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


