I see it's once again time to post this: https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@gme I'm not sure what criteria you're using, but for public communities it absolutely is not. The utter lack of moderation capability makes it unsafe for that use case. Private comms? Fine. But that's not really Discord's primary purpose.

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@gme That is not what I'm talking about. When you run a community, moderation is per room, which doesn't scale in the least. The automation via bots like Draupnir is rudimentary at best, and incredibly hamfisted (especially for E2EE). Yes, I can take action on individual users. I cannot prevent attacks usefully at scale. And setting all of the additional tooling up for what does exist is the kind of sysadmin nightmare that Discord successfully abstracted away.

Meanwhile, Discourse has these tools out of the box. They serve different purposes, but I contend that for community building, one is far superior.

[bretthaines@infosec.exchange]

@mttaggart the first company I worked for used Rocket.Chat for their IMs and it worked better than MS Teams or Google Chat, both of which I've used at later employers. Didn't look as flashy but it was far more stable. I really hope they stick with it for my old coworkers' sake.

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@bretthaines It's very good! And their native federation protocol has entered general availability.

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@gme Ah, but what has a community profited to gain E2EE, only to lose trust and safety? As always, "it depends," but IME a public Matrix server is just courting disaster.

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@shom I have. It's functional, but I wouldn't call it a first-class citizen yet. And as noted elsewhere E2EE is not a feature, so be aware of that.

[tehfishman@ioc.exchange]

@mttaggart Have you tried the streaming functionality? I have a small Discord community that uses the streaming features pretty often, and it'll be a hard to convince people to ditch Discord if streaming isn't very good.

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@tehfishman I haven't, but I'm keen to.

[shom@gts.shom.dev]

@mttaggart thanks, good to know. Best to treat it like the Fediverse where everything iis quasi public.

[wjmaggos@liberal.city]

@mttaggart

you seem to be very knowledgeable and fair about all these, but I so want the answer to be #matrix cause it could also theoretically do all our messaging and video chat and even POTS eventually. I feel like if we want the less techy to embrace our world, it can't be just about switching apps yet again, but also must at least offer the possibility of eliminating the need for other apps. IDK.

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@wjmaggos Matrix can be the answer! I was very optimistic, and I still think there's a lot to like. For private communities, I think it's wonderful. The problem arises in large public communities because of the lack of moderation tooling. Without that aspect of the platform, it's simply too dangerous to open the doors to the general internet.

[amici@fribygda.no]

@mttaggart

missing consideration: video chatting

[cos@sauna.social]

@mttaggart good list, but I don't think it's fair to Matrix today.

The CSAM attacks happened, but moderation tools have taken a big leap since. You can quite easily use a moderation bot that subscribes to public ban lists. This almost fully ends any generic spam.

Also you talk about matrix.org as "flagship server". Friends don't let friends use matrix.org. Use small/medium sized servers instead and you get better performance. Same applies to Mastodon - don't use mastodon.social, decentralize!

My main criticism would be the buggy mobile clients, and super slow migration from Element Classic to Element X. Element web/desktop are decent quality, but far from polished.

Oh and you don't even mention bridges. Other alternatives don't even try to support them. Bridges are a key feature.

[bryanredeagle@beige.party]

@mttaggart A another knock against Matrix is the ordering of messages. I've been using it more recently, and I struggle to piece together a conversation because the messages are in the wrong order.

[admin@mastodon.futurelab.social]

@mttaggart what about the ones that don't have AI shoved down users' throats?

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@cos

The CSAM attacks happened, but moderation tools have taken a big leap since.

I would appreciate links to these new resources. Last I saw, Draupnir was still very much inadequate.

As for server choice, I think Mastodon itself is evidence of what a fussy server selection process can do to adoption.

This reply is written from the perspective of a computer enthusiast. Probably a volunteer sysadmin/self hoster—like me. We cannot be the target for a general alternative.

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@admin I think you'll find the list refreshingly AI-free. While Discourse has plugins, they are optional and not default.

[admin@mastodon.futurelab.social]

@mttaggart from rocket.chat's front page:

"AI-powered conversations

Automate the busywork, surface the right insights instantly, and keep your teams to drive
operational success."

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@admin I would separate marketing hype from product reality. Again, optional modules and nothing doing in self-hosted.

[cos@sauna.social]

@mttaggart for example etke.cc offers a public draupnir instance: https://etke.cc/help/bots/draupnir/
That combined with good policy lists should be quite good against spam. Of course targeted attacks are harder to block.

Also I think I heard that in FOSDEM Element said that there will be some kind of server chooser at last.. IMO using matrix.org as default has been a bad choice. Of course a curated list of servers makes a handful of new problems.

Currently a list of open servers can be found at https://servers.joinmatrix.org/