It’s absolutely possible to build a discord replacement

The real issue is convincing people to move

I even found a replacement called Fluxer that let’s you import your server and all their channels, plus the livestreams don’t run at 2fps like Matrix but my friends still are too lazy to move, it’s frustrating.

in the embedded jitsi based calls you can set the screen share fps in its own settings. if your server uses element call, I don’t think you need such a setting?

Streaming over Matrix seems to work just fine with me and my friends. Might be the client we’re using, or the fact it’s a self-hosted server.

Might be, I made my channel in the default matrix server and was using the default program Element too, and when I streamed a game to my friend he said it was extremely choppy.

Oh, well, yeah. That explains it then. The default matrix server isn’t good for anything because its bitrate is low, yet everyone makes an account there.

So you have a limited bitrate anf thousands of people to serve. Fluxer is the same. It’s just not as bad yet because there aren’t as many people there.

If you’re approaching Matrix like a centralised service, you’re doing it wrong. You must set up a server for you and your friends, and then federate with the rest of Matrix.

there already exist discord clones like fluxer and stoat, but not a lot of people are there yet

I wouldn’t say Stoat. Too many missing features. Fluxer doesn’t have Federation or E2EE yet.

Sable currently is the best drop-in replacement for Discord.

Why does a Discord clone need federation?
Discord is about persistent text chat and non-persistent voice chat. The medium is way more limiting than a single server’s hardware. Each virtual chat server only being on a single (maybe mirrored) physical server shouldn’t be a problem.

The big thing that made Discord so popular is being able to make one account and join multiple communities, often about specific subjects. To use that exact same account to freely communicate, including direct messages, with members of these communities, and have one friend list attached to your account.

Only ways you can have this is either through centralisation or Federation. Centralisation has proven to be junk.

I run a trans discord server for an IRL group. We’ve looked at alternatives for obvious reasons, but we’re still on discord. All the alternatives we looked at come with some compromises. Often they lack some critical feature of discord. And while self hosting is great for an individual, it becomes a liability for a group as now that one individual has a great deal of responsibility and power over the rest of the group. And some alternatives are no where near as approachable as discord.

None of these problems are insurmountable, but they’re also not something that is as easy to brush aside as a lot of tech enthusiasts claim. Our current stance in our group is that we’ll stick with discord for now. If they start flagging our channel as adult content and demand ID to access it, at that point we’ll select one of the alternatives. The drawbacks of the other platforms aren’t deal breakers for us. But at present the hassle of discord’s bullshit isn’t enough for us to overcome the hassle of the alternatives and the transition. We’re aware of alternatives and keeping them in our back pocket, but for now we’re sticking with discord.

We’ve looked at alternatives for obvious reasons, but we’re still on discord. All the alternatives we looked at come with some compromises. Often they lack some critical feature of discord.

I’m no discord user so unlikely I will have an answer, but if you genuinely looking for help you should list what those critical features are (I mean the fact that those services don’t have these features means they weren’t critical for the devs that created them).

Ideally you could list service that was closest to what you want and the features that it was still missing.

I’m not genuinely looking for help. I’m sharing my experiences not looking for tech support.

Laughs in stoat and fluxer

This.

A friend of mine went through the trouble of setting up a whole Matrix server with the Sable client when the first rumblings of this came up late last year.

Everything was made and readily available for everyone one we knew to move over. They just had to make an account and that was it.

Nobody came.

Nobody fucking came.

Its just me and two of my other friends on there, because despite everyone crying how Discord is doing something bad, when it comes to it they have nothing but excuses.

“But all my friends are here…”

“But there’s a videogame community I’m part of…”

“I don’t understand. It’s too complicated…”

“I’ll move if it really gets bad…”

ICE in America is using AI profiling to get rid of or straight up murder peoole, trained on data which includes everything the age verification spyware in Discord sends directly to them. But they don’t care. Their convenience is lore important than the lives of people.

So fuck them.

Same with a local queer server that made an XMPP server. Only 4 (including me) actually made an account. The only reason ANYBODY joined is because were all anarchists but for most lazyness outweighed paranoia

Yeah it’s difficult convincing people due to sunken cost.

You could be chatting on a better platform that offers everything discord offers for free but you’d have to convince your friends and the servers you frequent to all move.

It’s not about the platform itself as much as it’s about the communities that are all already there.

Even the one person I know who is terrified of losing her account and preemptively set up alternatives on other platforms still won’t leave until something forces her.

Yea this right here. People don’t remember, the only reason everyone left Skype in the first place, wasn’t because of skypes enshittification, although that didn’t help.

It was because during skypes implementation of said enshittification, their uptime was almost non-existent. Cloud servers crashed constantly, the linux program for it was unusable and required reinstall every time you opened. Messages weren’t sending and people weren’t getting notifications or history. People were forced to go elsewhere in order to remain in contact, so people moved to discord. The more people who moved the faster the transition become. Eventually everyone realized “Wow this is such a better product” and decided to stay.

So you are saying we need to to DDOS Discord? /hjk

Yeah I’d move if the groups I’m in moved too

Is it though?

I don’t mind making another account, but I’ll have a hard time convincing many of my friends.

They managed to move to discord at one point, they can do it again

Oh, yes. If I mention that “well you’ve made an account before” they will immediately be convinced.

I am still going to try, don’t take my prior comment as me throwing in the towel, but the chances are slim I’ll be able to convince all the people I’d want to. And even if they make an account, chances are they’ll rarely boot up the app and forget about it.

Discord has a certain critical mass that will be difficult to beat.

readily replaceable

I think the last time they tried this showed just how NOT replaceable they are. Every alternative lacks critical features or is still so deep in development that a workable, scalable product is still years away. And that’s not even touching the difficulty of getting people to move.

People switched from mumble and teamspeak to discord because it offered more features and worked better in all but a few edge cases. In the years since, nothing else has been developed that even comes close to matching all the things it does. If you think it’s as simple as slapping together a VoIP program with a chat feature, you are vastly underestimating what every day users would want.

Sable already offers most of the features of Discord, even ones otherwise locked behind the Nitro pay wall.

What’s more difficult is getting people to move. There’s always excuses, and nothing is EVER going to be the exact same as Discord. So the excuses become progressively more granular.

It’s surprisingly hard for normal people to get a chat server running and maintained. It’s the same like with forums. We need something like Lemmy for persistent chat. The software isn’t really the problem - it’s literally just single-server chat with message persistence. Someone needs to host it free-to-use - that’s what made Discord successful.