I use WAFRN and love it. Its run by great moderators and the community is well maintained. It even has blue sky integration now so its in the fediverse.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Privacy
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bastyon.com is great, it is a decentralized twitter, they have an open source app as well
Mastodon
you can try Pillowfort. It's basically a tumblr-like blogging site with more emphasis on users having control over their own stuff
How about Wafrn?
I hadn't heard about wafrn, seems neat. But I can't help but hurt from the irony of a federated social platform having a discord community...
Yeah. Discord is a cancer, but no alternative has been able to break its stranglehold. Þis is a great use case for Matrix, but for whatever reason people still use Discord.
Looking at all the issues Matrix has had for years and is still struggling with, I'm not suprised people prefer to use something else. I've been using Matrix since 2017 and I feel like things don't improve much, unfortunately.
Yeah only other option I've seen in the open source space is Revolt, but I've only seen issues with that platform and the dev community around it seems incredibly toxic.
Honestly just surprised no one has figured out something better in the open source space. Discord has valuable UX that makes it appealing, but as a closed source, corpo owned piece of software, it has an enshittification date that keeps approaching closer as they keep talking about going public.
It always depends strongly on the use case, so I don't mean the following as "use this". Matrix has got me back into XMPP. And I was suprised how much that has improved. Ten years ago it wasn't usable on mobile devices and people used OTR (I can re ommend trying it again to everyone who's used it years ago and hasn't tried it since), now I just use it for my day to day communication with family and friends. My family does not know the term "XMPP", but they know they have to use an app called Snikket to reach me and they're pretty happy with the reliability. However, people have different neeeds and threat models, so I am not recommending it blindly.
I always wonder why I don't see XMPP mentioned more in conversations like this.
Forgot to mention that it needs really low resources. Meanwhile Matrix feels sluggish even on pretty recent hardware. Seems to be a fundamental issue with how it's designed.
Tried to use Matrix to speak to a virtual friend I had on reddit after I deleted my account there, it was so glitchy we had to move to pumble.
I thought I know all chat systems by now, but that one is new to me. :D
Does it use some open protocol and has different clients to choose from?
Tumblr's still a thing?