Pretty much what it says on the tin, but for more context. My friends and I use Discord to play D&D and other TTRPGs. We also use it to send memes and just have conversations. We mostly do the chat, text, images, gifs, etc. But we also use the voice and video chat pretty regularly too. Screen share sometimes as well. So I’d like to try to find something that has all those features if possible.
The new ID or facial recognition requirement they are implementing is a deal breaker for a few of us, and so if I can set up some kind of alternative to make it a non-issue, I’d like to.
I’m running Ubunutu 22.04 LETS, AMD 3700X, 64GBRAM, 10x 6TB HDD, and and 2 4TB NVmE. Have a 2gb up/down internet connection. So I don’t think we should have any issues making it work smoothly for 7 people.
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https://github.com/spacebarchat/spacebarchat
Literally reverse engineered discord, made open source.
I‘ve been looking into this a bit and whilst i haven’t really tried any of the alternatives, i did collect some notes:
possible contenders
- zulip
- apache-2.0 self hosted more work focussed
- stoatchat (formerly revolt)
- AGPL-3 self hosted
- teamspeak
- proprietary … self hosted older ts3 with ts6 announced
- mumble
- license seems foss - self hosted
- spacebar
- AGPL-3 self hosted
- return to irc or xmpp
probably no
- matrix - could not decryptinator
- a hassle regarding voice
- peersuite
- very very young and not really ready
- https://lemmy.dbzer0/post/45470657
DO NOT
- mattermost
- play stupid games, win stupid prices
- guilded
- owned by roblox
- slack
- discord
- ventrilo
- proprietary - not selfhosted - no linux
please let me know what y’all think
Most of the possible contenders lack video calls and some also other needs mentioned by the OP. Nextcloud Talk has them all
- zulip
The main issue is you’ll never get the cretins that use it off it. Communities… they’re just sitting there burning the library of alexandria… all the esoteric knowledge they’re “putting on discord” is just gonna vanish.
over a billion in vc funding and discord is as shit as it is.
As an archivist and data hoarder I hate discord with a burning, visceral passion.
Are there any groups we can join as archivist / hoarders?
Sure, a good place to start is ArchiveTeam
https://tracker.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
It’s funny you mention the VC funding. As far as I can tell, it’s only made it worse. Discord would have done great if they just kept expectations low. Instead, they’re now expected to create massive returns. That must come at the cost of consumers. I hope consumers get tired of it and leave, or someone else comes offering the simple service Discord used to provide.
Mmhmm, its also not early round funding so… where are they gonna get 3bn to pay back their investors? Or even break even at 1bn?
Is it worth preserving though?
So much tech support has moved to Discord. That’s worth keeping around.
Call them cretins all you want, Discord in a great piece of software and very powerful. The usability is better than most others.
Its a usability and information discoverability is a nightmare and its continuously probing my system in ways that I don’t want it to.
The usability is complete and total ass unless you’ve grown up knowing no better.
Edit: Also, its full of toxic ass communities with stupid little kingdoms they’ve set up.
All valid points. It is still popular.
toxic kingdoms
Exist here too.
element.io uses Matrix. It’s not bad.
yes i second matrix. it’s different from discord in a lot of ways, but it’s still a pretty seamless transition. for anyone who wants to host matrix, i recommend the continuwuity homeserver software. it’s much easier to host than synapse and is significantly faster for 99% of use cases
if you’re just trying use matrix, i prefer cinny over element for the client. cinny’s ui is also very similar to discord’s and it handles space/room grouping very intuitively. there’s also fluffychat (less feature rich) and schildichat (element fork), among others. however, element is currently the only client which fully supports voice chat
for instances, i recommend choosing something other than matrix.org. right now, matrix is barely decentralized because the vast majority of users choose matrix.org, which isn’t great. also matrix.org collects a lot of data and requires more information to register than most servers. some other good public instances are:
- tchncs.de
- unredacted.org
- catgirl.cloud
- calitabby.net
there are also many, many smaller public instances, but it’s probably better to choose a relatively big one for moderation reasons. a lot of people think matrix is dead or no one uses it, but there are plenty of active communities if you know where to look
for your friends who refuse to quit discord for some reason, matrix’s ecosystem also has lots of bridges. if you’re willing to self host, i recommend out of your element. the only caveat is that it doesn’t support e2ee rooms
This is fantastic information, thank you
My project for the week is getting Matrix and Continuwuity set up. Half-hearted initial attempts have been unsuccessful with the Continuwuity container just in constant restarts.
If OP wants voice and video chat like they say they’d have to host synapse and use element afaik.i don’t think any of the other home servers support matrix calling. Cinny and fluffychat don’t support voice or video calls. Fluffychat has it as an “option” but it’s currently broken last time I tried it. Schildi chat might work for voice and video since it’s an element fork. I’ve not tried it so I don’t know for sure.
element call is a standalone service (call.element.io) that the client just integrates really well. since it’s not actually part of the homeserver deployment, it should work fine even without synapse. that said, it means traffic passes through a third party server unless element call and the client are also self hosted. but yes, you’re right that other clients currently do not support calling. luckily, cinny is relatively close to merging a PR that adds it
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol PIA Private Internet Access brand of VPN SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging nginx Popular HTTP server
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.
[Thread #79 for this comm, first seen 9th Feb 2026, 22:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
We switched to element (matrix-protocol) a while ago. Until now it worked fine for us - without any real problems. It already got a native voice/video-call implementation. But i heard that selfhosting isnt that smooth
Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.
You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. WebRTC (like voice/video calling) tends to throw a fit without some sort of TURN functionality. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.
Edit: I looked it up. Cloudflare offers TURN servers, with the first 1000GB for free each month, but then it charges for use after that. But that does mean a server that gets used for video calls more than a few hours per month could end up incurring costs. Because that TURN server would be handling all of the video streaming data, so it will quickly eat that 1000GB limit. It also means true self-hosting is prohibitively difficult, as you’d be tying yourself to an external provider unless you go out of your way to host your own TURN server.
Why federate if you’re just expecting a small group of friends to use it?
matrix is unreasonably hard to set-up, why doesnt the docker container or the compose include voice chat? i cant even sign up for stoat to try it out… is this the best we have against discord in the big 26 😭
Voice chat works out of the box with Matrix.
It uses WebRTC and tries to do P2P connections. Note that this leaks your IP to the other caller and vice versa, but it’s also quite fast as you can establish a direct connection.
If P2P fails it will try to fallback to your configured TURN server and use that one for relaying.
However not every instance has one (as TURN servers are usually not that modern and straight forward…) and if this is the case it will fallback to Matrix’s global TURN servers.
XMPP is also still a thing and IMO much easier to host (at least ejabberd is). Look into Movim, which looks quite nice as a discord replacement on top of XMPP.
XMPP aka Jabber.
Yeah, we’re using Conversations and it’s fine for most things.
Will be self hosting prosidy “sooon”… and it’ll all be in-house.
Good luck! Report results.
Does XMPP work with group audio calling and video calling?
Yes, depending on the server/client
Check out https://stoat.chat/, it’s the closest self hostable group communications platform to Discord.
Just a fair warning in reply to this that the self-hosted version of Stoat doesn’t currently have voice chat. It’s an open issue that’s currently paused until they can finish their rework.
If you have the skill for it, it seems like you can patch work the existing voice chat back in, but it’s not part of their initial setup and there’s no instructions on how to do so properly
Well that seems like a fairly big deal.
Link to their voice chat implementatoon.
Looks like you can enable it on self hosted version. Probably worth someone trying it out personally. Before giving up on stoat.
sadly, it’s a little more complex than just enabling it. The supported self host deployment uses docker, and the docker containers that are available don’t contain the interfaces for voice or video calling as they are not up to date.
If I understand it right, to enable it would mean you need to either pull the source yourself and run it off of docker, or make a custom docker image using a version of stoat web that contains the ability to do voice calls.
reading the draft of the linked issue, it looks like the author isn’t doing voice call for the reason that they don’t know the proper way to integrate it into the docker image.
So to answer it: yes it looks like you can use voice servers on the current self hosted model, but you can’t use pre-existing docker images, and it will require you to manually add the new web UI in and patch where needed.
Turns out they also don’t support federation or e2ee. If those are things you care about.
Honestly the name choice adds difficulty in getting friends to take it seriously. Why did they pick “stoat”
Nowadays everyone accepted the name “Discord” but I think it’s a pretty poor choice of branding too.
A communication app called Discord is pretty weird too.
A stoat is a pretty cool animal.
I think without prior knowledge of any voice chat Discord would probably rate worse in perception than Stoat.
Nowadays everyone accepted the name “Discord” but I think it’s a pretty poor choice of branding too.
A terrible name for an app meant to facilitate communication. Always baffled me. But the name is so widely recognized that nobody thinks twice about it.
I always thought Noosphere would make a cool name for a Discord replacement, especially if it incorporates a way to permanently catalog the knowledge accrued by the community, say as a built-in wiki. That might actually make it viable as a support platform.
you mean unlike the tools discord has replaced, such as “mumble”, “ventrilo”, “roger wilco” and “trillian”?
Mumble is a verb like chat but what the fuck has a stoat got anything to do chatting?
now do the other ones
Do them yourself and you want to copy all those failed apps, lmao.
Mumble is great and I still use it. None of those are failed apps.
Not every app seeks to rake in teenagers’ parents’ money with shit like premium emojis.
So, where are all the posts saying, ‘self-hosted ventrilo?’
I still use IRC. There are now modern web clients like The Lounge or Convos that can display/share images in the channels, keep history and push notifications. Apparently Convos can do video chat but I never tried it. Unfortunately I’m not aware of screen sharing features for any of these.
So on a very simple setup, you need an IRC server, then install and connect one of those clients to your server, and use them through a web browser, either on a computer or on a phone.
It’s obviously not entirely Discord-like, but it is a simple way to chat and share images.
Self hosting a Matrix server was daunting when I first looked into it, so concerns over it being difficult to deploy are pretty founded. But that changed when I discovered this repo. This makes quick work of getting one spun up, but the true gem of this is their documentation. They’ve probably got the best documentation I’ve ever read that explains the “why’s” and not just the “how’s”.
I’m hosting a matrix server it was rough but not impossible. Using conduit as the backend. Now that the setup is finally done it was so worth it. I would do it again if needed. Coturn was easy to set up along side it.
My guess is that it would be difficult to find a piece of software that does all the stuff discord does. But I also think it’s a non-issue. You could split these needs onto multiple solutions. My group uses mumble for gaming voicechat, Signal for group conversations, and a simple rtmp server for streaming. We don’t need nor use discord and never did.
I like the idea of a single piece of software that does one job well instead of a giant powerhouse that does everything.
Back in my day, (shakes cane), Teamspeak and Ventrillo were the big voice chat platforms/tools. Both have text chat and channels/rooms; but their focus is voice chat for gaming.
What’s that you say? IRC?
Ventrilo was awful, having huge delay. Also no persistent chat.
TeamSpeak is proprietary and required a license for more than 8 users iirc. Chat might have been persistent?
Mumble was/is king in terms of voice chat. Open source, fully featured, strong certificate based security, best latency. It’s used as backend in many big games, too. No persistent chat, though.
We used IRC for chat and Mumble for voice like 10 years ago when I played Eve Online. Works great!
