I’ve also been comparing Element and Revolt. Both seem really solid, both are open source and both are self-hostable. Hard to find any downsides there.

There’s a discord server that me and a bunch of friends use as our main hangout, and they’ve raised the prospect of bailing before things enshittify. For my money, Revolt is the way I’m going to go, specifically because it’s basically a one for one clone of Discord. The people I’m pitching this to are a mix of technical and non-technical, so I think something that looks and feels like what they’re used to will be the easiest transition.

It also feels like Element is geared pretty heavily towards being a replacement for Slack / Teams rather than a replacement for Discord. Their pitch seems a lot more focused on the enterprise market. Revolt seems more focused on gaming, casual hangout, that sort of thing.

I like Element a lot, but for me it doesn’t feel like the right solution to this specific problem. But if I was pitching something to my work as a Teams replacement, Element is definitely the way I’d go.