I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
Seeing Teamspeak outlive Discord just keeps making me laugh.
Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn’t mean Discord is dying.
“outlive” Discord is quite the exaggeration. Let’s not pretend that we’re not a vocal minority here, and that Discord will keep trucking just fine.
Even if the age verification wasn’t a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually. So it’s not going anywhere for now, but I’m pretty sure the investors will want their money back sooner or later.
Now I’m just waiting for Ventrilo and the All Seeing Eye to come back… Maybe one day I’ll be able to play CoD1 mp and have weekly scrims again : (
Don’t know if you are interested in COD UO but we have biweekly pugs every Tuesday and Sunday evening. I think the cod1 scene is pretty much like us. CoD2 seems to be the active community with a running league with like 9 teams or so.
Trying to build the community up on these old games
I’d def jam UO but I’m down under and playing with ~250 ping is too shit for cod :( thanks for the invite tho, hf in ur games <3
Edit: I did see this recently, could be useful for you: https://gamedate.org/
I remember the good old days of the 300 pingers either being people on dial up or Aussies getting a morning game in. Yeah it’s be hard to scrim with that ping for sure. Thanks for sharing the game date URL. It’s a nice little site, we’ve used it a few times
How do you guys organize games? Discord I assume? I might be keen to jump into a pug at a weird time sometime.
Yes, pretty much every active server on UO has one. This one is ours if you feel the fancy to hop on sometime (I go by VE_AG_RA on UO [long story])
What’s wrong with team speak? It was a good service circa 2006. And I don’t see how it is significantly less valuable to the “gaming” community. I know it isn’t as feature rich and discord has evolved a lot from its “gamer” origins. I see it used for all kinds of community’s as a catch all system. I guess that is good, but I don’t get much value from it being a centralized point of community building.
Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.
I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.
It’s disgusting yeah. I try to avoid projects where Discord is their only news and/or support outlet.
Imo the biggest problem with Teamspeak is that it still requires an active connection to the server at all time… So unless your computer is on with the app opened 24/7 you may miss messages. That may or may not be an issue, but you may miss messages that your friends send to the group when you aren’t actively online.
Frankly the UI of TeamSpeak is ageing as well, and there is value in for instance being able to simply attach a screenshot directly in a Discord chat without having to upload it to some external service.
They have acknowledged the offline messaging part. It does work in group chats and has E2EE there, but I think it’s something they are going to look into for servers. It’s closed source, so we are at the mercy of their few developers and cannot help. While I do trust them more than Discord, I would rather have an open solution, like Stoat/Fluxer, take off instead.
Check out the Teamspeak6 beta. I don’t know about offline messages but it addresses all your other complaints. I moved to it from Mumble somewhat recently and have been very happy with it.
It used to be packaged with Overwolf, that was the dealbreaker for me back then.
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I have tried XMPP, Matrix and now I’ve settled on Mumble.
Me and my fellows mostly just need a voice room or a couple to sit in, and Mumble does that best out of these three, in my opinion.
I recommend giving Mumble a try as it is super easy to set up and use. Users don’t need to even create accounts to join servers.
I second this. My gaming group probably won’t leave discord for the foreseeable future but Mumble is probably where we’d go if we did. IMO all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does, when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at their scale.
I don’t want federation. I don’t want it to scale to infinite concurrent users. What I want is something simple I can plonk on a crusty old laptop running Proxmox or a Raspberry pi for a few friends.
Mumble is nice, but it hasn’t changed much since the time people explicitly moved away from it to Discord, so why would they go back it it now?
Mumble isn’t requiring you to submit your ID.
Probably nothing has really changed. And I am not claiming it to be a Discord killer, as it really only does the voice rooms well.
But I am recommending it if you and your friends just need a voice room or two (as me and my friends do).
Mumble is fantastic.
I designed and implemented a very complex voice system for an old guild. Like 100 people, 8 groups of 15, group leader’s private chat, priority speech all that. It worked so well, and never failed.
This was many many years ago, to be fair.
I wish it’s positional audio was more supported.
What I’m upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums? Hell, even a subreddit would at least have been scrapable. If there’s a mass migration away from Discord then all that information just gets lost. Example that Lemmings might care about - CachyOS has a forum, but I’ve seen the vast majority of troubleshooting and user input made on their Discord channel.
Old fashioned forums are old fashioned. Circular logic but there’s a lot holding them back.
- Create a new account for every single niche forum? No thanks. We need a federated solution.
- Lemmy/Piefed/etc is almost there
- Antiquated restrictions (e.g. Log in to view images)
- Antiquated UI - People want emojis, reactions, rich media, etc
- PHP paid the bills once upon a time but now it’s hard to get anyone excited to make big new features for forum software
- Create a new account for every single niche forum? No thanks. We need a federated solution.
As a Giant Bomb fan, it’s somewhat renewed interest in forums over there from the operators and users. Discord was always a bad forum anyway, but it was great for immediately being able to have a conversation with people to find answers to problems.
What I’m upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums?
Rather than paying for hosting and operational costs that goes with a forum, social media and the desire for immediacy happened as Yahoo created Groups, then Facebook followed suit with their own.
Thankfully these guys dumped many public Discord servers, privacy concerns aside, the information won’t really be forever trapped
It comes down to Fluxer and Stoat. Or just Stoat if you dislike Fluxer’s AI-assisted development.
One thing is clear, both are currently working great and are the closest thing to Discord’s core features.
It’s definitely going to be one of these two. Matrix and XMPP are just too much for casual users, and there’s no one client for either of them which supports all of Discord’s core features.
Out of those two, Fluxer feels like the better choice right now, but I do wish they’d take a stronger stance against LLMs. Stoat feels clunkier, buggier, and feels like it’s getting left behind.
I feel like comet has all of discords features, no?
Element supports all of discords core features.
Last I checked it doesn’t keep channels in a server organized and always sorts by recent activity. I may be mistaken but I don’t believe it supported screenshare audio yet either
These are core features? For me core feature is channels, audio/video call and screen share and element can do all of that.
Damn it this is the first I’m hearing about Fluxer’s AI development.
I’ve had the most people switch over to element (a full 2 people plus myself)
Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?
Are you talking about self hosting for fluxer? They explicitly state in their documentation they don’t want people using the current version because they’re doing a rewrite, so you should wait.
Yes, Fluxer’s self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn’t self hosted enough for my needs. It’s cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.
Honestly if you’re that worried about it, I’d just wait and not use anything. Instead of wasting time trying to find a product that probably won’t get better, you can wait and get Fluxer when they make it ready.
Or you could pull stoat and modify the code yourself.
I am so pissed that Element or any other Matrix app does not support push to talk OR a minimum noise gate. If it did it would clearly get tons of new users, it would be pretty much no question which plattform to replace discord with
Whilst that’s one of the few things that bugs me with element, let’s not pretend that a lack of PTT or noise gate is the reason for everybody not switching to matrix.
Maybe not, but it would probably grow immensly. The exodus from discord is pretty significant, and matrix is mentioned again and again. It does not have to be that many more users in % from Discord to make matrix a lot more popular than it is today
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #178 for this comm, first seen 17th Mar 2026, 08:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I hope we get encrypted hosting sites that can help people do easy automated setups. A bunch of people want something that is just create a server and go. I know several discord admins that aren’t really hardware and self hosting literate.
Got a link that’s not YouTube?
I don’t. And I don’t know if they put their videos elsewhere.
You can use an Invidious link, actually. I do this a lot.
For @quick_snail@feddit.nl as follows: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=kpjcmXbmMVM
go-away says I’m a bot, and the page doesn’t load
You need to allow JavaScript in order to do it due to bot scraping.
Fluxer is of particular interest to the folks here at AN. We’ve talked a bit about exploring it once they finish work on federation.
hey that looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. will keep an eye on development for sure!
That’s a primary focus of the app after stability. The dev was able to hire on a co-developer, so hoping to see the project accelerate
Pretty surprised to not see mumble mentioned. It’s mostly a voice chat replacement. But the low latency chat works so damn well and easy to self host.
For those who are still getting their arrangements together to leave discord but are uncomfortable about running the client in the interim check out vesktop, an open source privacy-focused discord client that looks and feels like the official client without the same uncomfortable level of access to your user space.
I hear Snikket makes it really easy to host XMPP (aka Jabber).
Yes, but it isn’t a Discord replacement, but rather a WhatsApp replacement.
https://movim.eu/ is xmpp based and might be more suitable as a Discord replacement, but to be honest it isn’t quite there yet if you are looking mainly for a voice chat app.
Hmmmm voice chat eh?
Well then it’s time to recommend Mumble!
But then it’s not chat anymore. Or screenshare.
There are many good tools that solve individual issues. But Discord solved many of these issues in one tool, and that also has its charme.
That’s precisely why they have to be resisted and/or we have to look for alternatives that Do One Thing Well. Among many other issues, the networking effect issue with EverythingApps is quite double-faceted in that, because they do everything, their “weight” not only acts as gilded cages to prevent people from leaving, but also to prevent developers, working on their spare time, from developing something that can be reasonably understood as an “alternative” (because the alternative has to also Do Everything).
It’s basically playing a loser game to lose, see eg.: Mozilla always at best playing catch-up to Google, or why we can’t seem to move from BloatedWebWithReact to something like Gopher (or even make a proper Gopher 2.0).
All that said, I feel like XMPP and Matterbridge are approaching this from the right perspective. Just implement a global communication protocol and leave to platform makers (or platform users) the task of bridging from and to whatever directions they want.
A “do everything” app is overkill. I am not a fan of many features Discord implemented over time. But the initial offering of having text chat, voice chat, video chat in one app makes sense. It’s just super convenient to switch the communication type depending on what you are currently doing, without having to onboard and switch between tools.
It’s also hard to draw a line, if you want to go “do one thing well”. Mumble also includes text chat, and user management, ACLs, etc. … for text chat one could use IRC, for user management there are IdPs, and so on. XMPP also doesn’t just do “one thing”. The “X” (= extensible) is heavily used and there are extensions for all kinds of things. Some of the big messengers out there are (or were) using XMPP under the hood (just without federation).
The project I posted here yesterday focuses on providing text, voice and screen share. My goal is to provide an easy to host tool for those three things. Check it out if it’s just those you want in a single package.
As anyone checked out Sharkord? it looks like a nice option if you don’t care about federation and just want a simple setup for your group, but it looks like it is vibe coded partially
https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger is an XMPP client from by the ejabberd people that seems aimed at being a Discord alternative. I think it is intended to support voice and screen sharing eventually, though it looks like they want to focus on getting text chat worked out for the time being.
Hey on this note, I was looking to do discourse with the mumble plugin but I wanted to do this via docker compose. Has anyone gotten that to work or have a good source they can point me to since at least on the discorse mumble plugin I noticed that it stated that their install instructions were for the stock non-docker solution only.
oh wow this is exactly what I was looking for but with mattermost. Gonna have to give this a try later and I’ll see. What are you having trouble installing, the plug-in?
Right now I’m just getting discourse to run via docker compose. I have that up and running finally and got to the splash screen locally but of course it needs a domain so I’m working on that route while my reverse proxy is throwing a fit.
I haven’t gotten to the plugin yet but just reading up on the git documentation it sounded like running it in a docker compose isn’t officially supported so I was just posting to see if maybe someone had has some experience and could offer up some pointers before I bang my head against a wall this weekend.
