I’m part of the exodus from reddit, and have made the active decision to start de-cloudifying my life. I’ve got my own media server, and working on a Nextcloud for the home.
One of the biggest pieces of software that I currently use though, which has way too much access to my hardware is Discord. I know of old school software like Teamspeak and Mumble, but those aren’t quite what I’m looking for. They lack some of the features that discord has, such as the chat rooms, or online indicators for friends.
Does anyone know of any good alternatives?
EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions! It’s looking like Matrix is going to be the way to go
Matrix? It’s also quite close and federated as well.
Been checking out open-source alternative Revolt, which is very similar to Discord but currently very bare bones, biggest feature missing is screen share.
Matrix
Possibly Rocketchat
There’s Revolt that seems to be very similar to Discord. They even have instructions to self host on their github repo. Don’t know if this matters, but as of right now it is not federated.
In case you guys are wondering, despite being posted to selfhost@lemmy.ml, this post actually only exists and can be interacted with on fedia.io
Federation seems to be falling over all over the threadiverse.
It looks like lemmy.ml is down, that might be why we’re only interacting with it locally
Linen (https://linen.dev) can sync Discord chat, it doesn’t have voice or video capabilities though but at least backs up the important content.
The worst part about Discord is how nothing is indexed by search engines, so when you need help with something your only option is to join a Discord server and ask for help, or use the crappy search functionality.
I’ve seen Linen before, but haven’t found a community that actually uses it. It would be great to see it (or a similar alternative) take off in the software development world, where this type of thing is probably most impactful.
Edit: for a casual or private chat room, Matrix is probably better though
Since you mention you have Nextcloud, it’s worth knowing that Nextcloud embeds Spreed which gives you chat, audio, video, screensharing and a ton of other features. The trick with stuff like that is getting people to sign up, but limiting it to only people you want to chat with. The one thing that’s valuable about internet-facing stuff like Discord is that anyone can sign up and it’s not your problem. With Nextcloud, you can often federate and let people sign in with Google or Github or Facebook or whatever, but—as an individual—you probably don’t want to have truly open signups on a personal chat server. So you’ll have to sorta invite/accept people signing up. Matrix (already mentioned) is the other good contender.
I didn’t realize that Nextcloud had all the extra stuff with it. I’ve just been wanting something other than iCloud. I’ll have to check it out, but it’s looking like Matrix is going to be the one
Matrix is probably the best solution. There is a bridge feature that allows you to merge a Matrix room with a Discord channel to the members can tack to each other. This allows for a smooth transition of communities away from Discord.
This is gonna be the one! Looks like Element has a similar enough UI, and one that won’t scare away family from using it
