As a gamer, Discord is my most difficult to replace anti privacy platform. It is “the social media for gamers™” after all.
I’ve tried Matrix many times, and every server I’ve joined has felt dead. I couldn’t find many gaming centric communities there either, and absolutely none that had any activity.
Do you still use Discord or have you successfully replaced it?
You’re not asking for a platform. You’re asking for alternative communities.
Communities are the hardest thing to move. Fact is, people use discord because the people they talk with are on discord. Same as any other social platform.
Discord’s main killer feature is Discovery of who is currently voice chatting in a room.
I’ve not seen any alternative platform that has the same level of voice discovery that discord does. Discord makes it easy to have a community, oh I see Bob’s online, let’s jump in and say hi.
It really is the local bar, you can just walk up and talk to anybody. That is absolutely critical. It’s open discovery, it’s effortless communication of status.
For all the people talking about discord just being another chat service, that’s absolutely true, that’s not what makes it critical.
You can use Revolt Chat (revolt.chat). It’s fully open source and free!
If revolt did federation so my friends could join my server from others that would make it a straight up replacement, but I can’t ask my friends to create a login for each server. I hope they bump that in priority because it’s the last thing I need to switch
I still use discord with friends, matrix if more for foss software comunitys imo (kde, godot etc). As lkng as Discord doesn’t test their luck with people like Reddit does people will stay there. That was a case with Skype.
A ton of communities I’m interested in use Discord so I still use it. I use Armcord/Vencord on Linux and Bunny (not sure if it still exists) on Android.
Any reason to use the apps you listed over just using discord in a browser?
Teamspeak is still a thing
Indeed, levert to teamspek if you want to selfhost. Ts3 has community features such as chat and channels and whatever too
i am on mumble, which is basically interchangeable with ts3. they just won’t accept my beta signup for ts4…
Matrix is great, but yeah, you’re gunna struggle to find really active communities depending on what you are focused on.
I can get a few of my close friends on Matrix, but the real issue is most of the FOSS and tech communities I’m a part of are on Discord.
It’s rapidly enshitifying though, so might not be long before I leave it for good.
Same with me. I really feel I should quit discord but I lose all of my online friends.
I don’t play games, so I don’t have such problems - maybe a little bit of mobile games and casual RPG grinding simulator. But if it’s about open-source communities, I use Matrix exclusively. Using IRC is annoying, but I do use it sometimes.
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Arm Holdings has issued a cease & desist against Armcord being named Armcord, by the way.
Pretty much just now, they rebranded to Legcord
Does it have an Android app? Or anything similar for Android?
Revolt is the most promising alternative but I haven’t seen anyone really use it.
My friends and I use Matrix. Other than that, yeah, Matrix really lacks servers for gamers.
Discord is fine, it’s not great but it’s way better than it could be and it’s got a huge community
Convincing people to switch to your communication app of choice is a fool’s errand
I still use Discord, but once I get round to setting up my own Matrix server I’ll set up a Discord bridge with my most important friend group servers and move off it for good.
I would love to use Matrix more. I’m in one Discord server I enjoy and would hate to lose touch with. I am otherwise actively minimizing my Discord use. My friends complain sometimes but I do not budge.