for some reason. What would you recommend I use?
Revolt seems to be the best for now. Today they got a lot of money and I hope, they'll make their best to make it a reasonable discord alternative
Discord was based off of Slack and Microsoft Teams is a trash knockoff. All depends what you intend to use it for.