[bramhaag]

What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group:

- Matrix

- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)

- IRC + Mumble

- Signal

[buovjaga]

For the latest in IRC tech, you can read my blog posts: https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.

[txtsd]

Thank you! I've bookmarked your website!

[arkh]

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.

[foresto]

Matrix screen sharing is a feature of Element Call / MatrixRTC (in development).

For now, I think they do it through their Jitsi integration. I don't know how easy it is, as I haven't tried it.

https://docs.element.io/latest/element-cloud-documentation/i...

[joks]

Stoat has screen sharing / video calling in the pipeline at least: https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313

[tourmalinetaco]

I use MiroTalk for it. Within Element you can set up widgets (basically PWAs) and so you can call via Element’s built in Jitsi widget (or a more reliable dedicated Jitsi link) and then use MiroTalk to share screens. It is a LOT better, especially for streaming video.

In terms of ease of use, it’s like three clicks. Technically more than Discord, but it’s p2p streaming so it’s far nicer quality.

[Zhyl]

Jitsi does that well

[somat]

Hard to say, I don't really use discord so I think of it as voice chat as a service, and for pure voice chat it is hard to do better than mumble. However from the way people talk about discord, it is also a text chat screen sharing file server. and it is hard to find one product that does all that well.

For video, both video chat and screen sharing I have had a lot of success with Galene, it offers text chat and file sharing, but they are sort of anemic and bare bones, which could be good or bad based on the needs of your users. https://galene.org/

What I usually do is start with a fossil server, this is trivial and gives you files, a wiki and a forum (none of them super good but like I said trivial to set up) then if I want voice, mumble is my normal route, but galene is growing on me more and more, the web interface makes buy in from the end users trivial and despite it being nice you almost never need the cool room stuff you can do with mumble.

But I am a sys-admin, I like running servers, hell, I find I enjoy running the servers more than I like playing the games. Plus, statistically, I have zero-friends, it is fine to say a server is great when only one other person has used it. That is to say, my results may not be typical.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

I think Matrix is the closest equivalent that's reasonably popular, at least for text messaging. There are both web and mobile clients and they interoperate seamlessly. It's also at the point where it somewhat reasonably works for the average user, rather than being the usual UX nightmare that teaches people that anything open source or anything pushed by their nerdy friend should be avoided.

[ilikepi]

This seems like a nice breakdown of some options:

https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/

(Not affiliated)

[3acctforcom]

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."

[lostmsu]

Revolt's rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding MSFT done ever.

[rickstanley]

It's because of the trademark: https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat

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.

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225, not sure how accurate it is, but it makes me want to revolt .

[rsynnott]

"[beaver emoji] Revolt is Stoat now"

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.

[kibwen]

It's open source, I'm tempted to fork it and do nothing other than change the branding.

[drzaiusx11]

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...

[tourmalinetaco]

MiroTalk can be made into a widget on Element, is open source, and is P2P after the initial connection.

[joquarky]

Which of these has been around for over three decades?

That would be my answer.

[mrweasel]

Same, depends on what you expect in terms of features and so on, but for chat, IRC works perfectly.

[jiffygist]

Discord's voice rooms with screen sharing is a very cool feature i depend on daily. I haven't seen opensource messenger that implemented this yet.

[JoshTriplett]

Jitsi handles this very well.

I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.

[buildanduse]

Diode Collab - not fully open source but network and client are all open source. It has dramatic privacy commitment (stores no data on servers, decentralized user-to-user routing, no PII/phone/emails). Diode team just added STUN/TURN to the network last month and streaming will come soon. https://collab.diode.io

[love2cycle]

Worth looking at Diode Collab too No PII, E2E encrypted, p2p. Not 1:1, but its Zones are Discord-like. https://collab.diode.io

[hydroflame7]

You've pretty much covered all the open source alternatives, other than rocket.chat which is more similar to slack. This has a good list - https://medium.com/@jingjunm/the-best-alternatives-to-discor...

If you don't NEED the open-source, pumble and steam group chats work great too

[rickstanley]

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.

[OuterVale]

Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind a paywall to remain sustainable.

[zerotrustor]

Check out Diode Collab. It’s private communities to join/create, no IDs/personal info needed, fully encrypted, and keeps your data under your control. Not a voice clone, but great if privacy and community joining/creating is the main thing.

[x01]

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.

[encom]

IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after.

I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron. Total waste of time.

[joks]

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)

[mvdtnz]

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.

[somat]

The real sin is that if they went with electron, they probably could have gone with a web app, and while web apps have downsides, they make fellow user buy in trivial, instead of "download this client" it's "go to this web page"

I am especially bitter because electron advertises as being "cross platform" by which they mean that it also runs on linux and as a openbsd driver I get to go "cross platform my ass" and then weep because of how close I am, if it were a web app it would probably be trivial for me to to run. What I really want is a method to unelectronify electron apps.

[MYEUHD]

Snikket (https://snikket.org ) with Monal as the iOS client

[subscribed]

Requires hosting of the private server (security/privacy implications) or renting it from the third party.

[vagrantstreet]

Zulip?

[andreashaerter]

I keep wondering why Zulip is so often left out of reviews and tooling comparisons. For me it ticks a lot of important boxes, yet it barely gets mentioned. Is there a downside I'm missing, or is it just under the radar?

The concept that every message belongs to a topic and the async communication focus makes so much sense to me. I read conversations, not timelines.

[jchook]

https://zulip.com/

[Schlagbohrer]

I have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS

[rsynnott]

Element’s awful, but I’ve found FluffyChat, another matrix client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.

[Ste91]

https://nostrapps.com/flotilla

[kristjank]

Matrix has been trivial enough for me to implement with some of my non-technical friends. YMMV

[ozlikethewizard]

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.