I was shocked to learn that Steam group chats can be turned into pseudo-discord servers.
It’s obviously not a viable replacement for 99.999% of people but I thought it was wild it’s there today, hidden away. I wager most people had no idea (like me.)
The first time someone called me via Steam, I was really confused about what was causing the noise. I thought the game was bugged because I legitimately had no idea you could call people on Steam.
It has weirdly good audio quality too, like noticeably better than Discord. If the Steam desktop app wasnt so heavy this could maybe be a good alternative. Maybe if they split out a separate app to use it without launching all of Steam.
I can't remember the last time i actually (non-work-related) needed to go back and look at old conversations. Anything important enough to be referenced isn't data that should be kept in a chat app
My friends' discord has pinned messages for things like mod lists and server connections that we would still use years later. More public groups for things like fan communities probably have plenty of rules and instructions that are displayed to new users. They could be linked as a shared file to download, but having it easily viewable in-client is a legitimate use case.
Yeah I found this limitation too but at the same time all that public info for communities will be better on a webpage and right now there are a lot of services to host static sites like nekoweb, neocities, cloudflare pages and github
Should be easier to access but requires minimal knowledge of HTML
I don't know if it's a standard feature or a setting you can adjust, but my Steam chats seem to disappear after a certain amount of time. If I can't keep a history of chat logs, then I can't use Steam as a Discord replacement.
Also, I have one friend who constantly spams our chat groups with random links and videos, no context. I kind of like having channels so I can filter some of that stuff into categories and keep some of our chats from being drowned out.
To be a real discord replacement it needs to not be a stack. It also needs to use the server/channel model discord does, rather than rooms like signal or matrix.
Spacebar is the same way though. Like, it's a one-to-one clone that is reverse engineering the API of the service. Their entire advertisement point is that you can take a Discord client or a Discord bot and throw it on to Spacebar without any type of modification aside from the server url
Last I checked Spacebar hardly just works. Lots of placeholder code at least for the web client. I know there is a fork of it with a web client that’s recommended. But even that for me it’s been buggy
I didn't have any issues when I tried it a few days ago, but I also never bothered getting voice chat working for it and I haven't done anything advanced like throwing my bot onto it.
Movim (XMPP Client) is actively working on implementing discord-like spaces as soon as possible, and they just started a funding drive in the last 24 hours to help accelerate development! :D
If the Discord refugees funded Movim and XMPP in general like they did Fluxer (which got $300k in under 3 days in community funding), it could unironically replace Discord entirely. Here's hoping!
Every name there seems normal, except for a stoat. Like, I'm sure there was a very heavy process going into deciding the name for the service when they realized they couldn't use Revolt anymore. But stoat just feels weird to me.
I haven't tried all but I'm not super impressed with matrix so far. I tried to join three former discord groups and it looks like I have to individually join the channel equivalents and then they just show up in a list together with no server identifier so theres 3 "general" chats next to each other and I don't know which is which at a glance
We're not going to have a one and done chat/social program and know what, it should be that way. We shouldn't allow another one to become a behemoth that then turns into a perfect honeypot.
There are federated alternatives like Movim that would eliminate the chance of that happening, just like Lemmy/Piefed do. It also offers proper E2EE.
It's missing a couple features compared to Discord, but the dev is actively working on fixing that. And since it's also GPL licensed, it can never be co-opted by corpos.
I've checked out Stoat and Fluxer. Both seem like they would be the easiest to convince your friends to move.
Fluxer in particular seems a little ahead of Stoat with screen sharing and video calls. Both have the main Discord features, text and voice channels, etc.
I'm rooting for Fluxer now though because they're AGPLv3 without a CLA. So the code will be free forever.
I tried out Matrix as well with Element. It was a complete disaster. The few friends I convinced to try it hated it, the UI was buggy AF, the whole the thing was slow, and we couldn't even see our chats because something, something encryption. They quickly retreated back to Discord.
Slack has the same issues as Discord, so that's automatically discarded.
Mattermost and Zulip I don't know too much about. I think Mattermost is open core, which is lame. So that's out.
Fluxer in particular seems a little ahead of Stoat with screen sharing and video calls
That is surprising since Fluxer started last month (and its wikipedia article was started today) while Stoat has been around since 2021 (it was called Revolt until it renamed last year).
Stoat does have voice and video and screensharing in their desktop+web clients at least, but as of this comment in August it still wasn't implemented in mobile clients. And also it wasn't/isn't enabled on their flagship instance due to the high cost of running a free video relay.
I’m rooting for Fluxer now though because they’re AGPLv3 without a CLA. So the code will be free forever.
Stoat is also AGPLv3; do they require copyright assignment? From a quick look I didn't see any indication that they do.
Ah, yeah. I guess he created the official repo for this in January of this year. According to him, he's been working on this for 5 years. The very first commit he has in the repo is huge. It seems like he already had most of the code working already.
Personally, I don't think that's weird. I have several projects in private git repos. If I were to make any of those public, I would for sure copy stuff over to a new repo and ditch the old one.
Stoat does have voice and video and screensharing in their desktop+web clients at least, but as of this comment in August it still wasn’t implemented in mobile clients
Ah, I didn't know. Cool!
And also it wasn’t/isn’t enabled on their flagship instance due to the high cost of running a free video relay.
This makes sense. They need more money to keep the project going. That's why I don't totally mind Fluxer selling Plutonium. Open Source can't (fully) run on hopes and dreams. Actually, seems like Stoat doesn't have a donate button anywhere. Even just getting enough donations to rent a faster VPS would help. The main instance is slow. Which I understand why. It's just unfortunately that if someone compares them with Fluxer, Fluxer is gonna be faster. :/
Stoat is also AGPLv3; do they require copyright assignment?
I don't know when you tried it, but Element has come a long way. I had an experience simple to yours when I first tried it but now it's pretty functional. We don't do much with video, but so far everyone I've convinced to start switching from Discord has successfully switched to Matrix and only one of them has had any trouble.
Pidgin is (primarily) an XMPP client. There are a handful of excellent ones now and they're all intercompatible. There's been a tonne of recent experimentation and expansion of the protocol for modern use.
spaces, persistent voice chats, screensharing... discord grew a lot from their origins as a teamspeak alternative and it tried to become an 'everything' app until they were stretched too thin
I was shocked to learn that Steam group chats can be turned into pseudo-discord servers.
It’s obviously not a viable replacement for 99.999% of people but I thought it was wild it’s there today, hidden away. I wager most people had no idea (like me.)
The first time someone called me via Steam, I was really confused about what was causing the noise. I thought the game was bugged because I legitimately had no idea you could call people on Steam.
The thing that really shocked me is that you can stream to your friends list through steam.
You can stream to a wider audience as well. Some people are streaming to thousands of viewers on Steam.
https://steamcommunity.com/?subsection=broadcasts
It has weirdly good audio quality too, like noticeably better than Discord. If the Steam desktop app wasnt so heavy this could maybe be a good alternative. Maybe if they split out a separate app to use it without launching all of Steam.
My biggest gripe with it that makes it unusable as a serious replacement is that it purposely only stores conversation history for two weeks.
As for the heaviness you mentioned, it technically can be ran inside a browser but I agree a separate lightweight app would be more appealing.
I can't remember the last time i actually (non-work-related) needed to go back and look at old conversations. Anything important enough to be referenced isn't data that should be kept in a chat app
My friends' discord has pinned messages for things like mod lists and server connections that we would still use years later. More public groups for things like fan communities probably have plenty of rules and instructions that are displayed to new users. They could be linked as a shared file to download, but having it easily viewable in-client is a legitimate use case.
Yeah I found this limitation too but at the same time all that public info for communities will be better on a webpage and right now there are a lot of services to host static sites like nekoweb, neocities, cloudflare pages and github
Should be easier to access but requires minimal knowledge of HTML
Huh that actually makes it more appealing to me from a privacy perspective.
Oh thats weird I'd never used it enough to notice that. Not a great choice.
I don't know if it's a standard feature or a setting you can adjust, but my Steam chats seem to disappear after a certain amount of time. If I can't keep a history of chat logs, then I can't use Steam as a Discord replacement.
Also, I have one friend who constantly spams our chat groups with random links and videos, no context. I kind of like having channels so I can filter some of that stuff into categories and keep some of our chats from being drowned out.
Group chats seem to stay forever, I had some I made off-hand like 6 years ago and they are still there lol
I would argue that the audience for Mattermost, Slack, and Zulip are pretty different from Discord.
what would be a good stack to replace discord?
teamspeak + signal(desktop client) + ???
To be a real discord replacement it needs to not be a stack. It also needs to use the server/channel model discord does, rather than rooms like signal or matrix.
Stoat or Fluxor do just that.
matrix
Fluxer or Stoat would be your best options for a feature match ….
I wonder how long until cease and desist. Fluxer in particular is a one to one clone.
Spacebar is the same way though. Like, it's a one-to-one clone that is reverse engineering the API of the service. Their entire advertisement point is that you can take a Discord client or a Discord bot and throw it on to Spacebar without any type of modification aside from the server url
Last I checked Spacebar hardly just works. Lots of placeholder code at least for the web client. I know there is a fork of it with a web client that’s recommended. But even that for me it’s been buggy
I didn't have any issues when I tried it a few days ago, but I also never bothered getting voice chat working for it and I haven't done anything advanced like throwing my bot onto it.
Lots of companies have a very similar Ui to Discord . Like many do to X or Facebook. I can’t imagine any lawsuit comes about
If you're gonna go that way I'd recommend mumble over teamspeak
+1 for Mattermost though regardless, great app been using it for a while.
xmpp will rise again and take its rightful place as the decentralized messenger of the people
hopefully xmpp protocol xep-503 gains traction - it aims to replicate the structure of discord servers/slack workspaces for xmpp clients
that is really great!! yes lets hope some of the projects add it... thinking about it, i should probably go out donating a bit
Movim (XMPP Client) is actively working on implementing discord-like spaces as soon as possible, and they just started a funding drive in the last 24 hours to help accelerate development! :D
If the Discord refugees funded Movim and XMPP in general like they did Fluxer (which got $300k in under 3 days in community funding), it could unironically replace Discord entirely. Here's hoping!
movim does look pretty good but why doesn't it have propper client applications ;w;
progressive web apps scare me
Damn that's a lot of money, don't get me wrong I hope Fluxer develops into a great discord alternative but DAMN
Every name there seems normal, except for a stoat. Like, I'm sure there was a very heavy process going into deciding the name for the service when they realized they couldn't use Revolt anymore. But stoat just feels weird to me.
It's an animal.
Like a tiny weasel.
Fits the animal theme some FOSS platforms have like Lemmy (lemmings) and Mastodon, I guess
They used to be called Revolt but they got a Cease and Desist.
It keeps reminding me of voat (if anybody remembers that) and leaves a very bad taste in my mouth lol
funny, it was called revolt before they were forced to change it
I haven't tried all but I'm not super impressed with matrix so far. I tried to join three former discord groups and it looks like I have to individually join the channel equivalents and then they just show up in a list together with no server identifier so theres 3 "general" chats next to each other and I don't know which is which at a glance
u should check out cinny. it is a lot closer to discord's ui, and iirc does have a feature to join all rooms in a space with a single click.
As does commet. And it also supports voice rooms (which afaik cinny doesn't yet)
Someone is working on an alternative frontend called commet, have you tried that yet?
We're not going to have a one and done chat/social program and know what, it should be that way. We shouldn't allow another one to become a behemoth that then turns into a perfect honeypot.
There are federated alternatives like Movim that would eliminate the chance of that happening, just like Lemmy/Piefed do. It also offers proper E2EE.
It's missing a couple features compared to Discord, but the dev is actively working on fixing that. And since it's also GPL licensed, it can never be co-opted by corpos.
Movim looks quite cool, thanks for sharing it!
Preventing segmentation or centralization? Apologize, it's early and I'm bleary eyed.
Preventing it from becoming a centralized honey pot.
Thank ya. I suspect we'll see a big swing of people leaving come March.
I’d guess Slack is wildly more profitable than discord
I've checked out Stoat and Fluxer. Both seem like they would be the easiest to convince your friends to move.
Fluxer in particular seems a little ahead of Stoat with screen sharing and video calls. Both have the main Discord features, text and voice channels, etc.
I'm rooting for Fluxer now though because they're AGPLv3 without a CLA. So the code will be free forever.
I tried out Matrix as well with Element. It was a complete disaster. The few friends I convinced to try it hated it, the UI was buggy AF, the whole the thing was slow, and we couldn't even see our chats because something, something encryption. They quickly retreated back to Discord.
Slack has the same issues as Discord, so that's automatically discarded.
Mattermost and Zulip I don't know too much about. I think Mattermost is open core, which is lame. So that's out.
Really, the only options are Stoat or Fluxer.
That is surprising since Fluxer started last month (and its wikipedia article was started today) while Stoat has been around since 2021 (it was called Revolt until it renamed last year).
Stoat does have voice and video and screensharing in their desktop+web clients at least, but as of this comment in August it still wasn't implemented in mobile clients. And also it wasn't/isn't enabled on their flagship instance due to the high cost of running a free video relay.
Stoat is also AGPLv3; do they require copyright assignment? From a quick look I didn't see any indication that they do.
Ah, yeah. I guess he created the official repo for this in January of this year. According to him, he's been working on this for 5 years. The very first commit he has in the repo is huge. It seems like he already had most of the code working already.
Personally, I don't think that's weird. I have several projects in private git repos. If I were to make any of those public, I would for sure copy stuff over to a new repo and ditch the old one.
Ah, I didn't know. Cool!
This makes sense. They need more money to keep the project going. That's why I don't totally mind Fluxer selling Plutonium. Open Source can't (fully) run on hopes and dreams. Actually, seems like Stoat doesn't have a donate button anywhere. Even just getting enough donations to rent a faster VPS would help. The main instance is slow. Which I understand why. It's just unfortunately that if someone compares them with Fluxer, Fluxer is gonna be faster. :/
Yeah, Stoat is also AGPLv3! I think they required a CLA when they were revolt. But not sure about today.
I don't know when you tried it, but Element has come a long way. I had an experience simple to yours when I first tried it but now it's pretty functional. We don't do much with video, but so far everyone I've convinced to start switching from Discord has successfully switched to Matrix and only one of them has had any trouble.
What really needs to rise to the top again is pidgin
(Disregard if you already know but)
Pidgin is (primarily) an XMPP client. There are a handful of excellent ones now and they're all intercompatible. There's been a tonne of recent experimentation and expansion of the protocol for modern use.
By that i meant an app that communicates with everything
https://wolfdo.gg/notes/aio85w7twrmqmd5l
I really don’t understand what IRC was falling short of.
spaces, persistent voice chats, screensharing... discord grew a lot from their origins as a teamspeak alternative and it tried to become an 'everything' app until they were stretched too thin