We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Submitted 2 months ago by Beep@lemmus.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
Comments
amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world 2 months ago
baatliwala@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world 2 months ago
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.
carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It’s not search indexable or archivable. It’s more or less a memory hole.
amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world 2 months ago
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
Smoogs@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The old bulletins of the pre2000s.
amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world 2 months ago
oh yeah!
OldChicoAle@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I just set up mybb board a few weeks ago for old times sake. Brought back so many memories.
neblem@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he’s going to include Discourse…)
QuadratureSurfer@piefed.social 2 months ago
Some other alternatives not reviewed: - Spacebar - TeamSpeak - Root
plz1@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah, it was immediately clear based on the scoring that he was super biased toward Discourse. It’s not a Discord alternative, and had no place in that list at all.
timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I mean, it certainly is an alternative to all three morons using discord as some sort of forum for an app or similar. The same way discord is the worst for easily searchable info like a forum is basically the converse for discourse. And exactly the opposite for real time chat obviously.
He at least mentions outright it’s a forum tool. The real problem is having to include it because people misuse discord.
Kind of like anyone using SharePoint for anything. It’s not meant for it.
SparkleVoid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Why is SimpleX not mentioned anywhere in the article or the comments here? I thought it is similar to Discord. Am I wrong?
neblem@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Looking at its Wikipedia entry, it looks like a reasonable alternative, I hadn’t looked into it before.
Have you had the chance to try it out?
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Is SimpleX based on Matrix? I have this recollection that it is, but I don’t if it’s a false memory or not.
itsmistermoon@piefed.social 2 months ago
Not a single reference to Zulip either
Personally, I really want Matrix to succed though, hope this discord diaspora (?) gives them enough push to smooth their problems.IronKrill@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
It’s literally the 5th thing in the article.
Strider@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
God, I hated that terminology when I needed to talk with people about discord.
Strider@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I can only assume it’s on purpose so average users really understand it wrong to avoid the associated negative view. Clever, really. But absolutely evil.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I highly doubt that when you start a “Discord server”, there’s any new machinery spun up. There is a near 100% chance it’s just an entry in a database. Nobody’s running a server just for him. So I don’t think there’s even reason to be charitable.
jcorvera@quokk.au 2 months ago
The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
exist@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that
ComradeRachel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They should use some of the funds for UX.
For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.
Not whatever they’re doing now.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 2 months ago
copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY
Please don’t. Please for the love of god don’t
itsmistermoon@piefed.social 2 months ago
Look at Cinny if you’re looking for a Discord-like experience
Ontimp@feddit.org 2 months ago
Which client do you refer to regarding the bad UX, Element Web?
Matrix is just the protocol. There are a bunch of different clients though that all implement Matrix but are made by different people: matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
psycotica0@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Ontimp@feddit.org 2 months ago
There is a difference between funding of the Matrix foundation and the matrix.org instance vs. funding for the companies working in the ecosystem. The Matrix foundation has been struggling financially, yes. But the companies using and contributing to the Matrix standard are doing quite well from what I know - though they should probably cough up a little more money to find the overhead and the public matrix infrastructure imo
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
neshura@bookwyr.me 2 months ago
Apparently that’s already in the backend since december, they’re just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
If they enable that and iron out the iOS app, it’d be a surefire migration for my whole crew.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.
hornedfiend@piefed.social 2 months ago
I can’t even create an account on Stoat yet. New account confirmation emails take hours to arrive and by the time they do, they are already expired.
This is not a discord alternative yet and not be for a long time most likely.
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
They’re having issues with their email provider due to the hug of death effect, they did not expect to get so much traffic so fast
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, yet it gets ranked lower than… Rocket chat??
If we’re objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.
Mubelotix@jlai.lu 2 months ago
Discord got popular because it’s centralized and pretty
HyperfocusSurfer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
What functionality are we talking about? Genuinely curious here, since I use discord like a couple of times a year.
From what I’ve noticed, matrix can do basically the same, except for the voice chats which are a pain to setup (and are better handled by jitsi anyways).
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. “Rooms” (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, b
I don’t think that’s true anymore. it has been encrypted by default for quite a few years now
thesmokingman@programming.dev 2 months ago
It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
betahack@lemmy.world 2 months ago
what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince
stressballs@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.
waggz@programming.dev 2 months ago
i haven’t seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.
Creegz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000’s IM landscape. Soon we’ll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn’t support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.
MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hey… Trillian was awesome.
DerdWurst@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Dont do pidgin too dirty…
WraithGear@lemmy.world 2 months ago
i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
My friend group also jumped to that first, unless it’s federated though it’s not going to be “like discord” enough in the long run.
Part of what makes discord so good to many is that it’s one app where you can connect to various different friend groups/modding groups/artists/etc…
Matrix does allow that with its federation model, ts6 does not 🤷
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
Batman@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I absolutely love matrixs UI, but I wish they would make the device verification configurable. aware it’s a million times easier to say then implement though.
innermachine@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The enshitification of the internet as a whole killed so many forums. I used to scour forums (and still regularly visit old forums) for info, but now it’s on discord or some bs facebook group. I miss old school forums and wikis and I fail to understand why everybody got away from them :c how on earth is an endless scroll of a FB page remotely conductive to finding information vs searching for the right thread on a forum?! I have no experience using discord so can’t speak for them but seeing all these articles makes me think I never will either.
MiahNelah@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Switching to a self-hosted good old Teamspeak 6. Their screen sharing is very good, and audio quality is far above Discord. Overall it’s still need some polish but is okay.
Nima@leminal.space 2 months ago
did he not try stoat? he just put a bunch of question marks there.
I’d have thought if that was the case it’d be left out of the rankings.
weedee@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
nil@piefed.ca 2 months ago
It seems there’s also Spacechat.
BodyPower@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Can Stoat be used as an alternative?
AgentBoom@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m surprised, nobody is mentioning WhatsApp as an alternative. They released usernames a few months ago, all messages are end-to-end encrypted, will add voice and video calls to WhatsApp Web, many people and companies have an account there already… It would be an easy migration, but awful for privacy.
BenderRodriguez@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Discord Alternatives: Discord
what the hell?
H1AA6329S@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I read the article, it’s a good article but it also shows how we don’t really have any options that would match the discord’s functionality and ease of use. Which is very sad.
daggermoon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not going to be able to get anyone else to use an alternative, so what’s it matter?
vogi@piefed.social 2 months ago
We all now the true alternative would be phpBB… /hj
paraphrand@lemmy.world 2 months ago
How many of these have moderation issues? Like, unwanted content uploads and stuff. How many expose you to accidentally hosting illicit content?
biotin7@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Revolt is good too
Kowowow@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
This reminds me that a saw someone like luisus rossman reccomend a discord like thing that worked as a better forum/wiki/discord for small developers that’s shows up on web searches, I think it had real time chat but I can’t remember
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I can’t imagine “Discourse”'s branding will survive for long.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Tangential but figure eyes are probably on here:
Any good guides or discussions for setting up and running Matrix in a VPS? Been thinking on and off I should do that for a few months now (and lack of account migration means I either start with my own domain or forever use a generic).
nek0d3r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Unfortunate to see that Revolt hasn’t really changed much since I last tried it out. It’s the closest alternative I can see that seems like it would actually look like a replacement for the average Discord user.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Bring back the old BBs!
SnoringEarthworm@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Top three are:
iamthetot@piefed.ca 2 months ago
I don’t really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
markz@suppo.fi 2 months ago
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
karashta@piefed.social 2 months ago
I also want this suite of things. I stream movies to friends, share games I’m playing…
These are core features to me now in a robust chat client
toynbee@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can’t even tell the difference.
Ulrich@feddit.org 2 months ago
A lot of people don’t seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. The ones I’ve used NEVER used anything but text chat.
JayGray91@piefed.social 2 months ago
I’ll keep you company in the minority, since that’s what I want too
Kowowow@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Live chat is all I ever use but you never know
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
I would bet on the screen sharing not being that big of a requirement for most people. Voice and text chats though? Yeah, that’s the minimum.
Cheems@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?
Ulrich@feddit.org 2 months ago
I love that Discourse is open. I hate that it’s just horrendous from a usability perspective. Flarum is much better than that, in my opinion, while being way more flexible. Examples:
discuss.grapheneos.org
orionfeedback.org
Evotech@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I find discourse perfectly usable.
Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Discourse isnt free
And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is misinformation.
You can self host it, for free.
Ontimp@feddit.org 2 months ago
Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year
Ontimp@feddit.org 2 months ago
Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)
redsand@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Jitsi, simplex, mumble, matrix, lemmy.