Steam had 90% of the tooling just needs polishing
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
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.
First one of those contenders that solves federation in a nice way would be a winner. Quite a lot of them has it on their roadmap so my hopes are not completely lost.
I could probably just google this... but I think I just want to hear a real person explain something this time :P
What do you mean by "solves federation"? As in bringing disparate groups together under a single app?
bringing disparate groups together under a single app
Yep, that's pretty much how I'd like to see it done. Similar to lemmy/piefed, where I can reply to your comment from different server. E.g. Fluxer have something like this in their roadmap, fingers crossed.
There's Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer. Additionally, Steam has many Discord-like features in app.
Slack seems cool to me and my friends, is it not cool to other people?
It's owned by Salesforce. Big ick.
Slack is the polar opposite of cool.
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.
Matrix is not
With LiveKit for calls / screen share, it is for my group. Though I'm not saying it doesn't have issues.
will never be
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 seen mentioned these:
- Stoat - pretty much same UI, based in UK, not sure where they get $$
- Fluxer - looks virtually like 1:1 Discord clone, based in Sweden, has paid tier pretty much like Nitro on Discord on official server
- Nerimity - a little different UI, but still very Discord-y, based in UK, sourced from donations
- Movim - this one is interesting, but it's not really Discord style app; it looks more like cross breed between IM and social network (FB/X), origin in France
- Strafe - looks like Discord, supposedly have e2ee
- Spacebar - reverse engineered Discord, IDK about maturity of this one
- Adapt - another wanna be
Saw this a few days ago.
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.
Why is "one-to-one clone of Discord" the goal for everyone? Why not set your sights on a making a good UX instead?
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?
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.
ngl, discord kinda had the best UX before the enshittification began
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...
TeamSpeak had their chance, but they decided to be complacent after getting popular. Now they are playing catchup and very slowly. Discord has given them multiple chances now to take back market share, but TeamSpeak was never ready. This time some other project will take over instead.
Its also closed source as i recently learned...
How did that go unnoticed? I always remember them requiring a license in order to have more than a small handful of people connected to the server you are running locally on your own computer.
The last time i used teamspeak i was like 15 i think. So i just forgor i guess.
I still prefer to open my window and just scream for the person I’m trying to reach. Fuhgedaboutet
Bring back Mumble!
If only Mumble contained more than 10% of the features Discord does.
I'm tired of people suggesting replacements that only do one small part of what Discord does. It's like needing a new car, and all people keep suggesting is new engines. I don't care if the engine is better than my current car, an engine alone does not solve my needs.
Mumble is alive and well amongst Project Reality players. Same with Teamspeak for the Arma community as well as some roleplaying communities like on RedM.
I self host a mumble for my people I games with, works great
They got trounced by Ventrilo, which had the saddest looking UI I’ve ever seen on a commercial product.
There was something kind of special about how simple Vent was. It didn't need a bunch of bells and whistles, it did one thing and it was relatively easy for people to use. Discord feels so cluttered and it's full of shit I don't want.
I liked it, it reminded me of AIM
Mobile app is dogshit but the Teamspeak 6 desktop client is decent
I hadn't heard of Fluxer before this post, but after looking it looks like it's basically everything I've been looking for. Hopefully that refactor gets sorted relatively soon.
TeamsPiqued more like it... in the 2010s even.
They nailed what they did there really wasn't that much more work to do. A program that can do everything and hosts everybody will always end up speed running enshitification to new lows, why does everybody just want an endless treadmill of dog shit monopolies? Best case scenario is we have many options with people scattered around them and you go to where the group that you want to engage with is.
You've peaked my interest
So close