I’ve looked for alternatives lately and the most promising one I’ve seen is Spacebar. I would like to see it federate eventually, but I think the way to attract users fleeing Discord isn’t to make them adjust to a less-intuitive or less-featured alternative. People switched to Discord because it combined feature-rich text chat with group voice, video, and streaming all in one central place. Going back to Mumble, Teamspeak, etc. for voice, Matrix or XMPP for chat, etc. is a downgrade and people will just put up with Discord if that’s the alternative.

Unfortunately, there are no fully feature-complete alternatives with Discord’s user-friendliness yet. Spacebar is at least going in the right direction, trying to completely replicate Discord’s API. It seems they had voice working at one point but it’s currently broken due to a compile issue, hopefully the influx of new users will expedite a fix. The only major other thing they’re lacking then is streaming, though that doesn’t sound too hard if they already have voice working. The devs have said they’re open to federation as a future upgrade but the current focus is fully implementing the Discord API. A self-hostable Discord is pretty much what I’d want as a replacement. I’ve used Mumble and I’ve used Matrix and I agree with the idea that neither are a proper replacement for Discord. Matrix’s communities are a loose collection of independent rooms, which is not the same as a proper Discord guild/server. Matrix is great if you want secure, encrypted chats, but synchronizing keys is a pain I don’t see most Discord users accepting.

Gonna say it aloud for the unweaned masses in the back.

The main problematic issue with most “we need an alternative for Yplatform in the Fediverse!” speech is the use of the singular. We are never going to get a good thing going if we push for “everything-app” platforms because they’ll be everything-apps, and the push of power is irresistible. Also, everything apps are much harder to develop for the same base feature set (“share a message” is easy in text, quadratically much harder on video), which is why VC-funded capital can do it.

We have to accept that what we need is alternatives, plural, to the various things that Discord and other platforms centralize. Because half the point here is we are against centralization. And allowing each project to focus on each problem separately allows them to take advantage of their own strengths, up to and including funding and provisioning (“get storage for a million items” is trivial on text; quadratically much harder on video).

We need a text messaging platform? XMPP already exists. Let’s go help.

We need audio chats? Mumble already exists. Let’s go help.

We need instant notifications? Surely something already exists. Let’s go help.

We don’t need “a walled garden but on the Fediverse”.

I feel like I’ve explored every alternative, and there’s one feature that’s missing from everything: audio with screen share. Not a single service lets me share my system audio with the people watching my screen

I never really understood the appeal of discord over something like ventrilo or team speak. Is it basically so your friend group has a little message board or community website in THEIR voice server?

It looks like discord. There is no replacement. No other project comes close.