this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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It's absolutely possible to build a discord replacement
The real issue is convincing people to move
This.
A friend of mine went through the trouble of setting up a whole Matrix server with the Sable client when the first rumblings of this came up late last year.
Everything was made and readily available for everyone one we knew to move over. They just had to make an account and that was it.
Nobody came.
Nobody fucking came.
Its just me and two of my other friends on there, because despite everyone crying how Discord is doing something bad, when it comes to it they have nothing but excuses.
"But all my friends are here..."
"But there's a videogame community I'm part of..."
"I don't understand. It's too complicated..."
"I'll move if it really gets bad..."
ICE in America is using AI profiling to get rid of or straight up murder peoole, trained on data which includes everything the age verification spyware in Discord sends directly to them. But they don't care. Their convenience is lore important than the lives of people.
So fuck them.
Same with a local queer server that made an XMPP server. Only 4 (including me) actually made an account. The only reason ANYBODY joined is because were all anarchists but for most lazyness outweighed paranoia
Yea this right here. People don't remember, the only reason everyone left Skype in the first place, wasn't because of skypes enshittification, although that didn't help.
It was because during skypes implementation of said enshittification, their uptime was almost non-existent. Cloud servers crashed constantly, the linux program for it was unusable and required reinstall every time you opened. Messages weren't sending and people weren't getting notifications or history. People were forced to go elsewhere in order to remain in contact, so people moved to discord. The more people who moved the faster the transition become. Eventually everyone realized "Wow this is such a better product" and decided to stay.
Laughs in stoat and fluxer
there already exist discord clones like fluxer and stoat, but not a lot of people are there yet
I run a trans discord server for an IRL group. We've looked at alternatives for obvious reasons, but we're still on discord. All the alternatives we looked at come with some compromises. Often they lack some critical feature of discord. And while self hosting is great for an individual, it becomes a liability for a group as now that one individual has a great deal of responsibility and power over the rest of the group. And some alternatives are no where near as approachable as discord.
None of these problems are insurmountable, but they're also not something that is as easy to brush aside as a lot of tech enthusiasts claim. Our current stance in our group is that we'll stick with discord for now. If they start flagging our channel as adult content and demand ID to access it, at that point we'll select one of the alternatives. The drawbacks of the other platforms aren't deal breakers for us. But at present the hassle of discord's bullshit isn't enough for us to overcome the hassle of the alternatives and the transition. We're aware of alternatives and keeping them in our back pocket, but for now we're sticking with discord.
I'm no discord user so unlikely I will have an answer, but if you genuinely looking for help you should list what those critical features are (I mean the fact that those services don't have these features means they weren't critical for the devs that created them).
Ideally you could list service that was closest to what you want and the features that it was still missing.
I wouldn't say Stoat. Too many missing features. Fluxer doesn't have Federation or E2EE yet.
Sable currently is the best drop-in replacement for Discord.
Why does a Discord clone need federation?
Discord is about persistent text chat and non-persistent voice chat. The medium is way more limiting than a single server's hardware. Each virtual chat server only being on a single (maybe mirrored) physical server shouldn't be a problem.
I even found a replacement called Fluxer that let's you import your server and all their channels, plus the livestreams don't run at 2fps like Matrix but my friends still are too lazy to move, it's frustrating.
Streaming over Matrix seems to work just fine with me and my friends. Might be the client we're using, or the fact it's a self-hosted server.
Might be, I made my channel in the default matrix server and was using the default program Element too, and when I streamed a game to my friend he said it was extremely choppy.
in the embedded jitsi based calls you can set the screen share fps in its own settings. if your server uses element call, I don't think you need such a setting?