I see
I didn’t seem to have the problem but I do understand the frustration
honestly what I do is that if there is something I need to cover, I wouldn’t say “I can’t read past messages”
I would say something like “Could you remind me of (X/Y/Z situation)? Appreciated” type of message
Yeah sure, but my point is: Good protocol and app design ensures (via checks, notification messages, key exchange mechanism and failing fast in case of random issues), that users don’t even experience this situation and need to find workarounds.
true.
part of it is client polish and part of it is matrix standard.
I still recommend matrix as it is mostly the easiest go to platform for bridging to discord users before inevitably making a full transition I guess.
Stoat is more if you desperately need something closest to the experience of discord and can be a smooth enough transition
I used to self-host TS for my gaming buddies, it was amazing.
Mumble is exactly that but fully FOSS (unlike TS)?
Fair reason to glaze it IMO.
I don’t know, their landing page doesn’t showcase anything besides it being done right!
Maybe it’s great but they don’t sell it super nicely is all I’m saying.
All the solutions mentioned below are listed here pretty much.
They will all have their pros/cons and nobody will easily agree on a specific one because of everybody’s taste and because they do not remove enough friction as a whole.
Discord was successful for a few reasons but the main one is the fact that with one single account, you could quickly join any server in no time[1].
Very sorry about that one, I do understand the pain myself too. 
I guess we need to stop looking for a replacement of Discord and rather look at some different with its pros/cons. Otherwise it will be a mental burden. 
I haven’t tried all the mentioned solutions[2] below but having something public like Discourse is quite a must IMO: transparency, SEO etc. Again it depends on the needs yeah but it also having a chat feature as mentioned below is quite cool yet less hacker with a dark/gamer-y UI to it. 
Tbh, Discord also took years to be popular and de-facto the default. But yeah, it’s annoying when companies do those kind of moves that force people to move elsewhere.
At some point, maybe people will realize that locking themselves into a private platform is maybe the issue?
But I am overall not too optimistic about that mindset shift. 
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That’s a good point, Discord integration seems to work kinda well.
IIRC, GrapheneOS folks had issues with room scalability, moderation tools, and “hijacking” prevention, which lead them to use Discord unfortunately.
So though I would recommend matrix over Discord every time, I wished protocol and app would be more bullet-prof for non-technical user and admins.
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I wish Discord alternatives wouldn’t choose names with negative connotations. Stoats are predators. Rockets are weapons. Matrix is a distopia movie. Mumble suggests low confidence. Travesties are bad. Mattermost sounds like betterhelp. Zulip sounds like tulips, which crashed an economy. Discourse is usually used in the context of politics. Team Speak predates Discord and has the best name of the bunch.
The opposite of discord is harmony but that’s already an established dating service.
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Looks cute enough to me tbh
Moreover, discord is not the best marketing name either
Or more intimate haha.
Learning daily I guess 
I had not seen this!! Thank you! I’ll dig into that today.
I will keep an eye on it, but I think it needs to be more polished. And the reason I stopped using Discord was lacking encryption. I do not need public servers to have encryption, but would want direct messages to be. Even Telegram lacks here, as you still have to open a secure direct message channel, as the default one is not encrypted (if they haven’t changed it).
With Discord bringing audio+video e2ee in March2026, it seems nice - but I don’t really need that personally.
then matrix with cinny or fluffychat like I mentioned before? those at least have E2EE in DMs
btw I wanna update on that, cinny seems the closest to a discord like interface than fluffychat
Zulip is one of the most unique offerings out there. It’s more like “forums+reddit” for threading based conversations, not unlike Discourse. But it also offers some real-time chat. I wouldn’t relate it to Slack any more than I would to Discord.
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Not sure if this was directed at me, so apologies if not!
My issues with Matrix are the completely lack of Roles and extensive RBAC. You have three default levels of Member, Moderator, and Admin. You can “tweak” these a little bit by adjusting the numerical values, but the idea of being able to designate “these rooms are accessible by this Role” are non-existent.
That makes architecting a community with 10+ different roles and 30+ channels a nightmare or not at all possible.
Matrix also still suffers from client fatigue. Between clients like Element and Cinny, you don’t even have 1:1 features. Someone could pick one client and think a feature doesn’t exist in Matrix, only to not know it does exist but their client doesn’t support it (like password resets, kind of a major feature).
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its weird becau the first thing you see on zulip’s website is
“ Organized chat for distributed teams”
that very much screams Slack alternative to me
i’m sure it is great but that’s what puts me off about it, I don’t think they intend to attract discord users compared to something like matrix and revolt
If you ask me the difference between Slack and Discord, it’s honestly the same to me. 
Same with all the tools mentioned here, they achieve/behave in very similar ways if we’re looking at it while taking 2 steps back.
Understandable on roles, This is where I think stoat comes in.
password reset pretty sure should be on all major clients, if not you can do password resets actually on the server that the account is logged in (eg. Matrix.org), so that may have been resolved.
but I also honestly think if you don’t need to do roles basis and have the basic mod admin & owner, I see that actually as a viable alternative, for example, say Im operating a community for a gaming café, I don’t think at all you need roles, I would have a matrix server bridged to all other major platforms, have mods, admins and owner to deal with nasty and done
I don’t need to give user permitted roles like “Gamer” or something in that specific scenario, honestly I find the whole role thing almost obsolete personally.
With that sad I do think discord has strong automoderation and moderation tools which is a shame that this is actively happening, The only second best moderation and automoderation platform I can think of is discourse and I would need to try stoat to be sure on stoat’s implementation. You can more or less try to replicate automoderation and moderation with bots and the admin/moderator pre-assigned roles but that’s about it (on matrix) or stoat with their tools and an automod bot but that’s it
Additionally, probably is good to migrate to a tool that can bridge communication with Matrix and Discord. Not sure if things are going to change with the age verification making it potentially impossible to use a bridge to connect to Discord but Matterbridge has been the option that many used to bridge tools.
I’m not sure how is the bridge situation with Revolt/Stoat to connect it to Matrix or Discord. I see a discussion about it: Revolt Chat Bridge · 42wim/matterbridge · Discussion #1717 · GitHub
Zulip seems to have the Matterbridge support to connect to Matrix and Discord:
Stoat doesn’t seem to have encryption, Zulip has some data encryption: Security | Zulip
Stoat documentation seems scarce, Zulip has some documentation.
Those are the main things that call my attention, not focusing on the real feasibility of either been featured enough to replace Discord.
There is a project I am more or less keeping tabs for its in development phase but sounds very promising which I shared before but I guess none cares about in development stuff even though I believe it’s potential
This will have native dicord bridges which is exciting, they’re also working in activitypub so federation both mastodon and discourse use/support
if at some point this becomes stable, I can see how this is promising
we also need to see ATProto supporting E2EE dms doe
In light of recent events do we have any recommendations as alternatives to Discord? I didn’t get the chance to watch last week’s PG video. Did they suggest anything?
One of the communities I belong to is very worried, and doesn’t know where to migrate.
I feel like Matrix is a pretty reasonable alternative, unless there is some specific feature you really need that is missing. It has been around for a while now, it’s commonly used by FOSS projects, and has E2EE for private chats.
Is Matrix easy to use and are most of its Discord like features free? Because the communities I belong too are looking for free alternative that are user-friendly. I don’t run any Discord server, nor am I a mod anywhere. I am just a member who is barely active in some communities there, that I find extremely useful. Many of the people there are active every day and are from marginalized communities.
At this stage, since time is of the essence, I don’t think my communities are looking for a perfect solution, that includes myself. I noticed you didn’t comment on my mentions of Fluxer and Root. Are they not good solutions?