The issue I see here is alot of people have friends... Solve the discord problem by getting rid of them.
/s
If you're willing to use discord just use zoom or Google for video/screen sharing it's all going into the same database anyways.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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I am still confused that Discord got so popular. Glad I never built anything around it.
Sucks that there isn't a one-size-fits-all alternative, yet.
Stoat doesn't have enough features.
Matrix is confusing for the masses, plus there is so much conflicting information online of what home server do you join? You shouldn't join matrix.org's because of admin abuse? Element clients on mobile are meh.
TeamSpeak is a voice first platform.
For my situation it looks like I should move my wife and I to Signal and then my friend group to Stoat, but the recent server issues(prob due to influx of new users) has caused a bit of my friends to have a sour taste out of the gate...
Nothing is ready to replace Discord IMO. And that sucks. We need dedicated forums again, more wiki servers, and better chat applications.
We interacted on the internet for years without discord.
It is far from essential.
True, we all also interacted in the real world for years before the internet.
So the Internet is also non-essential!
But, it makes it convenient. Discord is also super convenient.
It's not like we didn't see the writing on the wall 10 years ago, but all of us accepted convenience over everything else. Now we are reaping the "benefits".
For me I have a private self hosted wiki that I use to document everything from gaming to my servers to just general life stuff. I'd love to start up a forum for gaming/tech, but I don't have the resources nor funding to do that, plus there's a decent amount of others already out there...
If you don't need voice, there are a lot of options. Matrix has IRC support and encryption, and has voice options if you self host.
Riot is... A Discord clone without working voice and I found it to be an odd duck.
There's RocketChat.. More Slack like.
Mattermost.
I replaced my voice/video chats with Nextcloud Talk and/or Steam, based on the scenario. Outside of those, Matrix is good for community needs in my mind.
Looks like my server is moving to stoat
Done! Just deleted my Discord account!
Good riddance...
Did so yesterday morning fuck Discord. Been using it for at least 10 years. Now this.
Same, I was disappointed though that they never asked for a reason why
Yeah me too. Wanted to give peice of my mind. They did send email saying I have until 14th to change my mind. Fucking A didn't even delete it like asked them to do.
They expect to lose a few users but will work hard to get users back?
No. Once I'm gone, I'm gone. Account deleted. You are not getting me back. Trust broken. Thank your dumbass shareholders for forcing you to do this shit
It's okay. People who don't care will keep paying and keep staying. And the same people will be even more likely to continue buying or to buy new things.
I’m in the process of switching my two communities to Matrix. It’s not bad from a user point of view, but running your own server is such an enormous pain in the ass. Like, way harder than it should be.
Mind elaborating a little? I have one community to switch but haven't started at all yet.
If you set up your community on an existing server, like Matrix.org, it’ll be really easy. And it’s pretty easy to join as an end user.
But if you have your own domain, and you want to host your own Matrix server (mine is matrix.port87.help), be prepared to spend at least a day trying to get everything to work. There are six different services you need to run:
- synapse
- postgres
- element
- coturn
- jwt
- livekit
And there’s no guide for just setting up everything easily. You have to follow several different guides that sometimes have conflicting information. Not all the guides are exactly comprehensive, too, so be prepared to read a lot of documentation. You’ll also need to forward a bunch of ports, and then a port range (thousands of ports, for coturn).
It’s very easy to mess something up, and sometimes it’s very hard to tell. For example, I was running federation on 8448, like you’re supposed to, but my server was advertising that federation was on 443. This caused some rooms on other servers to be unjoinable. It gave me a cryptic error message about it, and I had to read through a few Stack Overflow posts and GitHub issues to finally figure it out.
Synapse will complain about Postgres’ collation and encoding, and that’s quite difficult to fix. You have to add some arguments to the startup command to force the right encoding.
Synapse will also log fucking everything, so make sure to set log level to “ERROR”.
None of this is meant to scare you away from running your own Matrix server. If you want help, I’d even be willing to zip up all my docker compose files and send them to you. This is more meant to indicate that the Matrix team should focus on making this process easier.
Whoa, ok thanks I appreciate the warning and details! I'll try the existing server route first then. My friend has a domain name we could use but it's not that important.
Isn't there a docker image that will package all of these for you?
Not to my knowledge.
What is the reason you pick Synapse for the backend?
Aren't there simpler to use implementations?
It’s the most popular one by a huge margin, and it’s the reference implementation from the protocol devs.
Windows is the most popular OS by a huge margin and undoubtedly the default desktop OS for most. That don't mean it has to be the best option out there.
I prefer simplicity and Synapse does not seem to offer that..
Apples to oranges.