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.

[cwebber@social.coop]

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.

We have the skills and the underlying tech to pull this off. What we need right now is resources. Funding for open source nonprofits like ours really fell apart in 2025. If you think you know how to help, feel free to reach out.

[cwebber@social.coop]

We need more institutional support to get to the level where this can be our focus. But in the meanwhile, if you're an individual and you do want to help @spritely advance, you can donate here: https://spritely.institute/donate/

[ekaitz_zarraga@mastodon.social]

@cwebber @spritely What is going on with Discord? why does EVERYONE use it?

I don't even know what it is LOL

[kryptykphysh@mastodon.kryptykphysh.xyz]

@cwebber @spritely How much funding is significant and how much is too little?

[glyg@mamot.fr]

@cwebber @spritely

Framasoft has a longstanding practice of ''freeing out'' web services
Maybe they can be of some help?
@Framasoft

[sobex@social.sciences.re]

@KryptykPhysh @cwebber @spritely Same question. I might consider forking a little bit of money (on the magnitude of 5€/month), but I'm no big fish and my pockets are already a bit drained.

[sobex@social.sciences.re]

@ekaitz_zarraga @cwebber @spritely Discord is like slack for gamers, and better than slack, including audio and video calls and streams.

And what is going on. Since a large array of country have enacted are are in the process of enacting age verification laws, they are rolling out age verification globally.

And that's after one of their partner for UK age-verification leaked a large stash of IDs.

[woody@pleroma.pch.net]

@cwebber @spritely

Isn't that XMPP?

[dallo@pouet.chapril.org]

@cwebber @spritely is it going to be a new protocol or maybe build on top of xmpp or matrix?

[wcbdata@vis.social]

@spritely @cwebber Can you help Zulip achieve this (and fix their conversation thread model)? 🥺

[danvolchek@mastodon.social]

@cwebber @spritely Its so frustrating that all the other replacements should be good options, but they're not because they either don't work or have a difficult to use UX. If you end up doing this please make it usable

[polyfloyd@hsnl.social]

@cwebber @spritely Will you pick an existing project and nurture it? Or start from scratch?

There are plenty of alternative Discord-projects out there, some of which already have some degree or promise of federation. I would find it wasteful to start the Nth competitor. XKCD 927.

[dthompson@toot.cat]

@polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely can you name one that is any good? I can't. matrix probably comes the closest but it has fundamental issues that would be hard to fix retroactively.

[polyfloyd@hsnl.social]

@dthompson @cwebber @spritely The most mentioned one would be https://stoat.chat/. I heard it is decent but I have not tried it myself.

Alternatively:
* https://commet.chat/
* https://fluxer.app/
* https://fermi.chat/
* https://sharkord.com/
* https://www.rootapp.com/

And probably a few more that I have not yet discovered. This is a crowded space, holy shit

[dthompson@toot.cat]

@polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely I took a quick look and I don't see anything that mentions Stoat having federation or any other decentralized features. Commet probably has that due to being built on Matrix. Other than that, they all seem centralized but self-hostable with the exception of Root which afaict is proprietary SaaS.

[mattof@functional.cafe]

@cwebber @spritely why not a xmpp chatroom?

[neckspike@indiepocalypse.social]

@mattof

@cwebber @spritely

the problem with replacing discord is it does a bunch of things good enough, so you end up needing xmpp and jitsi and sone other things and custom work to bind it together and make it work smoothly

[richlv@mastodon.social]

@wcbdata @spritely @cwebber Zulip is great, but what do you find wrong with topics there?

[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.