It comes down to Fluxer and Stoat. Or just Stoat if you dislike Fluxer's AI-assisted development.
One thing is clear, both are currently working great and are the closest thing to Discord's core features.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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It's definitely going to be one of these two. Matrix and XMPP are just too much for casual users, and there's no one client for either of them which supports all of Discord's core features.
Out of those two, Fluxer feels like the better choice right now, but I do wish they'd take a stronger stance against LLMs. Stoat feels clunkier, buggier, and feels like it's getting left behind.
I feel like comet has all of discords features, no?
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Damn it this is the first I'm hearing about Fluxer's AI development.
Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?
Are you talking about self hosting for fluxer? They explicitly state in their documentation they don’t want people using the current version because they’re doing a rewrite, so you should wait.
Yes, Fluxer's self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn't self hosted enough for my needs. It's cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.
Honestly if you’re that worried about it, I’d just wait and not use anything. Instead of wasting time trying to find a product that probably won’t get better, you can wait and get Fluxer when they make it ready.
Or you could pull stoat and modify the code yourself.
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I hope we get encrypted hosting sites that can help people do easy automated setups. A bunch of people want something that is just create a server and go. I know several discord admins that aren't really hardware and self hosting literate.
Pretty surprised to not see mumble mentioned. It's mostly a voice chat replacement. But the low latency chat works so damn well and easy to self host.
I like the alternatives, but they mean nothing without being federated.
For me it's federation and encryption. Yeah obviously, if I'm in a public space then encryption means fuck all, but for messages between me and close friends I want encryption.
I agree with the public spaces. Just put https and we're good.
The worst part of Matrix is needing to copy recovery key onto each new device or install, or else you will lose access to all your messages in public servers. Its been discouraging and I rarely use Matrix because of this inconvenience, but I really want to -- but it's too exhausting and time consuming. And I lose track of conversations if I lost the key, which isn't practical if I'm working on something and getting help.
I hear Snikket makes it really easy to host XMPP (aka Jabber).
Yes, but it isn't a Discord replacement, but rather a WhatsApp replacement.
https://movim.eu/ is xmpp based and might be more suitable as a Discord replacement, but to be honest it isn't quite there yet if you are looking mainly for a voice chat app.
Hmmmm voice chat eh?
Well then it's time to recommend Mumble!
But then it's not chat anymore. Or screenshare.
There are many good tools that solve individual issues. But Discord solved many of these issues in one tool, and that also has its charme.
That's precisely why they have to be resisted and/or we have to look for alternatives that Do One Thing Well. Among many other issues, the networking effect issue with EverythingApps is quite double-faceted in that, because they do everything, their "weight" not only acts as gilded cages to prevent people from leaving, but also to prevent developers, working on their spare time, from developing something that can be reasonably understood as an "alternative" (because the alternative has to also Do Everything).
It's basically playing a loser game to lose, see eg.: Mozilla always at best playing catch-up to Google, or why we can't seem to move from BloatedWebWithReact to something like Gopher (or even make a proper Gopher 2.0).
All that said, I feel like XMPP and Matterbridge are approaching this from the right perspective. Just implement a global communication protocol and leave to platform makers (or platform users) the task of bridging from and to whatever directions they want.
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The project I posted here yesterday focuses on providing text, voice and screen share. My goal is to provide an easy to host tool for those three things. Check it out if it's just those you want in a single package.
https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger is an XMPP client by the ejabberd people that seems aimed at being a Discord alternative. I think it is intended to support voice and screen sharing eventually, though it looks like they want to focus on getting text chat worked out for the time being.
For XMPP, the Movim client is currently the best option as a discord alternative.
It has group voice and video calls, screensharing w/audio (need a chromium browser to share the audio for now), and just added discord-like channels with rooms (though it's not as smooth as Discord). The Dev plans to implement drop-in voice rooms at some point as well.
They've got xep-0503 on the roadmap, so it's not there yet, but is for sure something worth keeping an eye on.
Xmpp already survived Google divesting from it, so I'm more inclined to believe it has real staying power compared to all these new apps partially written by ai or with problematic security policies.