I think it’s very easy to use. I actually found the Discord UI incredibly unintuitive when I tried it years ago. I thought Element was much simpler and easier to understand. I have never used Discord seriously, so I am probably the wrong person to ask about “Discord-like features,” but it’s done everything I’ve ever wanted it to do. You can give it a try if you want: https://servers.joinmatrix.org/. This website also compares Matrix directly with Discord: Matrix vs. Discord | Join Matrix! .
Matrix is free to use with any of those servers I linked, but donations are obviously welcome. Matrix is an open protocol analogous to email, XMPP, or the fediverse, but if you wanted a private server, you could pay Element to host it for you and gain some enterprise type features which is largely how their business model works: Element plans and pricing .
If I were in a marginalized community I would definitely prefer a more private option like Matrix over Discord.
I have never heard of Fluxer and Root. I recommended Matrix because it has been around for years, has a decent privacy and security record, it’s pretty widely adopted among FOSS projects, and it is FOSS. Plus I have plenty of personal experience with it.
Fluxer, that you mentioned, may be something to keep an eye, personally, at first it smells like a nine-day wonder. Self-hosted instances or public instances (multi-instance support, no federation). I’d wait to see if it becomes federated like they are saying before start using it.
If you don’t care much about super robust moderations features and it is ok with some sharp edges: Mov.im seems to be getting some attention. Decentralized & federated (XMPP protocol).
I’m glad this topic is coming up! I think it’s super important for marginalized folks to get off Discord at this point. I’ve been advocating the last 18 months trying to get some communities off Discord, and some issues I’m running into are:
People seem to want an alternative that is free, easy to use, open source, more secure, more private, and has literally all the features of Discord.
People particularly want more secure and more private AND also to be able to view message history if someone joins a chat.
I was pushing for Matrix, and I think it’s easy enough to use and has enough features, but about 95% of people in my communities took one look at it and said heck no. My takeaway from that experience is that I don’t know if it’s fully featured enough for widespread normie use yet. This is for a couple reasons:
The chat clients (apps) are too fragmented. There is no standard for which features are offered in each client, and therefore lots of stuff appears broken in group chats, or if someone selects a client that has few features.
IMO the encryption is not well implemented. It still has a very manual feel to it. Signal automates the encryption aspects and everyone is on the exact same standard with Signal, so it just works. With Matrix, I was still getting error messages, being asked to verify and re-verify clients, having messages not show up for certain people who hadn’t authenticated properly.
There’s of course the option to use it without encryption. Discord isn’t encrypted, and at least Matrix is federated, but that seems like making a change for not a lot of benefit.
When I was last using it often (3-6 months ago), very very strangely, the Element app made by the actual creators of Matrix was not fully featured in their own protocol. There were a couple other clients that were more featured. I found Fluffy Chat to be the best to recommend universally at that time. The fragmentation was very janky and reminiscent of the Android ecosystem circa 2013.
There are some “Slack” alternatives (IMO Slack and Discord are basically the same thing) that people have recommended in other threads on this forum, but I haven’t tested any of them. I feel like honestly a decent interim solution is moving a Discord server to a grouping of several Signal chats. You can have a main Signal chat you invite everyone to and link all the other chats in the group description. It definitely won’t be as polished, but IMO would be easy enough to use if there were only 5-10 channels. I also have been playing around with “Quiet” which someone mentioned in another thread. It is very, very far from a usable Discord alternative, but I feel like the design architecture, encryption by default, no personal information required to use it, and the fact it is P2P make something like Quiet incredibly promising for this exact use case. Just my two cents.
I’ve tolerated Discord for the past several years because all of my friends insisted on using that and nothing else. I firewalled it as best as I could and still have it somewhat functional.
As Discord progressively got worse the past couple of years, I searched for an alternative that my friends would accept. Preferably open source. But their demands have been too high. They see that Discord has free text, free voice chat, free video calls, free live streaming/screen sharing, free this, free that, but don’t understand how it is all “free.” They don’t care to either. Any solution that I’ve proposed over the years they have shot down. “Not free.” “No video calls.” “No live streaming.” “Too hard to understand.”
I thought maybe with the age verification announcement two weeks ago that things would change, but nope. They just refuse to leave Discord. A few have said that they’re just fine with scanning their face if they need to, and that I’m paranoid for not.
I gave my friends four alternative ways to contact me and deleted my Discord account. They all think that I’m paranoid, but c’est la vie.
For normal, average Joe or Jane users, I don’t think that there is really an alternative to Discord that they’ll accept unless it is easy enough for a mobile device-only using mother to use, and has all of Discord’s features for free. Which, right now, from what I’ve tried, nothing does. Not yet anyhoo. Even then, I don’t think it matters because even if something did come along, the network effect would still keep them on Discord. “It’s where everyone else is.”
I just lost about three quarters of my friends in the process, but I switched to Matrix and Root for those that can’t or won’t handle Matrix, and am keeping a close eye on Fluxer. Ultimately, I’d like to self-host a Fluxer instance in a year or two, but like Cyber-Typhoon mentioned above I’m concerned that it may be a nine-day wonder.