I’m not a die hard Discord user but I watched a video talking about Discord and I don’t have enough resources to judge it by myself if this is an ethical aplication.
This is the video that I’m referring to https://youtu.be/uvNkdAggUGU?si=sQlR_ypMR94bl9Ea
Thanks
Short answer: Discord bad, use Matrix
Long answer: Yeah, Discord is not great for many reasons. The video on first glance seems very clickbait so I won’t really comment on it. But Discord effectively has no privacy would be the biggest reason to avoid it unless you have people who really don’t want to switch away from it. The desktop client is yet another shitty electron app and they lagged behind the current electron version for a while too with all the bug and security implications thereof and the UX is just not great with all the little pushes to spend money on a premium subscription.
And yeah, big Tencent investments, but pretty much everything gaming-related is in that same shit so.
Once Steam added support for group voice calls I never went back to Discord. It was so simple and efficient at first. Now it has become another form of social media. It hasn’t been fit for purpose in a long time. The relationship to Chinese investors was a dealbreaker for me.
I don’t think Steam’s voice or text chats are E2EE from what I could find. Maybe y’all can find info on that though.
I haven’t used Steam for a few years either. I couldn’t pass the CATCHPA to reset my password on a new PC. Now I use GOG and haven’t looked back. Steam isn’t incompatible with privacy but I was less careful in the past. My account is almost old enough to vote. In the age of AI I wouldn’t consider non-E2EE voice chat.
Their loss, should have not fully switched to that one to begin with.
Also, a company can enpoopify itself yes, everybody loses but the board members. 
Imagine if they kept being nice humans, everybody would win.
Meanwhile, gamers are supposed to be more tech-savvy than your average Joe so can hopefully migrate elsewhere.
Doesn’t have fancy borders/animated avatars sure. Not a big loss to me.
It is fundamentally a different platform so yeah, you won’t have feature parity yet it has the edge on other topics + is FOSS and potentially more future-proof than a company’s product.
Real time low-latency communication is one platform, chat/messaging is another entirely different.
Discord was kinda a 2 in 1, but soon to be gone entirely. 
It’s probably on the roadmap already, don’t you worry. 
For chat purposes? There is a lot available that is also self-hostable like Rocket, Mattermost etc etc…
Also, I can’t even see how Stoat looks without creating myself an account, quite bad marketing to get people to migrate to a UI that you cannot even see while Discord is all about UI/ease of use in the first place. 
For real-time low latency voice communication, Mumble is still probably the king.
We need 2 tools to replace Discord here. 
I find it interesting how significant Discord has become. For me it was only ever a way to socialise while gaming. There were no animations or premium features. It was a clean interface without distsaction. Everything they added after 2020 is bloat. Fruit machine style animations are stupid. It was supposed to run quietly in the background while your CPU makes the game happen.
I’ve seen Discord on friends computers and it looks like unicorn vomit. We lose nothing important by migrating to a Matrix client. It can even intirface with Discord to some degree. Any missing feature can be added using FOSS solutions.
Complaining about the UI of an application designed to run in the background misses the point. I would never use Discord game intergrations for privacy reasons. In-game text chat is acceptable. They can profile everything about me already.
I’m never going to play GTA 6 since they added AI moderation. Minecraft now enforces Microsoft and XBox Live terms of service. The golden age of online gaming is long gone. I would consider DRM-free games with no anticheat. For now I only launch FOSS games to check for screen tearing but I’m going to host more LAN parties.
A Discord equiveland which runs E2EE in the terminal would be perfect. Jami is a good alternative.
I suspect a third as well, for real-time low latency live streaming / screen sharing for a limited/private audience?
Sorry to disagree but that one wasn’t ever a thing Discord was good at.
If I’m not mistaken, you needed to pay for the basic 1080@60??
vdo.ninja does the same for the free, with better quality and no BS.
It is not click & play from within a UI but it’s quite close while still being private.
For a screen sharing, other tools exist like Rustdesk (a better Teamviewer pretty much) but otherwise, you can always have a call on Signal.
Ah, no need to be sorry. Never intended to say they were best in class, just that it was available, so I don’t think we actually disagree much 
and besides, I was hoping to be pointed to suitable alternatives, so thank you if anything!
I also don’t use Discord much myself, but purely for the user experience, it must be said that Discord has done well to enable a variety of activities for digital communities or friend groups in a way that minimizes friction. For those in our lives less concerned with privacy, having to “move to” three new alternatives instead may seem unreasonably friction-ful, however unideal. All this to say that I empathise with those bemoaning Discord’s developments. And I appreciate this thread’s exploration of alternatives!
isnt zulipp more of a slack alternative?
anyways
@kissu explain your glazing behind Mumble, when theres teamspeak and other alternatives out there, chill, theres no need for people to use specific platforms. Also stoat is the closest we get to the discord alternative, it is also self hostable.
Anyways very ironic when I used to be in a discord community and most have rejected the alternative communication means (DMs) multiple times, Now it must be backfiring on them.
About time to consider the alternatives, and keep in mind that since we’re dealing with people that get used to things like discord, pick one that you can use relatively long term, any on those list should do
https://alternativeto.net/software/discord-app/?feature=privacy-focused&license=opensource
if I had to recommend a few:
Matrix with recommending friends the Cinny client,
otherwise Stoat really.
If you already are trusting valve with your account, you may consider steam chat, it is becoming closer to a discord experience with groups but I also understand why this may deter this specific community but im just saying with almost everyone on a steam account, it’s just an option. If on that note maybe also the OG, TeamSpeak [but only when TS6 becomes self hostable]
for personal/close friends and maybe family, really you could also substitute signal in this instance, especially as signal is getting quite the things discord had like polls and pinned messages
I tested Matrix a few years ago and was frustrated by the decryption errors I would get when logging in on multiple devices. Gave up on it since I won’t use something that isn’t reliable.
As bad as WhatsApp is at least they have encrypted Communities (basically organized collections of groups). I’d rather use that than give an ID to Discord.
Yes but an argument can be made for a lot of discord users who aren’t gamers and use it for text based discussions
I’ve been tracking this topic with great interest as I help manage and run a number of Discords (probably over 10 Communities) and have invested a fair amount of time and effort into each one of them. That being said, the writing has been on the wall for a while with Discord’s future.
What I am struggling with at the time is how few alternatives there are that are strong replacements for Discord. That platform is far from perfect, but its ability to build large communities that support real-time chat, extensive RBAC, bot integrations, and more, remains pretty unmatched in my current investigations.
I’ve been researching, testing, and evaluating some of the following:
And none of them come close to being a viable alternative. Many present very unique and interesting features for some types of communities, and I could see myself proposing Zulip or Discourse in some cases, but Matrix’ utter lack of good RBAC, Stoat’s disaster of everything, Mattermost lack of federation, and Rocket.Chat’s closed nature, ultimately make all of them poor choices as an actual Discord replacement.
Ultimately, I expect MANY communities will fragment across many different platforms and it’ll be a long while before we see as unified of a revolution as Discord became. While it started small with a heavy focus on gaming, it become the go to place for many non-gaming communities, support servers, and hangout spaces.
I personally wish that wasn’t the case, but I wish there were stronger alternatives that suited more of the broad needs than we currently have. I remain hopeful, that we’ll still see some positivity come of all of this.
There’s also Travesty.chat and Strafe.chat but neither of them are even in beta yet and development has been slow.
Zulip could be a good alternative but you need jitsi, zoom, etc for audio/video with it. https://zulip.com/
actually that is a good question
whats wrong with matrix as well?
How long has it been since you tried it?
and of course keys are stored encrypted backup, you need to have a way to recover them when you sign in to a new device
usually nowadays if a new device is signed in, you can now verify with an old device and that should restore encrypted messages conveniently
when an old device is not an option, this is where recovery key comes in that you would normally store in your password manager
What do you think about Discourse + its chat/real-time conversation component?
For me this was some weeks ago. I used Element Web (most recent Firefox ESR) and made sure “Key storage” has been ticked, also got my recovery phrase. Then had some direct messages in private rooms. Later on, despite successful verification of my device via that recovery phrase, all received messages from others were flagged as “Could not decrypt message”. I needed to explain everyone I could not read anything and found that to be a bit embarrassing.
Then after using Element Desktop and having passed some time for room key renewal, chats started to work again. Maybe the original issue was, that only that only non-ESR Firefox versions are supported - but overall it was a rather frustrating user experience.
I had the exact same experience a couple years ago.