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No E2E-encryption? Can't find any info about it. Unencrypted = big nope. Looks good otherwise :)
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Discord isn’t E2EE either. Having data under your control even if not encrypted is a big win.
why use this over the hundreds of messaging platforms that can be self hosted and have e2ee
voice/video chat
then you can use matrix
Can you? Can I? Best I understand it's a world of pain. If there was a clear winner in the discord-a-like OSS race all these alternatives wouldn't be coming out of the woodwork. Maybe it's matrix (with an actually good client, proper decentralization, easy containers), maybe stoat, maybe ... I've always hated discord anyway and have little need currently, I can wait.
The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.
Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I'm missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don't use Discord very much.
If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you're in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there's a better client out there for that?
This is spot on. Discord and Matrix are, IMO, quite different. Matrix is more like Slack or Teams. You can do voice and video calls, if you configure it to do so, but it isn't like Discord in that regard at all. If you don't use Discord for that and mostly just chat with your friends then sure, but you have a lot of choices in that case.
Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.
Seems likely, certainly Matrix has some pretty evangelical supporters. I think you nailed it with discord being more useful for mid sized numbers and having a client that handles it pretty well. I'd also add pretty painless onboarding. An OSS offering that matched it's primary features (and has E2EE) or has a good framework, roadmap and people to get there would come in pretty clutch as discord goes public and starts monetizing everything in sight. A million (or thousands) independent FOSS 'discords' in the night would be a sweet sight.
(and has E2EE)
Normally my policy is "E2EE or GTFO", but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.
E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn't have E2EE either, obviously. That's an absurd idea.
Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I'm in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I'm also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It's not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.
That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I'm like "dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS". One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:
Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.
Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.
E2EE for a public forum makes no sense.
Totally valid point, especially w.r.t. ease of onboarding for public usecases. Sure would be nice if it functioned (optionally) as a private forum as well. Seems like a lot of commonality there and covers the DM case and the 'semi-public' but discord is totally logging everything case. One can hope, but I agree, first things first.
Sure, pick a server (like you did for Lemmy) and register. Choose any of the supported apps and start.
Yah, did so long ago. Comment still stands. We are in Selfhosted...
I admit i mostly use matrix as an instant messenger, but it works fine for when i need comms with my friends while gaming or when i want to share my screen for something. My university also has its own deployment so all the people around me automatically have an account anyway, which makes it easy to set up groupchats.
Sure it still has some jank to it, but if you look at how janky it used to be even just a year ago, the trajectory is pretty clear to me. Its a very ambitious project that arguably tried to do too much at once in its early days, but i think its here to stay and its only gonna get better. If its not good enough for you today, then just wait another year or two until it is. Its not going away because its being used basically everywhere at this point. Government, healthcare, military, university, private industry, schools, etc.
Fair cop, sounds useful, and I have used it in the past for similar. I was however looking at it in the context of Selfhosted.
its being used basically everywhere at this point. Government, healthcare, military, university, private industry, schools, etc.
True, and I have good hopes for it, partly because of the adoption, you will however note the scale of your examples, basically it's an IT department project rather than a set and forget selfhosted container (I recognize there'll always be moderation to do). We shall see, I'm in no hurry.
I have, and am, selfhosting Matrix, and it isn't that big of a deal if you're someone that, you know , self hosts things. That is just outside of what most people can or are willing to do. That's totally fine, but finding a FOSS platform that will host a VoIP/video server for you and not try to monetize you is almost certainly going to be rare or short lived.
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It sucks for gaming.
I'm in a Discord server with 2000 members. You really want to encrypt and decrypt all incoming and outgoing messages 2000 times? There's a reason why most E2EE messaging apps don't really do that for group chats.
In Matrix you can pick if you want encryption in your group chat or not.
Depends on the usecase. If you don’t need chat history for new-joiners, you can work with a single key per group, rotating it whenever someone joins or leaves. Since the server broadcasts a „so-and-so has left/joined“ it might as well include the new key. That key is then used by everyone in the group, so you can still broadcast all messages and don’t have to encrypt them individually.
Calls are end-to-end encrypted.
Also completely new with no other contributors. Stay the fuck away from this until its been in development for a while and someone reviewed the code.
I believe you are correct, but this is still very early into development. Hopefully this gets added at some point
Keep in mind that this project is likely vibe coded, or at least seems very AI assisted. (Copilot is mentioned in the .gitignore file and this was built by a single person in about 4 months)
A bunch of security issues have already been opened.
Edit: @just_another_person@lemmy.world already mentioned this, my bad. 😄
Thanks for the warning.
While I appreciate the effort devs put into making open source alternatives to a closed source app, the naming convention is really starting to get irritating...
Discord splits out to
- Armcord
- Legcord
- Now Sharkord
YouTube has
- InnerTune
- Which turned into OuterTune
Libre-this, Libre-that, Libre-cock and balls.
...I would love for devs to separate their software's name just a little bit more from the thing they're trying to replace. Please. Just be more unique. The name can still have a nod to what it's replacing and not just be a partial modification to the original name.
Datcord
Libre-cock and balls
libre adjective
With very few limitations
Reminds me of the guy in that show Silicon Valley who was basically a plant / spy (Jianyang?), and his grand visions for all his apps were creatively named:
"Chinese Facebook, Chinese Instagram, Chinese Twitter. . ."
Lol
Stoat.chat, anyone?
Tried a few months ago, the documentation for self hosting was lacking lots of info and now I can't even find it...
Yeah, I lade my acc a year ago and iirc they didnt have voice chat then. Now they seem to have better permissions for channels, vc and video/screen sharing around the corner. Only thing Im lacking is fediverse type of instances so we can only pray that will be developed one day. As of now idk what the status on self-hosting is but ive seen the devs link alot about it in their official server
Their registration process is currently hugged to death. Can't receive verification emails.
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Oh woah, didn't realize it was self-hostable. I'll try it out!
Why use this over Matrix?
The user experience for matrix is absolutely dog shit. Anyone who says otherwise is huffing copium.
I have been setting up matrix servers and testing every desktop and mobile client. I cannot present this to my discord group as an alternative.
As much as I want to love matrix, it is a huuuuge pain to set up & maintain.
Drop-in voice channels are a requirement for a discord alternative, Matrix does not have them. AFAIK you still need to call an entire channel to start a voice chat.
Im surprised as how many people discount this feature. Sometimes I sit in voice chat in my small Discord server alone for hours because nobody would show up if nobody was around.
We're all adults with jobs and responsibilities and shit, we don't want to have to dial people in to shoot the shit late at night. That would feel like a chore.
An alternative with no drop in voice chat is a non starter for my group.
I think it comes from the fact that a lot of communities and projects use Discord basically like they would with IRC, with voice chats often not even existing in some servers. I have to assume the people who recommend Matrix are only ever in that kind of server.
I'm in 2 or 3 servers with different friend groups and of course each one is full of friends of friends of friends. Even the smallest is over 30 people, but I only regularly join VC with 3-4. If I had to call all of them to be in a voice call I would literally never do it.
Same goes for chats, in Matrix the closest things to channels and servers is rooms and spaces. The difference is that you don't join a space, you just view rooms in the space and join them. Most of my servers have a ton of different channels for different things, I want to be able to see what happens in all of them without having to join each one, announcing to them that I've joined.
I like Matrix for FOSS project discussions, but I don't think it'll ever be the right pick for just hanging out with friends.
Haven't had a chance to really look into it, but there's also spacebar chat which is an open source selfhosted reimplementation of the discord backend that can be used with existing discord clients and bots and stuff. Which depending on how solid the rest of if is, could really help existing discord people move with less effort.
Thank you for sharing, this looks like it has potential and its brand new. Love you FOSS nerds.
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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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