They didn't even untangle the web of half-finished and abandoned XMPP clients
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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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.
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We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It's not search indexable or archivable. It's more or less a memory hole.
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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.
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Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
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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.
Hey... Trillian was awesome.
Lmao that is the exact program that came to mind.
Dont do pidgin too dirty....
Pidgin was good; it did what needed to be done and wasn't that bad at it.
The last service I was using it for was a self-hosted XMPP server for a small group of friends that were all refugees of other defunct services. We ended up finally moving to Slack or Discord (the group bifurcated along game-playing lines).
Now I've got to find something new yet again!
I tried pidgin and it didn't land with me. I always went back to Trillian.
We all now the true alternative would be phpBB... /hj
Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
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.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
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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
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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.
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..)
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what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?... because that's who I am going to have to convince
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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.
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.
Trying to find relevant information that's supposed to be in a Discord server is one of the most hair-pulling aggravating experiences I've ever had on a computer. I mean seriously, any aspiring software developer of any kind should outright feel ashamed if they are relying on Discord for anything related to their project. Code repository sites are free, made for that purpose, and already offer everything necessary for collaboration. If communications are necessary, that's what email is for - everyone has it already.
And yeah I also hate the over-dependence on Facebook. If a companies "site" is their fb page, they don't get my business.
These things are successful not because they're good. It's because they're easy and convenient. That's the biggest thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to alternatives.
Ugh yea I have thought about trying to get away from FB, but a few years ago I moved to a more rural area than I was before and it's incredible how many places -the regional dump among them - don't have a website it's just Facebook pages if you want info like if theres closures due to weather or operating hours.
I get that, I had to keep my FB when I lived in a rural area just to pay rent. Lazy.
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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.
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.
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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
No, he hasn't been running a discord server. It's a channel. Discord is running the servers.
God, I hated that terminology when I needed to talk with people about discord.
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I'm glad 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. Thankfully, the most similar suggestions I found were Telegram and Signal.
WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal aren't Discord alternatives though? There's no ability to have multi text and persistent voice channels in groups. WhatsApp doesn't even support screensharing.
I've said this a lot in different places and the Lemmy community is so small folks might even recognize me repeating myself, but I'll say it again here. The problem with recommending a good Discord alternative is that Discord is different things for different people. For some it's streaming. For some it's video calls. For some it's voice calls. For some it's DMs. For some it's group servers. For some the image and video sharing is an important aspect. It's hard to recommend a good alternative because you'll always inevitably run into the problem of someone saying "but it doesn't do the thing I use it for." The reality is that folks might need to use multiple apps to meet their needs if they migrate.
If you'd skimmed the article you would've seen they they suggested Discourse which the author openly admits is a forum, not a chat app. But hey, that's what some folks use Discord as.
Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, that's why it's in the position it's in today, 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.
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If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
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Bring back the old BBs!
Where do you think you are? (Yes I know this isn't exactly a BBS.)
I know and love your avatar btw!
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