Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.

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.

@maswan oh interesting - I didn't discover this when looking into it - what're the limitations?

@mdiluz The "plan" is listed as "Community" if you don't sign up to any of the plans. There is a limit to the number of push notifications (but it is fairly high unless you have a culture where you like phones beeping for every message), and then there is some junk like "premium omnichannel" (whatever that is), "premium apps", etc.

@mdiluz From memory the limit on notifications is 10k/month.

Also I clicked around a bit, and it is very corporate features that are missing, like "engagement dashboard" and "device management".

So my biggest gripe is how hard they work at hiding this mode of operation, and a little bit of worry about what the future might bring in this regard.

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 thanks a lot for this useful collection, timely and much appreciated.

FYI, Rocket.Chat does have a web client, the desktop apps are plain Electron apps. E2E support is available for DMs, but is clumsy to use.

@lenzgr oh sure I'll correct

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 support

Hopefully this gives everyone else some ideas too, and feel free to chime in with corrections, suggestions or anything else!

Mattermost sometimes comes up

* Fully released
* Limited free use*
* "Open core"?
* Self-hostable
* Some E2E?
* Supports calls
* No web app (*correction: appears to have one)

Mattermost is interesting, but seems to be far more of an enterprise solution. It's even hard to figure out *what* you get from self hosting, what actually is open source, etc.

I think it's probably worth investigating further if you're looking for something for your company/teams?

And finally, Matrix. This is by far the most common suggestion I get. Especially here given the shared ethos of federation.

* Fully released
* Free
* Open Source
* Self-hostable*
* E2E
* Calls*
* Moderation*
* Supported everywhere

Matrix fills in *so* many of the requirements here, but still has issues.

You can self-host, but your homeserver has to host the full history and data in any channel that a signed up user joins. You could however not allow sign-ups, and just have channels.

@scott @CoMaps yeah for sure, I think if Zulip's conversation model fits with your needs it might be a great option! I'm fascinated by what they've done and I think if I had more time with it I'd be able to develop the mental model needed to use it.

I'm probably going to consider it in situations where Discourse might have been an option - it feels like an awesome forum/chat fusion for project support and discussion.

@lenzgr confusingly I thought someone else pointed this out last night and I'd corrected already!

@mdiluz no worries, thanks for the update!

BTW, this blog post from @mttaggart might be interesting in this context: https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/

@mdiluz when you mention hosting the full channel data a user joins do you mean local or any external channel too?

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.

@maikel external channels. The way federation works in Matrix is that the homeserver you connect to is the one serving you channels, even if those channels are on other servers. This generally means that a homeserver has to "host" the data and messages in those channels too.

Fwiw though others have clarified in the replies that you can tweak this a little and it can be less of an issue in practice!

@zeank hadn't heard of it but will be checking it out!

@zeank I've given it a tinker and it seems like self-hosting is quite involved.

The public instance is fascinating, but I'm also not sure what Movim really *is*. Like it's simultaniously chat and a news aggregator?

Do you use it? Would love to hear from folks who do.

@mdiluz for most parts it’s a feature rich, modern XMPP client. That amongst others focuses on good UX regarding chatrooms and offers A/V calls on top of that. And yes, it also has those blogging, news aggregator features. They plan to introduce a concept of „spaces“, which comes close to what Discord offers, a community space, a collection of rooms etc (yet to be defined what exactly it will be).