I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
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.
As anyone checked out Sharkord? it looks like a nice option if you don’t care about federation and just want a simple setup for your group, but it looks like it is vibe coded partially
Hey on this note, I was looking to do discourse with the mumble plugin but I wanted to do this via docker compose. Has anyone gotten that to work or have a good source they can point me to since at least on the discorse mumble plugin I noticed that it stated that their install instructions were for the stock non-docker solution only.
Got a link that’s not YouTube?
I don’t. And I don’t know if they put their videos elsewhere.
You can use an Invidious link, actually. I do this a lot.
For @quick_snail@feddit.nl as follows: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=kpjcmXbmMVM
I’ve been getting by just fine with a combination of Telegram and Element.
telegram is just as bad if you care about privacy
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage 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
[Thread #178 for this comm, first seen 17th Mar 2026, 08:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
Maybe some people will migrate things back out. I wound up moving a bunch of stuff to a self hosted wiki.
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
How hard would it be to create an open source identity token that would allow user authentication on any forum or site that will accept it?
Something with a public/private encryption system to authenticate users without the content needing to be federated.
You might be thinking of the original OpenID system. Instead of the OAuth2 thing we have now with OIDC (e.g. “Login with Google”), OpenID Connect didn’t require the site to be configured in advance with the auth provider. You just gave it your email address and off you went.
OIDC is generally superior security-wise but it’s held back by each site to establish a relationship with the upstream site.
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.
I don’t see how web 1.0 style sites are resistant to AI or bots. It’s kind of the opposite. Bots/AI are really good at pure text stuff.
Because they block access without signing up.
- Create a new account for every single niche forum? No thanks. We need a federated solution.
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.
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 a open sourced self hosted solution like discord hadn’t been created yet.
oh I’m sure something existed, it just wasn’t popular enough.
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.
That’s why my side project energy has been focused on making decentralized solutions infrastructure more appliance-like reliability and boring. So app environment on top can have as close to equivalent advantage as centralized solutions.
As a Giant Bomb fan, it’s somewhat renewed interest in forums over there from the operators and users. Discord was always a bad forum anyway, but it was great for immediately being able to have a conversation with people to find answers to problems.
Seeing Teamspeak outlive Discord just keeps making me laugh.
“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.
Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn’t mean Discord is dying.
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 : (
Don’t know if you are interested in COD UO but we have biweekly pugs every Tuesday and Sunday evening. I think the cod1 scene is pretty much like us. CoD2 seems to be the active community with a running league with like 9 teams or so.
Trying to build the community up on these old games
I’d def jam UO but I’m down under and playing with ~250 ping is too shit for cod :( thanks for the invite tho, hf in ur games <3
Edit: I did see this recently, could be useful for you: https://gamedate.org/
I remember the good old days of the 300 pingers either being people on dial up or Aussies getting a morning game in. Yeah it’s be hard to scrim with that ping for sure. Thanks for sharing the game date URL. It’s a nice little site, we’ve used it a few times
How do you guys organize games? Discord I assume? I might be keen to jump into a pug at a weird time sometime.
Yes, pretty much every active server on UO has one. This one is ours if you feel the fancy to hop on sometime (I go by VE_AG_RA on UO [long story])
What’s wrong with team speak? It was a good service circa 2006. And I don’t see how it is significantly less valuable to the “gaming” community. I know it isn’t as feature rich and discord has evolved a lot from its “gamer” origins. I see it used for all kinds of community’s as a catch all system. I guess that is good, but I don’t get much value from it being a centralized point of community building.
Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.
I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.
It’s disgusting yeah. I try to avoid projects where Discord is their only news and/or support outlet.
Imo the biggest problem with Teamspeak is that it still requires an active connection to the server at all time… So unless your computer is on with the app opened 24/7 you may miss messages. That may or may not be an issue, but you may miss messages that your friends send to the group when you aren’t actively online.
Frankly the UI of TeamSpeak is ageing as well, and there is value in for instance being able to simply attach a screenshot directly in a Discord chat without having to upload it to some external service.
Check out the Teamspeak6 beta. I don’t know about offline messages but it addresses all your other complaints. I moved to it from Mumble somewhat recently and have been very happy with it.
They have acknowledged the offline messaging part. It does work in group chats and has E2EE there, but I think it’s something they are going to look into for servers. It’s closed source, so we are at the mercy of their few developers and cannot help. While I do trust them more than Discord, I would rather have an open solution, like Stoat/Fluxer, take off instead.
@aeronmelon @ampersandrew crazy world isn’t it?
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.
Mumble is fantastic.
I designed and implemented a very complex voice system for an old guild. Like 100 people, 8 groups of 15, group leader’s private chat, priority speech all that. It worked so well, and never failed.
This was many many years ago, to be fair.
I wish it’s positional audio was more supported.Mumble was the primary choice for EVE Online groups.
You can literally have thousands of users on the same server.
In EVE, during big fleet fights (like 1000+ people on the same “team”), you can have a hierarchy of fleet commanders/wing commanders/squad leaders where voice travels down the chain of command, but not up.
Also the certificate based security with ACLs is just unmatched. You can set it up exactly how you want.
Also easy to integrate with, which is important for something like EVE.
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.
Even on a crusty old laptop you can easily serve hundreds of users with Mumble
IDK, said laptop is from 2010.
Limiting factor will probably be network - if you hook it up with cable, it should be fine
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.
In order for people to connect to it you have to give them your home IP right? The mumble server’s IP is your home IP?
I use Tailscale and share out that server machine’s tailscale IP with just my gaming buddies.
But if you wanna live dangerously, you can port forward from your router to your internal mumble server.
Yes, like with everything else you self host.
You could also use some paid service like Cloudflare if you want to hide it for some reason.
But generally people are overly protective of their home IP. What’s the danger? DDoS?
People know my physical address but my house hasn’t been burned down yet…
Afaik you’d have to open a port and port forward for that to work, and you’d have to update every time your ip changes, unless you have a domain linked to it. There’s lots of other configurations, too: VPN/tailscale or equivalent onto your home network, a vps, reverse proxy, etc. I’ve yet to decide how to access from outside my home. Still tinkering locally, but mumble would be fun to try one day.
I just use my (static) IP directly with port forwards on my router.
Sure, I get hundreds of login attempts every day, but that’s just life on the internet. Just secure your stuff and you’re fine.
Mumble is nice, but it hasn’t changed much since the time people explicitly moved away from it to Discord, so why would they go back it it now?
Mumble isn’t requiring you to submit your ID.
Probably nothing has really changed. And I am not claiming it to be a Discord killer, as it really only does the voice rooms well.
But I am recommending it if you and your friends just need a voice room or two (as me and my friends do).
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.
Maybe not, but it would probably grow immensly. The exodus from discord is pretty significant, and matrix is mentioned again and again. It does not have to be that many more users in % from Discord to make matrix a lot more popular than it is today
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.
hey that looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. will keep an eye on development for sure!
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
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.
I feel like comet has all of discords features, no?
Element supports all of discords core features.
Last I checked it doesn’t keep channels in a server organized and always sorts by recent activity. I may be mistaken but I don’t believe it supported screenshare audio yet either
These are core features? For me core feature is channels, audio/video call and screen share and element can do all of that.
Damn it this is the first I’m hearing about Fluxer’s AI development.
Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?
Are you talking about self hosting for fluxer? They explicitly state in their documentation they don’t want people using the current version because they’re doing a rewrite, so you should wait.
Yes, Fluxer’s self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn’t self hosted enough for my needs. It’s cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.
When did you last check the self-hosting documentation? I just poked my head into it and there’s a big post talking about why they’d rather people wait on self-hosting.
That said if you liked Fluxer but are not satisfied with it right now (which is completely understandable. It’s in beta, after all, not a finished product), I’d say check back in 2-3 months. I would bet that the self-hosting is ready to go by then, judging by the rate of how other things have been updating.
I believe it was from their GitHub, which is where GamersNexus checked as well. I did subsequently find their blog post. I’m new to self-hosting, and it is taking me longer to learn some crucial pieces of it than I thought, so by the time I’m ready for it, self-hosting for Fluxer may be up again. That said, the only thing I really need Fluxer to do that it looks like Element doesn’t do is screen sharing a game window, and I’m preparing to be able to set up Owncast or something to stream to if that’s the only thing my Discord replacement is bad at, so Fluxer doesn’t have to be my only option.
Welcome to self-hosting! I hope you have fun learning stuff. I’m still kind of on the lower-end of the intermediate scale myself, so I’m hoping they’ll be using dockers and docker-compose once the self-host docs are up.
Right now I do think it has screen share, but it doesn’t allow you to share audio at the same time (known bug). Bummer for me too.
I’m just glad that Discord pushed back their age verification stuff for at least a few months so there’s room for Stoat, Fluxer, etc to get some work done.
Yeah, same. And I’m currently scratching my head on Docker right now. I downloaded a Jellyfin build that was not labeled unstable but is still considered an unstable version, and go figure, everything is behaving correctly now that I’ve actually identified the latest stable version. But I’ve also got three containers, one of them a bespoke version of Jellyfin provided by my NAS manufacturer, and of the other two containers, I can’t figure out yet how to upgrade in place so that it uses the same users and settings from the other container. So that’s where I’m at, haha. After that, I need to figure out how and why SSL certs work and how to set that up, and then I’ve got a lead on exposing that to the internet via WireGuard, a cheap VPS, and a cheap domain name. If I can get all that working, I figure I’ll be ready for hosting something besides Jellyfin on my local network only. And yes, the clock is ticking until Discord becomes a problem.
Honestly if you’re that worried about it, I’d just wait and not use anything. Instead of wasting time trying to find a product that probably won’t get better, you can wait and get Fluxer when they make it ready.
Or you could pull stoat and modify the code yourself.
I’ve had the most people switch over to element (a full 2 people plus myself)
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.
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.
I agree with the public spaces. Just put https and we’re good.
The worst part of Matrix is needing to copy recovery key onto each new device or install, or else you will lose access to all your messages in public servers. Its been discouraging and I rarely use Matrix because of this inconvenience, but I really want to – but it’s too exhausting and time consuming. And I lose track of conversations if I lost the key, which isn’t practical if I’m working on something and getting help.
