Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
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@philipdrobar to me Threema is more of a Signal competitor, I hadn't really considered it in the context of community building. I should really give it a try though so that opinion is more informed! Do you use it?
@mdiluz I don't but have seen it mentioned here and there ( but yes, more as a Signal/Messenger alternative).
The payment is a hurdle, but pricing seems reasonable. As you criticized this with Stoat, I figured the cost requirement might actually give some assurance.
Again though, I haven't used it at all.
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Zulip
* Fully released
* Free
* Open Source
* Self-hostable
* No E2E
* Uses external plugins for calls
* Great moderation tools
* Supported everywhereZulip on paper sounds so close to being good! But dozens of weird UI choices forced me away. Zulip's UX is far more like a set of forums than a chat app. It's trying something new and I commend it for that, but I think it'll be a hard sell for many people.
@mdiluz Thank you for this valuable thread!
For what it’s worth… I have been lurking on Zulip after being introduced to it through the @CoMaps project. I have been really impressed with the quality of discussion (credit to the contributors!) and how the tool helps keep the conversations organized (threaded). I’m now testing Zulip for another nonprofit I’m involved with. I think as chat for that specific use case — mission-driven, distributed, goal-oriented collaboration — it’s a pretty great solution. Much more accessible to me than, say, Slack or Discord, which hurt my head.
️ I also like how Zulip lets you “resolve” threads like issues — so you can note when a discussion is over. (Threads don’t linger forever!) 
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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@mdiluz Element? Or does that fall under the same category as Matrix? Also, SimpleX but I had a hard time figuring that one out.
@rvaweather @mdiluz yeah element is a client for matrix
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And finally, Matrix. This is by far the most common suggestion I get. Especially here given the shared ethos of federation.
* Fully released
* Free
* Open Source
* Self-hostable*
* E2E
* Calls*
* Moderation*
* Supported everywhereMatrix fills in *so* many of the requirements here, but still has issues.
You can self-host, but your homeserver has to host the full history and data in any channel that a signed up user joins. You could however not allow sign-ups, and just have channels.
@mdiluz alright, so I'm gonna point out a few things about matrix in here, which are a bit wrong or inaccurate.
First, you don't have to host the full history of a room whatsoever, that'd require huge storage which I don't have for one, and neither would probably a lot of the people hosting matrix homeservers today. In theory all events are duplicated, but in practice all events from the point of joining only are duplicated, and old events, especially media because that's the biggest stuff in your matrix installation, can be forgotten from the room representation depending on the server. Also depending on the server, you can have a very space and memory efficient server if you're looking for that, and in that case I recommend continuwuity, but do note that you will lose some features specific to synapse if you go that route. So no, you don't have to defederate or avoid federation, however avoiding open signup is recommended indeed, because if you don't, spammers would easily overwhelm your server and use it as a spam vector, which will make the whole server appear on blocklists, like here on the fedi.
Second, calls. Yeah...that's a bit of a sore spot for sure, we have two standards, but everyone pretty much agrees that the first one is the legacy standard because it wasn't really good. The second one keeps evolving because it's an actual rethink of the whole thing, which takes time to get right, but element, gomux and probably some other clients here and there support it in its current form, even if a new major version of that unstable MSC which remodeled some of the transport again exists and the reference implementation is migrating to it.
Third, moderation, well I'd say we actually have it better than discord in many cases, because we rely on the federated nature of matrix, and then external and swappable tooling for moderation, essentially bots, and we also have another powerful thing called policy servers.
There's a lot one could say about how it works, what policy lists are and how we deal with spammers, but I think the documentation of the draupnir project, which is the moderation bot a lot of people use, explains this stuff quite well.
Another thing you mentioned is scoped permissions, well that's what power levels are for. You can modify the state of a room, so that a specific power level is required to send a kind of event, and critically, any event. can be restricted by that. That way, you can have telegram stile channels, rooms in which people can't start voice calls, stuff like that. In this also go the join rules, which instruct a server in what circumstances a person can join a room. This could be something like, you can't join this room unless you were a member of another room specified by the person who makes the rule, most often this is used to limit rooms which are part of a space, like a discord server, to be only joinable by the people in that space, but that's not the only use.
Sure, all this sounds complicated, but I'm saying this stuff exists, we just need good UI for it and that's challenging. But also, I think we don't really need the roles thing in matrix, because we can split our space into as many subspaces as we want, and then invite the people who should belong to a specific subspace straight there, because spaces are just rooms at the end of the day. It also helps that once a person is joined to a space, they aren't automatically joined to all rooms the way they're joined to all channels@everyonehas access to on the discord side for example. So yeah, the thinking is slightly different here, but I think it's a bit better and more organized, I might just be biased though which is definitely a thing that can happen
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Here's hoping all that was useful to someone. I spent some time looking for a thread/post/blog like this when I first went searching, but couldn't find it, so here's me paying it forward for the next person.
@mdiluz is there room on here anywhere for Signal group chats, or are searchable channels a core feature requirement?
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Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
I've actually been looking into all available options for the past few weeks for other reasons, so here's a thread to share what I've found.
In particular I'm looking for stuff with:
* Data sovereignty
* Strong moderation tools
* Wide platform supportHopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!
@mdiluz xmpp?
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Mattermost sometimes comes up
* Fully released
* Limited free use*
* "Open core"?
* Self-hostable
* Some E2E?
* Supports calls
* No web appMattermost is interesting, but seems to be far more of an enterprise solution. It's even hard to figure out *what* you get from self hosting, what actually is open source, etc.
I think it's probably worth investigating further if you're looking for something for your company/teams?
Mattermost has essentially given the OSS community the middle finger.
To make matters worse, they have a 10k message team edition (self hosted as well)
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3601919951 -
(matrix cont.) Overall Matrix feels like a brilliant evolution on IRC, in a wonderfully old-school kind of way. Unfortunately that brings with it some goofyness and hard to understand intricacies.
Matrix is one of the few options that lets you self-host *and* still connect with all the other communities, and that's wonderful.
I want it to succeed, and it'll probably be my choice, but it's gonna take work to operate communities in it effectively.
@mdiluz for folks thinking of considering Matrix, please stay away. It has the most unusable UX, and I have a running list of companies/clients who have moved away from Matrix (Element) back to Teams/Slack/Mattermost.
Usability is an issue that Matrix has willfully chosen to ignore under the garb of "Decentralized and secure messaging".
Additional reference: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/im-never-going-back-to-matrix/
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Mattermost sometimes comes up
* Fully released
* Limited free use*
* "Open core"?
* Self-hostable
* Some E2E?
* Supports calls
* No web appMattermost is interesting, but seems to be far more of an enterprise solution. It's even hard to figure out *what* you get from self hosting, what actually is open source, etc.
I think it's probably worth investigating further if you're looking for something for your company/teams?
@mdiluz What do you meant “no web app” for mattermost? I just did a 3-way call tonight with 2 other folks using mattermost. I was using Firefox. I had video, audio, and screen sharing. They also have a mobile app.
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Here's hoping all that was useful to someone. I spent some time looking for a thread/post/blog like this when I first went searching, but couldn't find it, so here's me paying it forward for the next person.
@mdiluz Thanks. I’m curious why you didn’t look at IRC. Old skool, but also, multi-client, federated, multiple full open source implementations, interoperable…
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Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
I've actually been looking into all available options for the past few weeks for other reasons, so here's a thread to share what I've found.
In particular I'm looking for stuff with:
* Data sovereignty
* Strong moderation tools
* Wide platform supportHopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!
@mdiluz I would also add Mumble if you only care about voice chat.
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Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
I've actually been looking into all available options for the past few weeks for other reasons, so here's a thread to share what I've found.
In particular I'm looking for stuff with:
* Data sovereignty
* Strong moderation tools
* Wide platform supportHopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!
@mdiluz Do people like Discourse? https://github.com/discourse/discourse
As a forum, it always seemed nice.
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Mattermost sometimes comes up
* Fully released
* Limited free use*
* "Open core"?
* Self-hostable
* Some E2E?
* Supports calls
* No web appMattermost is interesting, but seems to be far more of an enterprise solution. It's even hard to figure out *what* you get from self hosting, what actually is open source, etc.
I think it's probably worth investigating further if you're looking for something for your company/teams?
@mdiluz
No web app? My institute has mattermost, and webapp is the only was I interact with it. -
@mdiluz As someone who spent almost twenty years on IRC and fled the Freenode implosion in May 2021, I now sort of wish I had stuck it out with Matrix (which was hella jank almost five years ago) instead of going to Discord. I wonder how/if this will impact how we run REAC and the Advances chat this year, what a mess.
@mtothevizzah @mdiluz the good news is that you haven't missed anything - Matrix is in pretty much exactly the same state as 5 years ago
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Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
I've actually been looking into all available options for the past few weeks for other reasons, so here's a thread to share what I've found.
In particular I'm looking for stuff with:
* Data sovereignty
* Strong moderation tools
* Wide platform supportHopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!
@mdiluz Maybe Discord was just a really bad idea?
It seems to me that replacing a bad idea by something that attempts to emulate the same bad idea is unlikely to produce good results.
Better, then, to split up the bad idea into less bad ideas, and have specific softwares for these.
Like a Discourse/Signal mix as I saw recommended on https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/#score-breakdown
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Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
I've actually been looking into all available options for the past few weeks for other reasons, so here's a thread to share what I've found.
In particular I'm looking for stuff with:
* Data sovereignty
* Strong moderation tools
* Wide platform supportHopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!
@mdiluz have you considered Movim (https://movim.eu)?
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Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
I've actually been looking into all available options for the past few weeks for other reasons, so here's a thread to share what I've found.
In particular I'm looking for stuff with:
* Data sovereignty
* Strong moderation tools
* Wide platform supportHopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!
– reply to Michael Taggart's post, if you're interested. Thanks.
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@mtothevizzah @mdiluz the good news is that you haven't missed anything - Matrix is in pretty much exactly the same state as 5 years ago
@groxx @mtothevizzah @mdiluz yup, Matrix is still jank!
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@mdiluz I don't but have seen it mentioned here and there ( but yes, more as a Signal/Messenger alternative).
The payment is a hurdle, but pricing seems reasonable. As you criticized this with Stoat, I figured the cost requirement might actually give some assurance.
Again though, I haven't used it at all.
@philipdrobar good point on Stoat. I think it's more that I worry stoat will collapse under its own weight, as it seems to be going for the discord model of them hosting the majority of users (rather than federation or just server interop).
