MewMus

Just a tiny gay creature θ∆

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@mewmus@meow.social

It's not a secret that I hate Discord, but I've been trying out alternatives to it for some time with mixed success.

Firstly, I don't think that the federated alternatives are ever going to be that successful. For the same reasons why it is so hard to get people on Masto, but it's so easy to get people to switch to Bluesky. This is like a whole mentality thing for a lot of reasons, but yeah... I don't think it's happening.

Secondly, there are also issues in general with Server based Instant messaging vs just direct messaging. But everyone is so very used to the Discord paradigm at the moment, that I don't think just ditching them all together is going to be a solution either.

So what are the best alternatives I've found?

Well, I have two,
Guilded and Revolt

I don't really want this to be a deep dive, but I do quickly want to list the pros and cons I've found of each so far.


Guilded

Pros:

  • Basically almost at feature parody with Discord already.
  • Has much better Channel Types (Streaming, Media, Forums, Checklists etc)
  • Has the ability to make certain parts of your server public to the open web without an account (this is awesome for say an update feed or game support forum)
  • Gradient Role Names (this is silly but looks so good)
  • UPDATE This has been tested with the help of a friend and unfortunately, it does not work currently (although the video quality is still way higher than Discord) Screen Sharing with Sound on Linux (I haven't tested this myself yet, but it's apparently there in the Flatpak, so this is potentially gold compared to Discord for me)
  • Ability to build an "Applications Process" for a server. Basically a questionnaire with your own requirements that you then get to read and choose to approve or not. (This is great for managing large community servers or age-gating)
  • Genuinely excellent for project management thanks to some of the channel types and the ability to create subgroups (basically additional servers within your main server)

Cons:

  • Parent Company is the Roblox peeps...
    • Whilst they are their own self-managed company this is a pretty big deal and whilst currently it's only been a good thing, it could go bad. (Not that Discord is much better)
  • No theme customization. Like not even a light mode.
  • Kinda bad UX. Whilst it's mostly feature parody with Discord, it's extremely difficult to find where they have placed a lot of the features.
  • Unclear NSFW policy. They have conflicting ToS and Community Guidelines on the topic. There are multiple publicly joinable NSFW servers that use the Applications system to age-gate the entire server. But as far as I can tell, porn isn't really allowed on their service; it's just also not policed.

Revolt

Pros:

  • Opensource with a well-documented and very public development process/timeline
  • Full theme customization
  • Excellent custom emoji support
  • Excellent server management
  • Excellent text channel support
  • Clear and positive NSFW policy with individual channel marking
  • Genuinely good UX, with everything where you would expect it.

Cons:

  • Basically, no voice function to speak of. What's there is buggy, unintuitive and lacks even webcam sharing let alone video sharing.
    • They have planned to revamp the entire voice system and add video sharing, but that has been on hold in their project tracker for months so I'm not certain if it'll ever get done.
  • Whilst open source and run by not a megacorp, it is still a centralized platform, so that should be considered (though it's not inherently bad)
  • No iOS app (though you can use a pinned site like with CoHost and it's fine)
  • Development is very slow, even for a FOSS project

I desperately want to move away from Discord but understand that it's just not going to happen for a lot of reasons. That said I'm going to keep using both of these as alternatives alongside Discord/Telegram as I want them to succeed.

In particular, I want Revolt to do well, I think its potential is the highest of all of them and I'd be able to switch to it as my main service if it gains usable voice and video sharing.

But in the meantime, while it doesn't, I'm going to try and use Guilded a bit more. It has most of the features of Discord with Nitro but for free and if that screen sharing does really work on Linux, it'll be an easy switch for my main hangout environment. Yeah testing this it just doesn't work. I'm going to test this as soon as I can because I don't want to spread misinformation if I'm wrong; so expect an update to this post at some point


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in reply to @MewMus's post:

Hm, hadn't heard of either of these! I'm going to have to keep tabs on them because I also dislike Discord for similar reasons. It feels like the social expectation is less on DMs and more on group/channel discussion which has its place but it does add another proxy in front of, you know, talking to people.

Telegram is still my favorite for that, and until something goes wrong, that's going to have to be my main hangout

I, unfortunately, don't think the Discord-like server socialization system is going to go away as it offers a lot of advantages (especially for project management or community events) that forums (which it replaced) really couldn't. Because of that though I super want alternatives to Discord, because they are a garbage company with a very closed platform.

That said, for one on one conversation I'm still the biggest fan of direct DMs for certain. Nothing ever felt as good as old-school MSN (rest in peace) but I agree that the current best is Telegram. For chatting with people one-on-one it's certainly my preference...

...that said. Because everyone is on Discord for those server-based interactions, I find that most people are more active for one on one conversations on it compared to Telegram. I also had an issue recently where a friend just never got notifications for me on Telegram, but now we both have each other on Discord we are chatting regularly again.

I think the best solution would be software that has server-based/forum-like chat servers, but also a genuinely robust personal DM system like telegrams. Rather than it just being a tacked-on feature like in Discord.

Nah, I agree, there's not a chance of it leaving now that it's here. It's wayyyy too convenient for almost every other reason. It's that issue of inertia you mentioned in the main post. Agreed for sure that a nice venn diagram intersection between it and Telegram would just be the best of both worlds.

As someone recently looking for discord alternatives...yeah this is about it.

Guilded was pretty great but owned by Roblox means whatever problems discord has it'll have just as bad, and probably sooner.

Revolt makes an incredibly wrong assumption that the average person wants to self host an entire Discord. And I don't mean a discord server, I mean an entire Discord The Platform. Most people would rather just self host one server for one community. Plus they didn't seem to take accessibility very seriously when I looked at their accessibility channel and 90% of it was not accessibility related.

And while I think you could in theory get people into federated platforms for chat in a different way than with something like Mastodon, Matrix is just a mess and I gave up on even installing it on my server because it was such a pain, and several other heavily technical friends said the same. And if you wanted to go the old school XMPP route you're asking average users to cope with extremely unpolished apps (especially on mobile) and they won't do it.

I am just...really wishing we lived in a world where there were better options here.