this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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So seriously, what's going to replace Discord? Everyone wants to leave, but to where?
And no, Matrix is not and will never be a viable alternative
I've seen mentioned these:
Why is "one-to-one clone of Discord" the goal for everyone? Why not set your sights on a making a good UX instead?
ngl, discord kinda had the best UX before the enshittification began
I don't think it's necessarily the goal — Discord is just a helpful yardstick to compare things to as a baseline (and some people are looking for something that replaces Discord as closely as possible). Having to switch services is a pain, and whilst it's not optimal in the long term to just try to replace a thing with a clone, I can see why people don't have the executive function energy to think too hard about this.
Well, Discord's UI is certainly not the holy grail, but it's quite functional and people are used to it. So it's pretty much logical you copy the concept to some extent when you want to appeal to these people?
Saw this a few days ago.
It's literally on Fluxer.
Pros:
Cons:
Considering how many people are literally demanding and harassing the dev of fluxer to let him let them help him. I don't think the 1 dude working on it is going to be a problem for long lol
This looked perfect! Right up until the no API support. By no means am I asking of that either, just happens to look really nice but also lack that feature.
Seems like they have something: https://docs.fluxer.app/
Oh cool my bad! Didnt dig deep enough into it. I'll have to give it a look
It has a built-in blog feature that communities can use to post announcements or articles to the whole instance, but it's pretty easily ignored by just clicking the messages tab, which doesn't show them at all.
So you're saying there are options.
Doesn't Stoat charge far out the ass?
There are actually many, many options. It's hard to guess which one will get the momentum and lift off though. You probably don't want to convince all your friends to switch to another platform just to see it die in half a year...
Stoat still doesn't have screenshare. It's also a bloody stupid name - I have no idea who thought that re-brand was a good idea.
Fluxer seems to support it though.
BNoth can be self-hosted, which is a nice bonus.
Do people really use screen share that much? (Sadly) I use discord to reach a lot of my friends for multiple years and we actually used screen share maybe twice? Three times?
I have used it multiple times every day this week.
It's one of the single most used features there are outside of voip and text.
It's Mandatory for a discord alterative.
This is a big reason why every alterative keeps failing. Linux and open source users are so fucking out of touch with normal users it's absurd. They want and focus on all the wrong things and then complain when their apps don't get popular.
Like federation is cool and all but literally fuck and all people give a single flying fuck about it outside of the nerdy in crowd.
Screen sharing on the other hand is a hard line the majority of normal users either refuse to live with out or have friends that do. Thus making it a make it or break it for most groups.
I personally use it quite a lot, as do my friends. Typically use it to stream a movie to watch together, or to share the game they're playing while we talk.
I use it daily for both work and play.
In 3d work and game dev it's often far easier to just show people things quickly through it.
When playing coop games our group will all stream so we can see everyone's PoV. We'll also occasionally use it to watch a movie together.
With LiveKit for calls / screen share, it is for my group. Though I'm not saying it doesn't have issues.
Community-developed homeservers like continuwuity have gotten a lot of new support on the last few weeks. Clients like cinny are getting pretty close to a replacement ux wise (if you look at PR2599 on Cinny's GitHub, they are working on and will soon merge support for LiveKit in a way that is very close to voice channels).
I also generally think that the only way to replace Discord as an ecosystem where you talk to many people from different communities is a federated protocol, not a bunch of new silos, one for each community.
I have no first person experience but I've read Matrix' lack of "Discord-like server" grouping is terrible for moderation where you have to manually set permissions for each "room". If that's actually true it's literally impossible for it to become proper discord alternative.
I've moved to Matrix from Discord for two small friend groups (<6 people each). Matrix is a fine replacement for the small friend Discord. But it has awhile to go before it can replace 1000+ people servers
The bigger issue is that reports currently don't federate. A report will always go to the admin of your homeserver (which might be you) not the admin of the homeserver the room you're in is on, nor the admin of the homeserver of the other users.
Most larger (1-2k people) communities get around that by just having you ping the mods in reply to the offending content, which is a band-aid.
A spec for federated reports is apparently being worked on, but not yet available.
The problem isn't that there are no alternatives. It's that there's like 50 alternatives. Centralization makes us vulnerable, but it's also super convenient.
There's a reason we preferred reddit and now Lemmy instead of different forums with different logins for everything.
The biggest problem with getting off Discord is fragmentation of communities.
Reddit can't die fast enough. I miss niche subreddits
Don't worry, it's trying to speedrun its downfall.
Fluxer is the alterative it does 90% the same thing. Has a sub model for the users who need a centralized option or large communities they can't self host for
And it offers self hosting for free if you don't want to pay the sub. Self hosting has no restrictions.
But Fluxer is one dozens of platforms that do what Discord does. If it was the only one, it would be easier to move.
But as it is people who are on 20 discord groups don't want to deal with migrating to 20 different platforms, so they're just staying where they are.
There's Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer. Additionally, Steam has many Discord-like features in app.
IRC never left.
My group left about 5 years ago (give or take a couple) when there was a hostile takeover of freenode. I haven't really looked into it at all since then, is freenode back or where did everyone move to?
Everyone moved to libera. It literally happened right as the freenode fiasco happened, so I am surprised you and your group didn't hear about it.
Does irc even have voice? Or game streaming? Or emojis? Or persistent chat where if you're out of service or offline but then you come back into service/online you can see what you missed?
I’m interested to know why matrix isn’t viable for you? I’ve been trialing it recently with friends and it seems to tick all our boxes. I do admit I don’t do large communities personally
Someone has made a large spreadsheet of discord alternatives, with comparisons of features, that might help people decide: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14vicw-V9Z5m7ckuburP5wxyDIIb_fFJFEjnxxHk8qRw/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Slack seems cool to me and my friends, is it not cool to other people?
Slack is the polar opposite of cool.
Might as well go with Microsoft Teams at that point
It's owned by Salesforce. Big ick.
Slack is a subscription per user so far as I know
Why not? I've been using Matrix for a few years now. I like it, but it definitely lacks refinement and isn’t particularly user-friendly.
I think of it a bit as being the Linux of messaging platforms.