Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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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:
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
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