Discord Alternatives

By now many of you are aware that discord is planning on enforcing age verification policy on all of it’s users soon. I’ve been looking for discord alternatives for quite awhile now because I never quite felt comfortable with it. Unfortunately my search has left me quite frustrated because I can’t quite find that one perfect solution that’s a replacement. So I decided to write this post to help me organize my thoughts and get it out there.

Ideal Qualifications

I’d like the replacement to match discord’s core features, specifically:

• Group Chats, in the slack style
• Voice & Video Chat
• Screen Share!
• DMs

I’d also appreciate the solution being open source:

• Open Source
• Self-Hostable
• Federation between servers

This would quickly take me to Matrix/Element as my first choice as it (mostly) matches these qualifications. The biggest weakness is the video chat part. As far as I know screen share isn’t a built in option and people aren’t going to jump at some patched together solution there if its not integrated in an easy button.

Why open source?

You might wonder why do I have such strict and heavy requirements on it being open source? The reason is I’m simply tired of these migrations. Every time a business is created with the idea of making something nice for users it always gets destroyed when it has to become profitable to maintain operations. I’m happy to foot the bill for a server running chat for myself and a swarm of friends as long as corporations stay out of it. I realize there’s not many people willing to do this, which is why I’d like it to be federated in the sense you only need 1 identity to manage no matter where you go. Which leads me to my next alternative.

Stoat

Open source and self hostable make it a rising star in my list. However without federation users would have to maintain multiple identities, contact lists, and the like across different websites. It allows for independence up to a point, but expectations are very high nowadays on software just working and working everywhere.

I suspect this service is what will become my compromise.

Fluxer: The Search is Over?

Sifting through various threads of people discussing the state of discord and talking about alternatives. I think I found my replacement. https://fluxer.app

Everything I wanted on my wishlist is laid out in their roadmap: https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/

I can be patient and wait for mobile apps if I get a federated open source discord replacement I can self host in the future.