One thing most of those lack is an easy way to share screen.
Now if anyone wants to differentiate their Discord alternative, they want to have most of discord functionalities and add the possibility to be in multiple voice chats (maybe with rights and a channel hierarchy + different push-to-talk binds). It's a missed feature when doing huge operations in games and using the Canary client is not always enough.
Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don't want to host their own shit, they want a one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have baggage.
This is your chance to start Bluesky for discord. A competently built, VC backed competitor to exploit a misstep only caused by government overreach due to their colossal market share. 26 million daily active users is a nice guaranteed market to start whittling away at, with an effective marketing campaign to drive a wedge between "little gamers, and big corporate enshittification."
How would you avoid the same problem that discord ran into that made them require ID verification? I doubt they're doing this for fun. Incorporate in the Bahamas?
Does matrix have decent 1:N client desktop broadcasting with low latency (and high fps) yet? I use discord for "watch parties", video and tabletop gaming...
I wonder how Stoat will fare, and how it is currently maintained, in terms of "making money"; my fear is that it would steer into the direction of Discord itself.
Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind a paywall to remain sustainable.
Last I checked Signal was not fully open source, which is iffy, believe their encryption protocol is still closed. That said its the best of a bad bunch for E2EE messaging. If you're on android I'd recommend doing what I do, which is installing from the APK on the site, manually verifying the sig locally (you can use termux for this), and then lagging ever so slightly behind on updates to avoid potential supply chain or hostile takeover attacks. This is probably over cautious for most threat profiles, but better safe than sorry imo. Also their server side stuff is close sourced, technically this isnt an issue though as long as the E2EE holds up to scrutiny though.
Edit: My information may be out of date, I cannot find any sources saying any part of the app is closed source these days, do your own research ofc but comfortable saying its the most accessible secure platform.
Nevertheless, I don't like the new name either, oh well...
I like this comment though:
Imagine you make a free software project and it runs into trademark issues because people have more money than you to register in more classes than your project.
And then even though your project existed first, they still come after you anyway.
And from that an even more expensive rebranding from this as well.
Argh. If there's no stoat emoji, petition the Unicode Consortium for one, don't just use a beaver. It's not even the right family; the badger emoji would be closer.
For me, the closest alternative to Discord is Stoat. Matrix with Element (or other clients) would be great, but it feels so slow on both desktop and mobile.
IRC does not support group voice & video calls, which is one of the primary features of Discord (and previously Skype, from which everyone migrated to Discord in the first place)
It's a viable system for the many open source software projects that collaborate over chat. Expo, Typescript, and Effect are relatively large examples. I'll participate there if available and I get locked out. Otherwise, I'll just use the stuff without contributing, no problem.
For most Discord users IRC simply does not have the feature set that people need. Basics like simple drag and drop media sharing, threaded conversations, emoji reactions and voice comms, up to more complicated stuff like screen sharing and video calling.
- Matrix
- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)
- IRC + Mumble
- Signal