Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
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Mattermost has essentially given the OSS community the middle finger.
To make matters worse, they have a 10k message team edition (self hosted as well)
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3601919951@chanakya ah yup that explains it. The whole thing had the stench of "open source but not really open at all"
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@mdiluz for folks thinking of considering Matrix, please stay away. It has the most unusable UX, and I have a running list of companies/clients who have moved away from Matrix (Element) back to Teams/Slack/Mattermost.
Usability is an issue that Matrix has willfully chosen to ignore under the garb of "Decentralized and secure messaging".
Additional reference: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/im-never-going-back-to-matrix/
@chanakya honestly agreed - I don't think I'd ever recommend Matrix for actual company work. There's better solutions in this list for those kinds of users.
That's not to disparage Matrix. Different tools for different jobs.
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@mdiluz What do you meant “no web app” for mattermost? I just did a 3-way call tonight with 2 other folks using mattermost. I was using Firefox. I had video, audio, and screen sharing. They also have a mobile app.
@paco oh right, let me edit. I couldn't find any mention of a web app when researching!
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@mdiluz Thanks. I’m curious why you didn’t look at IRC. Old skool, but also, multi-client, federated, multiple full open source implementations, interoperable…
@adamshostack honestly I probably should have! Thanks for the reminder, will tag it onto the end once I've had another tinker after 15 years of being away.
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@roguefoam IIRC free tier users also can't store full history, which makes Searchable Log Of All Company Knowledge a bit of a misnomer
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@mdiluz Do people like Discourse? https://github.com/discourse/discourse
As a forum, it always seemed nice.
@com yup! Big fan of discourse for when the conversation is less real-time.
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@mdiluz
No web app? My institute has mattermost, and webapp is the only was I interact with it.@Mehrad updated, I couldn't find it
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Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
I've actually been looking into all available options for the past few weeks for other reasons, so here's a thread to share what I've found.
In particular I'm looking for stuff with:
* Data sovereignty
* Strong moderation tools
* Wide platform supportHopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!
@mdiluz TeamSpeak
only meets part of the criteria though -
@mdiluz Maybe Discord was just a really bad idea?
It seems to me that replacing a bad idea by something that attempts to emulate the same bad idea is unlikely to produce good results.
Better, then, to split up the bad idea into less bad ideas, and have specific softwares for these.
Like a Discourse/Signal mix as I saw recommended on https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/#score-breakdown
@androcat awesome write up. Annoyed I didn't find it the first go-around
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@mdiluz have you considered Movim (https://movim.eu)?
@zeank hadn't heard of it but will be checking it out!
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@philipdrobar ah I forgot it's paid too with no free tier, that also makes it kind of a hard no unfortunately for me, tho I'm sure it might work for others
@mdiluz @philipdrobar it's really only a few bucks for a "lifetime" and it can be purchased directly without involvement of e.g. the Google App Store. It's also available as direct download or on F-Droid. That is quite something in that space and sure keeps all the damn spam/scam bots out.
It was also sold [again] this year: https://comitiscapital.com/news/comitis-capital-announces-the-acquisition-of-threema
Jury is still out but since when does this mean any good for users.
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@esoteric_programmer thanks a ton!
Yeah so that's fair on homeservers. I had to over-simplify for sure. It's more that the responsibility is bigger than some might expect - though as you say not quite as big as it might first seem.
For moderation - I've heard power levels to givee some of what I need, though without particularly good UX. It slightly feels like a bodge though and I haven't found solid docs on how to use them as you've described. Could you point me in the right direction?
@mdiluz for now, look at the draupnir documentation, especially the protections list and concepts, like policy lists. It begins here
https://the-draupnir-project.github.io/draupnir-documentation/moderator/setting-up-and-configuring
About power levels and join rules, that stuff is mostly learned by doing, I dk of any well put together resource for specifically this, but as I said, those are kinda hacky and that's more of a last resort thing, use powerlevels and join rules responsibly, but most of those mechanisms should be performed with your moderation bot of choice. If you want certain features or need help with something you want to do but don't know how, feel free to go in the community, the draupnir room is public and available even in the matrix.org room directory, but I can provide a link if you can't find it on the site or in the directory -
Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.
I've actually been looking into all available options for the past few weeks for other reasons, so here's a thread to share what I've found.
In particular I'm looking for stuff with:
* Data sovereignty
* Strong moderation tools
* Wide platform supportHopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!
@mdiluz Delta Chat is another option.
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Here's hoping all that was useful to someone. I spent some time looking for a thread/post/blog like this when I first went searching, but couldn't find it, so here's me paying it forward for the next person.
@mdiluz
Maybe use Shakespeare to knock up your ideal Discord replacement?
https://shakespeare.diy/
I'm possibly serious about this. It's built on nostr, which presumably could provide all the back-end tech you'd need. -
@mdiluz for now, look at the draupnir documentation, especially the protections list and concepts, like policy lists. It begins here
https://the-draupnir-project.github.io/draupnir-documentation/moderator/setting-up-and-configuring
About power levels and join rules, that stuff is mostly learned by doing, I dk of any well put together resource for specifically this, but as I said, those are kinda hacky and that's more of a last resort thing, use powerlevels and join rules responsibly, but most of those mechanisms should be performed with your moderation bot of choice. If you want certain features or need help with something you want to do but don't know how, feel free to go in the community, the draupnir room is public and available even in the matrix.org room directory, but I can provide a link if you can't find it on the site or in the directory@esoteric_programmer love it, thanks. Will absolutely be getting to know draupnir
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@mdiluz @philipdrobar it's really only a few bucks for a "lifetime" and it can be purchased directly without involvement of e.g. the Google App Store. It's also available as direct download or on F-Droid. That is quite something in that space and sure keeps all the damn spam/scam bots out.
It was also sold [again] this year: https://comitiscapital.com/news/comitis-capital-announces-the-acquisition-of-threema
Jury is still out but since when does this mean any good for users.
@bekopharm @philipdrobar I guess I should clarify. For me I'm totally fine paying for something (I've now paid for Threema to try it out!) but I want communities to be open and have minimal barriers of entry.
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@bekopharm @philipdrobar I guess I should clarify. For me I'm totally fine paying for something (I've now paid for Threema to try it out!) but I want communities to be open and have minimal barriers of entry.
@mdiluz good point. It's a rather good alternative to anything else tied to a phone number though. And to this date I got zero spam over this, thanks to that entry fee I guess.
Indeed not really for the scope of the discussion.
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@mdiluz Delta Chat is another option.
@KarlHeinzHasliP thanks! I came across it but put it under the Signal/Telegram/Threema bucket in that it's not really a community building platform
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@mdiluz good point. It's a rather good alternative to anything else tied to a phone number though. And to this date I got zero spam over this, thanks to that entry fee I guess.
Indeed not really for the scope of the discussion.
@mdiluz shower though: YT is doing the same btw. More slowly but definitely also moving in this direction.
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First, Rocket Chat.
* Released
* Paid after 50 users (nb: a "community" edition exists too)
* OSS
* Self-hostable
* No E2E (nb: has it manually for DMs)
* Supports calls
* No web client (nb: does have a web client)(nb: feedback in the replies points to rocket.chat perhaps being more viable than I thought)
This one had so much promise, but from what I can tell is enshittifying in a similar vein to Discord. Not being free beyond 50 users even self-hosted is weird to me for an OSS project.
@mdiluz
Rocket Chat's limitation on number of users only applies if you sign up to their "free plan". If you don't (and this is fairly hard to navigate, my biggest gripe with rocketchat) you can have as many users you like at the cost of not having some features that I've never missed over the last 6 years.
