If you're interested in funding or helping us find funding for a Discord replacement that's federated and end-to-end encrypted, we're interested in implementing that at @spritely ... we even had been talking about that being our big focus for 2026.

[sprocketclown@mastodon.social]

@cwebber @spritely In the meantime are there any half decent FOSS alternatives one could use as a stop-gap measure?

[wcbdata@vis.social]

@spritely @cwebber @richlv I know it's a personal preference, but I like the threaded replies model in Slack & Discord better than the "topic" approach in Zulip. Topic to me seems redundant with Channel - sort of like a long-lived email subject line, whereas threaded replies are much more focused and help me visually associate conversations.

[viq@social.hackerspace.pl]

@wcbdata
What needs to be fixed about Zulip? I'm curious, as I'm very intrigued by how it works, and I think it could work very well for organizing conversations.

[woozle@toot.cat]

@cwebber @spritely

Funding-infrastructurally: one thing I'd like to see is some kind of mechanism where non-wealthy individuals with a little cash to spare can pledge $support if some corporate sponsor pulls out, especially if it's for questionable reasons.

(Just a thought.)
(Hey have you heard of ActivityPub, maybe that would be good for this.)

[richlv@mastodon.social]

@wcbdata @spritely @cwebber
Hmm, I could see them being somewhat redundant in a small community, but anything past that would surely benefit from nested structure.

Regarding the threaded mode, I have used Slack very little, and Discord maybe once, so no good experience - but I'll just imagine it's like mailing list archives
I can see benefits and drawbacks in both modes. In a way, quoting in Zulip might replace full threading, and allow the topics to remain more focused.

[richlv@mastodon.social]

@wcbdata @spritely @cwebber
The mailing-list-archive-like threading has other problems - going down all the threads is a bit tiresome, as one has to jump between conversations in time and subtopics. It's also not quite what mailing list participants experience at the time - they view messages very sequentially.
Perhaps Zulip model better reflects that experience?

That doesn't guarantee it being better, though. Would be great to see proper studies on this

[xjix@merveilles.town]

@mattof @cwebber @spritely

personally, I'd love to see more funding directed at OMEMO libraries. There are some worrying security questions there https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

FOSS broadly is having a funding crisis tho so this is probably true for a lot of projects.

[tim@mastodon.energy]

@cwebber @spritely @SprocketClown Matrix is probably going to be the long term answer. The UI UX is steadily improving, but might be OK already. The Element X iOS and Android clients are both now pretty good, and there are many others to try too.

[sprocketclown@mastodon.social]

@tim @cwebber @spritely The UI is a complete nonstarter for my uses. It's frustratingly confusing to navigate for new users and not laid out in any way intuitively the way Discord is.

[liaizon@social.wake.st]

@polyfloyd wow I hadn't seen https://commet.chat before this, thanks, this is a super nice Matrix client. cc @douginamug

@dthompson @cwebber @spritely

[maj@cosocial.ca]

@ekaitz_zarraga @cwebber @spritely It's often used by fandom communities as semi-private spaces apart from the more public Tumblr as well as by non profits and professional associations / communities of practice.

The UX is pretty great for moving between multiple servers with channels that have threaded conversations. Flexible admin controls and a lot of bots/add ons, too.

I never bothered with it until about two years ago when it became one of my main online social platforms.

[lexinova@cyberplace.social]

@cwebber @spritely just if possible try to avoid the major bug from both element (matrix), and simplex, that is losing the capacity to decrypt message because of a desyncronisation of some user on differents relay (server).

[maj@cosocial.ca]

@ekaitz_zarraga @cwebber @spritely It also has integrated audio and video chat (better than Slacks imho) and support things like watch parties really well (though I haven't used those features much).

[ekaitz_zarraga@mastodon.social]

@maj @cwebber @spritely Actual good design there then?

[wcbdata@vis.social]

@viq Sorry about that - replied to a similar question further up the thread (as an accidental case in point, I suppose!)

[maj@cosocial.ca]

@ekaitz_zarraga @cwebber @spritely Yeah, it has some quirks but is relatively intuitive for being so robust.

I was part of a 100+ person writing group that migrated from (private) Reddit chat (which sucked). There was the usual grumbling but even the very non-technical folks figured it out pretty quickly.

(They do not plan to move again and I can't think of what to even suggest... )

[viq@social.hackerspace.pl]

@wcbdata
”see answer over there" is a perfectly reasonable response

[shanie@mastodon.tails.ch]

@SprocketClown @tim @cwebber @spritely Gotta agree, as someone who has set up a Matrix server, the UX has been and still is a disaster (give them 10 years and it’ll still look like XMPP), and they have literal “pro” versions of Matrix that are NOT the same source as community and are hosted by them.

Discord isn’t a good company, but they made a functional UX and understood that simple is intuitive.

[setok@attractive.space]

@cwebber @spritely why wouldn’t Matrix be the natural replacement?

[shanie@mastodon.tails.ch]

@dthompson @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely That’s because Stoat doesn’t have decentralized federated features. In fact, if you want to connect to another server, you have to compile the client and distribute it.

Saying this, Federation of chat channels might be unnecessary tech. What you need is a client that easily connects to multiple servers (“communities”) simultaneously with a single login, of which that login server can be federated.