the best alternative I can think of is Matrix - is there another?
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Discord
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15 users here now
Discord is a voice, video, and text communication service to talk and hang out with your friends and communities.
founded 2 years ago
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Stoat.chat and XMPP
also Teamspeak, Ventrilo and Mumble are still around, they just feel incredibly dated and old by comparison to modern apps
Don't sleep on the Teamspeak 6 beta. It is very close to being a total discord replacement and in its current form is still extremely usable.
Huh, okay, well I'll have a look
Matrix and Teamspeak are the big ones, ive seen people talking about XMPP and other self-hosted solutions. The real issue people are waking up to is that if you dont host your communication tools, you dont own them.
The self-hosting community is buzzing with people spooling up their own services and getting ready to abandon discord. If you or people in your circles need help setting stuff up, just ask. Plenty of helpful nerds and guides are around.
Check out the Teamspeak 6 beta. I've checked out probably all the most popular discord alternatives at this point (as I refuse to use it and am always looking for something to convince others to get off of it) and the TS6 beta is almost right there as far as core features and experience goes.
Teamspeak
https://fluxer.app/ seems promising. Hoping they get self hosting documentation out soon
Edit: it's open source guys... https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer
Why would I go from one closed source corporate to another closed source corporate that's got less features?
https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer
There is the source code. I've never heard of fluxer before and it took 2 seconds to find, at the bottom of the page linked in the comment you replied to.
Way to shit on the hard work of volunteers.
Sorry, I just saw that there trying to charge money for an app that's not even fully released yet and assumed corpo.
It is corporate though, but also open source.
Did you look at the link? It's open source
Probably because open source alternatives have had decades to do better and still haven’t.
It's open source, the guy that responded to me didn't bother to look at it.
Oh nice, never heard of it before. How does it actually compare to Discord?
It got an influx of people and is laggy, but when it works... it honestly feels just like discord. I haven't seen screen sharing working yet but the dev in the discord was saying he was working on an update to alleviate the lag and it would make self-hosting easier, which would also help alleviate lag indirectly
I think that they backtracked after the public backlash.
If i was a shareholder, I'd demand that they fire whoever insisted on this ID verification bullshit.
There is zero chance that they could not have predicted the blowback, and it is all but certain that they were warned to consider the consequences.
Fire them.
Still no backtracking has happened. Must that's happened it's a "clarification", which is basically "we're still doing it, you're getting such a silly baka for thinking we will make the same mistake as to leak again though 😁"
They're also claiming most people will not be affected, as they will try to infer your age and only ask for identification if they can't. Still very sus
They said that from the beginning though?
Back to team speak
I'm very curious... For anyone here that uses Discord, how often are you using the voice calls / screen shares?
Versus how often are you typing / sharing memes?
3 times a week, for 2-3 hours at a time, almost every week, for the last 3 years I've used the Voice Chat.
I used to use the Video Calls for my weekly piano lessons but the quality was so inconsistent that we switched to WhatsApp for that.
Screensharing, maybe about 1-3 times a week, there's a server I'm in that do streaming of whole movies via the screensharing, with the text chat used for live reactions. Also one of the players in my TTRPG session has perennial problems where the Virtual Tabletop refuses to load for her and she "remote controls" her character by saying to the GM "can you move her to this space please?"
Text chat for day to day, voice for gaming, screen share for support or whatever, never use video.
Erry day.