To those suggesting mumble, are there any good guides out there? The website is shockingly bad for introductory information.
I think that's most of the alternatives. Revolt is the best of the bunch, if you ask me.
One more is https://tryquiet.org/ but it's SUPER basic at this time...
Theres also zulip, but I havent tried it yet, but its supposedly open source discord, but you have to host the server yourself I think.
There's not a great 1:1 replacement. I'd suggest some sort of hybrid approach. Personally, I use mumble for voip and matrix for text. I haven't experienced any significant stability issues with matrix, but self-hosting probably plays in my favor there.
KiwiIRC is a web based IRC client. Does not have voice chat afaik, but since it's IRC it's very lightweight and had a low entry barrier.
I'm in the same boat and also looking for a privacy-respecting platform for communicating with family and friends. So I'd also like to add items that are not yet mentioned to the list of suggestions:
Your experience with XMPP will vary depending on the client you use. It's not a 1 to 1 replacement for discord, and I'm not sure if there's a client that can do group calls, but It can do 1 on 1 calls and group text chats. I'd recommend Cheogram for mobile, and possibly movim for desktop.
For group audio calls, if you found matrix unstable, then Mumble is likely your best bet, or perhaps Signal, if that's not banned as well.
self-hosting matrix is possible, and after I got it set up, it works fine. That said, push notifications were acting up a lot at first (might have been fixed by an update since that hasn't been an issue in a while), and it is rather annoying to get your desktop and mobile clients set up to not be annoying about not being verified (iOS apps seem more fiddly with verifying than Android apps in my experience)
Despite my annoyances at first, the Element client really is the best and most mature one out there, and I do recommend it. Don't bother with any of the other ones; despite what the fluffychat settings want you to think, Element is the only client that can do any kind of audio/video calling, and most of the other clients only have web apps, so there's no hope for getting push notifications on mobile.
Ultimately it has worked for me, but my demands are three humans in a voice call once a week, no screenshare (use Parsec for that), and occasional text messages.
Revolt seems to be the best for now. Today they got a lot of money and I hope, they'll make their best to make it a reasonable discord alternative
Discord was based off of Slack and Microsoft Teams is a trash knockoff. All depends what you intend to use it for.
Tried this but it seems to be very badly broken. Couldn't get hardly anything working...
Guilded is really similar to Discord, but Roblox bought them so you need a Roblox account to use it. It's great for voice chat.
I don't think it's great to change one walled garden for another. If you are willing to change, better switch to a protocol instead. Even if there's something wrong with the server, witching between different instances is much easier than between entirely different products.
I agree, but after I tried three FOSS ones that were hard to set up and had very bad voice quality I gave up and tried Guilded which is working great. The most important feature I need is ability to locally mute people which not many apps have for some reason. What would you recommend I use?
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