this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Potential alternatives:
Guilded
Element
Revolt
Telegram
Mumble
Session
IRC :(
No voice/video calling, no screen sharing, no persistent chat history.
Sometimes you need to accept using more than one piece of software. And IRC can have persistent chat history.
That's why IRC isn't and never will be a replacement for Discord. Most people don't care to accept comprimises and friction and people developing the alternatives can not impose compromises on their users and expect general market adoption.
I really wish there was some real alternative that actually worked like lemmy communities for example where you wouldn't need to self host but be able to use a server someone else made available to be able to create a community there. And search engine indexing, that would be a must imo.
Matrix does exactly that.
I've only used it for private chats, but you can also have a public discoverable chat. And you can sign up at one of many federated servers. The biggest and likely easiest being matrix.org.
I hear complaints about UX and usability but I will give it a try. Thanks!
The complaints are definitely fair. It's noticeably less polished than Discord. But well worth trying out to see if that polish is an issue that will actually matter to you.
It is hella janky but its the best we've got, if IRC isn't enough.
If IRC is enough, it is clearly, clearly better than matrix.
Then people are cooked, only way you can do all the shit discord does is by having massive funding to pay for all the backend. Or we can brutally murder all the advertisers and slowly move back into a sustainable tech society through fear of tech bro hunts.