I think Matrix is the most suitable alternative. For me at least. The Element web and desktop app is almost on level with discord and on matrix.org and other popular instances you get element call too. Plus people already use it.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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Seeing Teamspeak outlive Discord just keeps making me laugh.
Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn't mean Discord is dying.
"outlive" Discord is quite the exaggeration. Let's not pretend that we're not a vocal minority here, and that Discord will keep trucking just fine.
Even if the age verification wasn't a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually. So it's not going anywhere for now, but I'm pretty sure the investors will want their money back sooner or later.
Now I'm just waiting for Ventrilo and the All Seeing Eye to come back... Maybe one day I'll be able to play CoD1 mp and have weekly scrims again : (
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Fluxer is of particular interest to the folks here at AN. We've talked a bit about exploring it once they finish work on federation.
That’s a primary focus of the app after stability. The dev was able to hire on a co-developer, so hoping to see the project accelerate
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I have tried XMPP, Matrix and now I've settled on Mumble.
Me and my fellows mostly just need a voice room or a couple to sit in, and Mumble does that best out of these three, in my opinion.
I recommend giving Mumble a try as it is super easy to set up and use. Users don't need to even create accounts to join servers.
I've got a Mumble server running on a little Linux container in my home lab.
Easy to set up and configure, very stable. Nothing special, it does what it is supposed to do, be a low latency, stable voip system, and it does great.
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I second this. My gaming group probably won't leave discord for the foreseeable future but Mumble is probably where we'd go if we did. IMO all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does, when even Discord can't pull it off sustainably at their scale.
I don't want federation. I don't want it to scale to infinite concurrent users. What I want is something simple I can plonk on a crusty old laptop running Proxmox or a Raspberry pi for a few friends.
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What I'm upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums? Hell, even a subreddit would at least have been scrapable. If there's a mass migration away from Discord then all that information just gets lost. Example that Lemmings might care about - CachyOS has a forum, but I've seen the vast majority of troubleshooting and user input made on their Discord channel.
What I'm upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord.
omg, you guys are almost there. you're so close, I can feel it.
so....why is the information locked behind a corporate entity?
Because people prefer convenience to privacy and accessibility, I guess? If there was an easy way to scrape/crawl discord data I would be hoarding everything I could to repost on lemmy or something but AFAIK there are no easily automated ways to access it.
and that's no accident. it's by design.
creating a community is neat, but many are started irresponsibly. they don't take into consideration how to move if things "change".
people just willingly and blindly trust corporate suppliers because they do "so much stuff". not a care in the world as day by day their dependency grows.
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Old fashioned forums are old fashioned. Circular logic but there's a lot holding them back.
- Create a new account for every single niche forum? No thanks. We need a federated solution.
- Lemmy/Piefed/etc is almost there
- Antiquated restrictions (e.g. Log in to view images)
- Antiquated UI - People want emojis, reactions, rich media, etc
- PHP paid the bills once upon a time but now it's hard to get anyone excited to make big new features for forum software
You've got some points but I would argue that antiquated UI will be what saves the Internet. Keeping out bots and AI scrapers with good old fashioned phpBBS systems that have been around for twenty years will be our clean data as we build systems outside of AI and the techbro properties.
I've also always liked how old school forums are structured. Nice, neat categories and most active/recent stuff on top.
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What I’m upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums?
Rather than paying for hosting and operational costs that goes with a forum, social media and the desire for immediacy happened as Yahoo created Groups, then Facebook followed suit with their own.
Thankfully these guys dumped many public Discord servers, privacy concerns aside, the information won't really be forever trapped
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It comes down to Fluxer and Stoat. Or just Stoat if you dislike Fluxer's AI-assisted development.
One thing is clear, both are currently working great and are the closest thing to Discord's core features.
It's definitely going to be one of these two. Matrix and XMPP are just too much for casual users, and there's no one client for either of them which supports all of Discord's core features.
Out of those two, Fluxer feels like the better choice right now, but I do wish they'd take a stronger stance against LLMs. Stoat feels clunkier, buggier, and feels like it's getting left behind.
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I am so pissed that Element or any other Matrix app does not support push to talk OR a minimum noise gate. If it did it would clearly get tons of new users, it would be pretty much no question which plattform to replace discord with
Whilst that’s one of the few things that bugs me with element, let’s not pretend that a lack of PTT or noise gate is the reason for everybody not switching to matrix.
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I hope we get encrypted hosting sites that can help people do easy automated setups. A bunch of people want something that is just create a server and go. I know several discord admins that aren't really hardware and self hosting literate.
I like the alternatives, but they mean nothing without being federated.
For me it's federation and encryption. Yeah obviously, if I'm in a public space then encryption means fuck all, but for messages between me and close friends I want encryption.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| XMPP | Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #178 for this comm, first seen 17th Mar 2026, 08:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Got a link that's not YouTube?
Pretty surprised to not see mumble mentioned. It's mostly a voice chat replacement. But the low latency chat works so damn well and easy to self host.
For those who are still getting their arrangements together to leave discord but are uncomfortable about running the client in the interim check out vesktop, an open source privacy-focused discord client that looks and feels like the official client without the same uncomfortable level of access to your user space.
I hear Snikket makes it really easy to host XMPP (aka Jabber).
Yes, but it isn't a Discord replacement, but rather a WhatsApp replacement.
https://movim.eu/ is xmpp based and might be more suitable as a Discord replacement, but to be honest it isn't quite there yet if you are looking mainly for a voice chat app.
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