Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
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@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!) 
@scott @CoMaps yeah for sure, I think if Zulip's conversation model fits with your needs it might be a great option! I'm fascinated by what they've done and I think if I had more time with it I'd be able to develop the mental model needed to use it.
I'm probably going to consider it in situations where Discourse might have been an option - it feels like an awesome forum/chat fusion for project support and discussion.
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@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
@esoteric_programmer thanks a ton!
Yeah so that's fair on homeservers. I had to over-simplify for sure. It's more that the responsibility is bigger than some might expect - though as you say not quite as big as it might first seem.
For moderation - I've heard power levels to givee some of what I need, though without particularly good UX. It slightly feels like a bodge though and I haven't found solid docs on how to use them as you've described. Could you point me in the right direction?
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@mdiluz is there room on here anywhere for Signal group chats, or are searchable channels a core feature requirement?
@darkuncle it's an interesting point for sure. I think the management of multiple channels (most of the time 10+) is quite key. That's kind of what separates these tools out from Signal, Telegram, Threema, etc.
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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@chanakya ah yup that explains it. The whole thing had the stench of "open source but not really open at all"
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@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/
@chanakya honestly agreed - I don't think I'd ever recommend Matrix for actual company work. There's better solutions in this list for those kinds of users.
That's not to disparage Matrix. Different tools for different jobs.
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@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.
@paco oh right, let me edit. I couldn't find any mention of a web app when researching!
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@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…
@adamshostack honestly I probably should have! Thanks for the reminder, will tag it onto the end once I've had another tinker after 15 years of being away.
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@roguefoam IIRC free tier users also can't store full history, which makes Searchable Log Of All Company Knowledge a bit of a misnomer
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@mdiluz Do people like Discourse? https://github.com/discourse/discourse
As a forum, it always seemed nice.
@com yup! Big fan of discourse for when the conversation is less real-time.
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@mdiluz
No web app? My institute has mattermost, and webapp is the only was I interact with it.@Mehrad updated, I couldn't find it
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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 TeamSpeak
only meets part of the criteria though -
@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
@androcat awesome write up. Annoyed I didn't find it the first go-around
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@mdiluz have you considered Movim (https://movim.eu)?
@zeank hadn't heard of it but will be checking it out!
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@philipdrobar ah I forgot it's paid too with no free tier, that also makes it kind of a hard no unfortunately for me, tho I'm sure it might work for others
@mdiluz @philipdrobar it's really only a few bucks for a "lifetime" and it can be purchased directly without involvement of e.g. the Google App Store. It's also available as direct download or on F-Droid. That is quite something in that space and sure keeps all the damn spam/scam bots out.
It was also sold [again] this year: https://comitiscapital.com/news/comitis-capital-announces-the-acquisition-of-threema
Jury is still out but since when does this mean any good for users.
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@esoteric_programmer thanks a ton!
Yeah so that's fair on homeservers. I had to over-simplify for sure. It's more that the responsibility is bigger than some might expect - though as you say not quite as big as it might first seem.
For moderation - I've heard power levels to givee some of what I need, though without particularly good UX. It slightly feels like a bodge though and I haven't found solid docs on how to use them as you've described. Could you point me in the right direction?
@mdiluz for now, look at the draupnir documentation, especially the protections list and concepts, like policy lists. It begins here
https://the-draupnir-project.github.io/draupnir-documentation/moderator/setting-up-and-configuring
About power levels and join rules, that stuff is mostly learned by doing, I dk of any well put together resource for specifically this, but as I said, those are kinda hacky and that's more of a last resort thing, use powerlevels and join rules responsibly, but most of those mechanisms should be performed with your moderation bot of choice. If you want certain features or need help with something you want to do but don't know how, feel free to go in the community, the draupnir room is public and available even in the matrix.org room directory, but I can provide a link if you can't find it on the site or in the directory -
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 Delta Chat is another option.
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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
Maybe use Shakespeare to knock up your ideal Discord replacement?
https://shakespeare.diy/
I'm possibly serious about this. It's built on nostr, which presumably could provide all the back-end tech you'd need. -
@mdiluz for now, look at the draupnir documentation, especially the protections list and concepts, like policy lists. It begins here
https://the-draupnir-project.github.io/draupnir-documentation/moderator/setting-up-and-configuring
About power levels and join rules, that stuff is mostly learned by doing, I dk of any well put together resource for specifically this, but as I said, those are kinda hacky and that's more of a last resort thing, use powerlevels and join rules responsibly, but most of those mechanisms should be performed with your moderation bot of choice. If you want certain features or need help with something you want to do but don't know how, feel free to go in the community, the draupnir room is public and available even in the matrix.org room directory, but I can provide a link if you can't find it on the site or in the directory@esoteric_programmer love it, thanks. Will absolutely be getting to know draupnir
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@mdiluz @philipdrobar it's really only a few bucks for a "lifetime" and it can be purchased directly without involvement of e.g. the Google App Store. It's also available as direct download or on F-Droid. That is quite something in that space and sure keeps all the damn spam/scam bots out.
It was also sold [again] this year: https://comitiscapital.com/news/comitis-capital-announces-the-acquisition-of-threema
Jury is still out but since when does this mean any good for users.
@bekopharm @philipdrobar I guess I should clarify. For me I'm totally fine paying for something (I've now paid for Threema to try it out!) but I want communities to be open and have minimal barriers of entry.
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@bekopharm @philipdrobar I guess I should clarify. For me I'm totally fine paying for something (I've now paid for Threema to try it out!) but I want communities to be open and have minimal barriers of entry.
@mdiluz good point. It's a rather good alternative to anything else tied to a phone number though. And to this date I got zero spam over this, thanks to that entry fee I guess.
Indeed not really for the scope of the discussion.
