this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.

Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?

Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".

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[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I've also been comparing Element and Revolt. Both seem really solid, both are open source and both are self-hostable. Hard to find any downsides there.

There's a discord server that me and a bunch of friends use as our main hangout. They've raised the prospect of bailing before things enshittify, and of course I've been tasked with pitching a replacement. For my money, Revolt is the way I'm going to go, specifically because it's basically a one for one clone of Discord. The people I'm pitching this to are a mix of technical and non-technical, so I think something that looks and feels like what they're used to will be the easiest transition.

It also feels like Element is geared pretty heavily towards being a replacement for Slack / Teams rather than a replacement for Discord. Their pitch seems a lot more focused on the enterprise market. Revolt seems more focused on gaming, casual hangout, that sort of thing.

I like Element a lot, but for me it doesn't feel like the right solution to this specific problem. But if I was pitching something to my work as a Teams replacement, Element is definitely the way I'd go.

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Silly question perhaps, but I haven't tripped across it on the site for Revolt -- is there a relatively straight forward server version for self-hosting, or is it just that the source is on github and you can compile it in theory if you feel like goin through that process... ?

[–] BendingHawk@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The most straight forward I see appears to be Docker hosting

https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted

https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-what-can-i-do-with-revolt-and-how-do-i-self-host

If you're looking to self host but are uncomfortable with Docker I recommend checking out YunoHost as an option for something a bit simpler, they also support Revolt

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Avoid Revolt as there moderation is questionable

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[–] msage@programming.dev 11 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Way too few mentions of Jitsi.

I use it with friends, it has good server config, and I'm pushing it on businesses.

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[–] GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] DaveX64@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've been tinkering with old BBS software :)

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[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 9 points 1 week ago (10 children)

If you're self hosting, it's Revolt. But the default instance limits you to 20mb or something for files, which is a problem for me, personally.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Revolt is also an annoyance to self host and the apps don’t support self hosted instances without you rebuilding them because the server is hardcoded.

[–] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why even give the option then lmao

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

That’s just it, it isn’t an option

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[–] PlexSheep@infosec.pub 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

That's a throwback. Let's take it one step further and just get back on Ventrilo and play some DOTA. (For the younger folks who don't get the reference: https://youtu.be/aTJncWndUB8 )

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[–] Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week ago

Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.

[–] crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Matrix is nice, and you can have jitsi for calls integrated. It seems to be pretty popular; Lemmy has a field for matrix @ in user profiles. Never heard of revolt before.

[–] ErrorCode@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

I use Jitsi for a non-profit, and I like the mute someone else function, but oh wow the noise cancellation needs improvement. So many voice comm apps have disappeared (there used to be one our group used all the time, then the devs dropped it (the client app) and just became on API or something).

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (19 children)

Why use Element for matrix?

From what I can tell it collets and links data to you: Location, identifiers and contact information.

How is that private or better than Signal?

[–] doodledup@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I use Signal for private and personal messages. I use Discord solely for gaming and voicechat. A good alternative doesn't need to be overly private (although that would be a bonus of course). It just needs to have a good UI and feature parity with Discord.

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.

Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.

Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?

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[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] farcaller@fstab.sh 7 points 1 week ago

Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.

[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Element/matrix all the way

if you want something that looks like discord there are themes for the clients, there's even commet.chat for a discord like experience (but they haven't added calls yet)

[–] TheSambassador@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Calls and easily sharing my screen are 90% of my use cases for Discord. The entire appeal of it initially was that it was a more functional Ventrilo with both text and voice channels. Hopefully something FOSS gets further developed by the time Discord completely shits the bed.

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[–] yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Somebody needs to create an XMPP/Jitsi hybrid

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Jitsi-meet is already using xmpp under the hood.

But there are some efforts to add multi-user video calls to full xmpp clients as well. Dino can already do it for a while, and Movim and Libervia recently added experimental support.

Its not quite a full Discord replacement, but for private groups it works quite well.

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[–] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago

rocketchat seems decent

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