I've heard Matrix was involved in some crypto bullshit and military operations of some sort. I want an alternative but Matrix is just shady enough all around for me to stay the hell away.
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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It’s FOSS that should be enough
require a laser scan of whole body. for security
Ive been trying to migrate off since 2020
Communities I follow refuse to, and no other service is close to parity. Guilded was the closest until they allowed themselves to golden parachute with their Roblox purchase, so they're now not longer worth considering
Teamspeak and teamspeak6 is a joke, anyone who prefers it is off their rocker
I've been following Revolt/Stout, River on FreeNet since I found it on FUTO, and others but frankly all alternatives I've found suck for varius reasons
Teamspeak 6 with the teamspeak 6 beta server is a great solution for my small community. I'm hosting a dedicated server on my mini PC that is used just for servers.
Has voice chat, text chat, screen share (whether it is streaming video games, your desktop, or webcam). The streaming is peer 2 peer, meaning there's no restriction on streaming quality except what your Internet can handle. Audio quality is amazing.
Beta
No app version
Since you appear to have some experience and technical capacity I have some questions for you
Selfhost is wonderful, but how secure is it when exposed for public access?
Is it a PITA to get into like say Immich if you want to share it to friends and family, where you have to play shenanigans with say OpenVPN having them connect to your home via VPN or Tailscale to share it?
Teamspeak allows for your server to have a nickname, effectively a DNS by TeamSpeak. Open ports on the router and firewall and you're good to go, no need to share IP addresses.
What are the others missing? In other words, what are the main features of discord that make it stand out so far above the rest?
I tried to move my friend group away from discord to stoat or matrix. But a pig part of why it stands out is that people are used to it and don't think privacy is a big enough reason to switch
Discoverability and moderated official servers
You need to be able to find say a public battlefield, minecraft, dayz, CivilizationVi, whatever community and subcommunities easily, so for minecraft you need to be able to find speedrunner, hardcore, smp, and so on groups
Active People to talk to
Chicken and egg problems. Gotta have signifcant quantities of people to attract more active people
Intuitive and easy joining, clean links.
Have to be able to say "oh we can hop on here and chat/discuss" to onboard new people from YouTube, Twitch, Owncast, whatever
The shared link cant be a string of letters and numbers because uninitiated correlate that with bad actors
This was something Guilded was starting to get right before they were bought out and shut down and it was massive for getting people to join
That's an absolute failure of all of those products to not provide that environment on their own.
This used to be commonplace
Discord at its best was simply a hangout where you and your friends can talk to each other without needing to be playing the same game.
It became entirely too complicated and bigger than it needed to be. It's a. Overblown IRC voice chat. And before nitro, it was exactly all it needed to be.
Now it shot itself in the foot like so many others by trying to be something that isn't what made it great
I think its yet to be seen if they shot themselves in the foot or not
Remember Reddit?
Yeah they were dirt bags and still exist just fine aren't they
I'd wager its more likely that the same scenario repeats than this being a catastrophic event for discord personally
Unfortunately
You are most likely correct that it's too early to say. I don't have a problem conceding that point to you.
I think Reddit did shoot itself in the foot though, regardless of if they are still around. I don't know that they will ever be able to regain what it has lost.
As a Reddit refugee myself I can say that for me they absolutely fucked over the chance to have me return to their platform, and many if not most of other refugees I'm guessing would share a similar opinion
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sadly people will forget about this next week
It’s not that they forget. It’s that 98% of its user base won’t care. They will just do whatever and continue on.
Too many companies have invested in discord being their point of contact.
It’s the same as windows 11 killing windows 10. Everyone just moved on.
Yes, you will have a few niche users quit, same as the few who moved from windows to Linux. But not any significant numbers to make any of these companies worry.
I mean I've wanted to change anyway since the enshittification started. I think the first thing was a paid avatar/profile decoration store. Annoying enough, but if they're decent cosmetics and not crazy prices I can understand. I still wish there was an internal, native seeing that would just remove all the visual teasing of paid options, but I can ignore it. (Mainly I hate trying to add an emoji to chat and just seeing pages of emoji from servers that I can't use on the one I'm on- which is already super annoying, but they put the regular result ones behind all those so you have to either scroll past them or manually switch to the default emoji page- that's just pure rage bait- default should be first, followed by the ones from that server that you can actually use)
But my main problem was when Nitro showed up.
Unfortunately, of the up and comers none are quite ready yet, and none have the full suite of functionality.
This change actually doesn't affect me at all, I don't really engage with any communities. I have one that I use just to mess with admin options and see what kinda choices there are and how it works, one server with a few friends (like 5 regulars counting myself) and one for some of my siblings that we only really use to play Jackbox remotely.
But I still resent the change and have wanted a good alternative ever since subscriptions started.
Thats why it is important to have an alternetive ready people can switch to. If there is a backlash (for any platform) and a decentralized alternative is there this is the biggest chance to become the "norm". So thanks to all the people working on lemmy, peertube, mastodon, etc.
It'll be the new Victorian age all over again. Morals and acting righteous up top and secret human stuff just underneath the surface. Just look at what is happening in the bad old usa today. This is not about protecting minors.
So you are also following this Epstein timeline we are living in....
Definitely uninstalling discord. I hardly use it anyway.
I use it daily, but I’ve now deleted my account and will move on.
I dont put up with this shit.
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Y’all just aren’t thinking about the shareholders.
I keep researching alternatives, and every time I circle back around toward Matrix, despite criticisms. Part of it is a question of what everyone is using. I pretty consistently see that groups who use or used to use irc are now using Matrix additionally or as a replacement.
Part of me would like xmpp to be the best answer, but I've yet to see an implementation that handles public communities well, particularly for anything that functions at all like Discord. Matrix seems to be at least gaining voice/video chat support?
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