Linux

Matrix and Peertube.

As for twitch alternatives, owncast is awesome, and peertube can be your own personal YouTube and handle livestreams, both have a live chat. But if you simply just want a twitch alternative owncast will be simpler on your end.

https://fluxer.app/

Open source, they are working on a self hosting img.

I'll use that, it's basically a discord copy but for free :).

My friends and I have been using Steam's group chat feature while waiting for an alternative. For streaming game play, we can use Steam's broadcast feature. The downside being we can only watch one stream at a time.

Fluxor is looking like a good Discord alternative, but it's too early to tell.

TL; DR use Jami

You want something to stream low latency, don't you? Honestly, that means peer to peer, not centralised (I. E streaming to a server which then streams to your friend). OBS will use large buffers (multiple seconds) that are then sent out to the server.

I would suggest using Jami. It's peer to peer chat with peer to peer video and audio calls. It's the simplest solution I've found. Matrix has MatrixRTC (or whatever they call it) but you will need the Element client and will need to activate RTC in the "labs". Not sure if it's in the stable build or the beta.

Signal can also stream peer to peer (webrtc like every other) but it compresses a lot and encrypts on top of it. You could have low latency but you will have visual artefacts and there's no way to tweak the settings.

Bare bone streaming tools like Sunshine work cross platform if your friend runs Moonlight on Windows. This setup beats Discord or Twitch for low latency gaming sessions with friends. Have you tried Sunshine and Moonlight yet?

You might want to try a service based on XMPP instead of Matrix due to how Matrix caches all the chats its users are in. If you want to go the XMPP route, Movim is the most similar to Discord.

For streaming, I've heard of Owncast as a FOSS alternative. I don't stream nor do I watch them, so please don't consider this more than pointing out what's available

The two most* famous discord alternatives that I know are stoat and fluxer.

I'm the moderator of the fluxer community, you can check it here: !fluxer_app@lemmy.world

EDIT: typos

Discord alternatives are complicated, because Discord is conceptual bullshit. It started as voice communication, yet became popular for the text communication.

So you won't find a good replacement (unless something new created in particular to mimic discord), because the things it now provides are better handled by seperate applications.

PS: ~~OBS should already work on it's own, without a dedicated webserver on your side. Basically every media program (also browser) should be able to handle streams~~

OBS' WHIP (WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion) support should allow direct connection to web browsers.

(I'll will take a look at it when I'm home)

You could use owncast as a twitch alternative: https://owncast.online/

Some Matrix clients such as comment also support screen sharing (for a more discord like experience). But I haven't used it myself, so I can't speak to its quality or reliability: https://commet.chat/

I am very happy with having Sharkord installed on my server. Still in alpha stage, it's very well built in many places. The project is only 3 month old.

Native softwares will never happen, though.

Owncast already mentioned, and while it's good, it doesn't achieve real-time streaming like discord does. It's more of a twitch replacement for streamers with an actual audience thanks to it's ActivityPub support (in that people on stuff like mastodon can "subscribe" to the server).

MatrixRTC is still new and while it's already being used to provide voice channels in clients like element, cinny and commet, as of now none of them can stream gameplay with audio.

For this I'm currently using Broadcast-box. Self-hostable, but the dev also provides a public instance.

It uses WHIP to stream over WebRTC (OBS is compatible) to achieve less than half second latency. More than fast enough to feel like "real-time" if in a voice-chat with friends. And you can push the video quality past what any platform like youtube, twitch or discord will allow.

You can also check out stream.place which has integration into bluesky and the atproto.

Whatever your preferred matrix client is. That's the alternative. Element, Nheko, Fluffychat, all decent options.

Is it perfect? Hardly. Is it the best you're going to get short of some cheap discord knockoff? Yes.

Luckily i barely use discord, but i have one small usecase for it where it is pretty much irreplacable, which is that i use it to voice chat with a friend when playing games with crossplay support, since he is on ps5, and discord now having ps5 support makes that the go-to app.

I have the same question, but a particular problem I am having is the need to chat via text while streaming instead of audio for accessibility purposes. Discord's game overlay worked okay for this (not great, but usable) on Windows, but doesn't run at all on Linux, and every alternative I look at seems very voice chat focused. Steam does have chat options within the overlay but doesn't seem to have good chat history options.

Never tried it myself, but doesn't steam have a feature to stream to your friends? Your friend would just need to install the client and create an account. All the other options in this thread are just if you want to serve your streams to a broader audience