In Search of a Discord Replacement

2/18/2026 at 5:54:05 AM

Matrix/element is the best bet atm. Had a solid 40m users compared to Discord's 140m at some point, which is good proof they can scale up compared to other. Hardest part is convincing your groups to switch from Discord. But you can bridge the two in Matrix and talk between them which might help ease the transition.

Teamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.

by remslave

2/18/2026 at 11:18:09 AM

Matrix is awful. I don't know if that's still the case but when I tried it a year ago it took me more than 30 minutes to get it working. In discord, you sign up with email (very low friction), click the + button and boom. You've got a private server you friends can join by clicking a link. It Just Works and until an alternative has this level of convenience Discord is not going away.

This is to say nothing of the insanity of public, effectively unmoderated rooms on Matrix.

by Jean-Papoulos

2/18/2026 at 6:14:31 PM

Last time I looked at Discord, a phone number was also required. Once I saw that my response was _fuck no_!

by yndoendo

2/18/2026 at 3:44:00 PM

Matrix is god awful, literally the opposite of Discord in usability

by jonathantf2

2/18/2026 at 3:43:38 PM

A very large number of people are not interested in any chat that does not have 1) brainless installation and use and 2) mobile apps for iOS and android. Matrix is simply a non-starter for ease of use.

by xnyan

2/18/2026 at 8:19:55 AM

I'm enjoying Chatto, https://chatto.run/, which is due to launch soon ish. Open source, self hosting, cloud hosted option, etc. Architecture looks pretty cool.

by moeffju

2/18/2026 at 6:42:24 PM

Looks neat

by DauntingPear7

2/18/2026 at 8:17:03 AM

How about using forums again, which keep the history of discussions instead of loosing all that knowhow in the infinite scroll of doom?

otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix

by rspoerri

2/18/2026 at 9:26:00 AM

>How about using forums again,

Not sure what forums software you're thinking of but vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse don't have the extra features the author is looking for.

He wrote: >Many of these make heavy use of Discord's voice channels, video chat, and screensharing. These servers have a hard requirement for adequate moderation tools for dealing with any bad actor willing to join the community. [...] Decent Mobile Experience [...]

A lot of admins shut down the forums software and moved to Discord because it didn't have the modern features they wanted. So to migrate off of Discord requires an alternative that duplicates most of what makes Discord valuable. That's what the topic admins wish for but the current options don't give them that.

>otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix

Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.

by jasode

2/19/2026 at 4:28:22 AM

> Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.

Which I have all kinds of questions for; my Synapse install is the FOSS community release, and pmap -d shows <1.5G of RAM usage even without the paid-org-optimizations. I thought maybe that was including postgres, but that shows only ~2M. This isn't a single-user instance either - I'm running half a dozen bridges, and use Matrix with my fiancee. Not much above single-user, but also less than half the claimed 4Gig at idle.

I do see ~3Gig mapped (still <4), but that hardly feels fair - any process will start to consume unused RAM, and it can be pushed out when under pressure.

The E2EE breaking for OP is something I haven't seen in somewhere between months and years either, which suggests the entire thing was last trialled before (or shortly after) one of the major performance improvement pushes

The point regarding Soatok's blog about the vuln is absolutely not a good look, though I'd want to dig into it a bit more to see if it's "a malicious admin can break the encryption", "a malicious actor can break the encryption", or "a malicious actor can access metadata". Not great whichever the case may be though.

by xethos

2/18/2026 at 9:51:40 PM

Discord is handling some different tasks, One it is used for overlay voicechat by gamers, both one on one and group chats. Second it is used as an instant messenger which is really pared to the voicechat aspect. Third it's used as a type of forum. It seems those two types of uses may need different solutions. I've read some concerns about Discord's weakness as a type of forum and customer support platform for some software and projects.

by Projectiboga

2/18/2026 at 8:37:59 AM

When you make forums you compete with forum aggregators with more history and social clout, i.e. a reddit replacement. If someone made better Reddit, it could have a chance, however reddit-type aggregators crypronite is hosting their own videos/media, which makes it prohibitively expensive for small companies without ads and sponsored posts which in turn make them less of "forum aggregator" and more like facebook social feeds: mainly video/image based dopamine rides instead of actual knowledge worth keeping.

by countWSS

2/18/2026 at 4:27:43 PM

People are allowed to make niche websites. We can disaggregate. It's probably better for the web if we did disaggregate given how many of the aggregators such as Wikia and Reddit and more have shown the tragedy of the commons that an aggregator over-specialize in being ad companies (or other questionable business models) over the long term rather than directly continuing to benefit the communities that trusted them as hosts in the first place, and often to the detriment and diaspora of those vary communities as they lose trust piecemeal and have fewer chances to "lift and shift" the entire community as a whole out of the aggregator in the same semi-easy manner they were aggregated in the first place.

The "social clout" advantage the giant aggregators have gained they are often working to lose a few communities at a time. Building a niche community site outside of the aggregators isn't competing with them in the same way any longer.

Maybe it is a time for building smaller niche sites again?

by WorldMaker

2/18/2026 at 8:45:40 AM

- not everything must be a unicorn.

- if you need aggregation use rss.

by rspoerri

2/18/2026 at 11:18:04 AM

Small correction, Stoat does have a usable native mobile app:

- Android: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-android

- iOS: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios

by DoctorOW

2/18/2026 at 1:28:02 PM

The iOS client is available through testglight right now, and has this in a banner on the repo:

"This app is still in early stages, and not yet ready for production."

Just for others who are evaluating it as an option.

by Ruthalas

2/18/2026 at 6:42:31 PM

I use Android so that's the only thing I actually used. I falsely assumed iOS was in a similar place.

by DoctorOW

2/18/2026 at 12:26:21 PM

> Signal is the E2EE chat app and protocol. It's FOSS software, and can be self-hosted (though with much difficulty)

I can not emphasise this point enough: it is difficult and unsupported to a degree that Signal can not be considered self-hostable to any remotely useful degree.

It should be in the non-starter category.

by rf15

2/19/2026 at 12:57:51 PM

I’m working on Prose, a lightweight XMPP team messaging app that can work as a Discord replacement. There’s no calls for the moment and OMEMO support is on the works but everything else is working great and pretty mature.

Lightweight macOS app / Windows running with Tauri are available and they feel native. But it’s also a Web app that can run on any domain.

Available at prose.org and https://github.com/prose-im/prose-app-web

by valeriansaliou

2/19/2026 at 3:56:24 AM

I think Fluxer just became a more likely candidate. Its maintainer just committed to removing its CLA[1] once the rewrite's done.

It also has screen sharing[2], which Stoat doesn't have yet[3], though it doesn't support casting audio yet. Also, the mobile app implementation can't arrive soon enough!

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/FluxerApp/comments/1r8724q/comment/... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1r6muvz/comment/... [3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/stoatchat/comments/1r7tdg4/answerin...

by r-w

2/19/2026 at 1:23:16 AM

If you want teams /modern forums - zulip is pretty great

If you want slack - mattermost is pretty great

Nothing else I’ve run across is production quality that isn’t proprietary.

by conception

2/18/2026 at 1:52:51 PM

Was having latency issues with Discord (1+ seconds) with people in adjacent rooms (which created a bit of an echo effect). Tried out self hosted mumble and it's been working pretty well. The older Fedora package refused to acknowledge certificates existed (despite generating them with correct permissions) but the Docker container worked fine out of the box.

by nijave

2/18/2026 at 1:05:12 PM

How does "DISCOURSE.ORG" compare? Is anybody using it? Anybody using it as a "self hosted" solution?

by jimstoffel

2/18/2026 at 1:16:22 PM

As an additional note, was looking at teamspeak, particularly https://community.teamspeak.com/, and noticed at the bottom the following: "powered by discourse.org"

Interesting...

by jimstoffel

2/18/2026 at 1:52:26 PM

Discourse is more forum software than it is chat. At being forum software, it's excellent.

They do have chat-channel features now. I've had a look. Meh.

by jen729w

2/18/2026 at 1:07:55 PM

I think I will try to push at least my more techy friends to a combination of Matrix and Teamspeak (because honestly the Matrix implementation of anything VC/Screenshare/Video is pure ass. A group call on Element right now starts a Jitsi conference. Can we be for real). On CachyOS with Wayland I additionally apparently need OBS with WebRTC for streaming because audio streaming support for Wayland seems to be some sort of circle of hell.

Matrix is kinda jank but I hope Discord enshittification will speed up client development a bit. I am just really fond of the concept of federated servers and self-owned chat history. Prevents hostage holding of chats in the future. For people who don't want to switch I will run a Discord Bridge for now but I do hope to get my main contacts off this software honestly.

For me anything that visibly looks like Discord is a non-starter because I want a product with an actual vision, not someone trying to slopcode an exact replacement of the Discord UI. Imagine if Discord just looked like Skype did in 2008. Yuck. The Matrix protocol, for all its faults, at least has some form of vision.

by vanillameow

2/19/2026 at 4:36:08 AM

You might be using old clients that are recommended against, as (AIUI) Jitsi stopped being the default with Matrix 2.0 (released ~late 2024 [0]).

Is it totally fair to blame users? Not entirely, as some features are still being pushed into ElementX. But it's a known problem, with a known solution (finish ElementX and/or wait for other clients to catch up), and a weakness of an open ecosystem.

Moxie wasn't wrong when he said that open ecosystems have to move slower, but I believe it's worth it in the long-run.

[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...

by xethos

2/18/2026 at 5:33:26 AM

TBH, I hate and have always hated Discord. I'm a tech nerd and it's way too complex for me. Teamspeak worked fine for me... simple channels, voice or text chat if you want. That's all I need in an app like that. Teamspeak seems to still be around.

by johng