As a gamer, Discord is my most difficult to replace anti privacy platform. It is “the social media for gamers™” after all.
I’ve tried Matrix many times, and every server I’ve joined has felt dead. I couldn’t find many gaming centric communities there either, and absolutely none that had any activity.
Do you still use Discord or have you successfully replaced it?
ArmCord which reduces some of Discords privacy invading tracking. It also lets you install handy QoL features via a plugin manager. Fyi, it’s against Discords ToS but who cares about that.
Arm Holdings has issued a cease & desist against Armcord being named Armcord, by the way.
Pretty much just now, they rebranded to Legcord
Teamspeak is still a thing
Indeed, levert to teamspek if you want to selfhost. Ts3 has community features such as chat and channels and whatever too
My friends and I use Matrix. Other than that, yeah, Matrix really lacks servers for gamers.
Matrix is great, but yeah, you’re gunna struggle to find really active communities depending on what you are focused on.
I can get a few of my close friends on Matrix, but the real issue is most of the FOSS and tech communities I’m a part of are on Discord.
It’s rapidly enshitifying though, so might not be long before I leave it for good.
You can use Revolt Chat (revolt.chat). It’s fully open source and free!
If revolt did federation so my friends could join my server from others that would make it a straight up replacement, but I can’t ask my friends to create a login for each server. I hope they bump that in priority because it’s the last thing I need to switch
Discord doesn’t need a replacement, for me, because discord doesn’t have a use case, for me. I don’t know what people use it for. It’s like shitty IM with strangers.
Discord’s main killer feature is Discovery of who is currently voice chatting in a room.
I’ve not seen any alternative platform that has the same level of voice discovery that discord does. Discord makes it easy to have a community, oh I see Bob’s online, let’s jump in and say hi.
It really is the local bar, you can just walk up and talk to anybody. That is absolutely critical. It’s open discovery, it’s effortless communication of status.
For all the people talking about discord just being another chat service, that’s absolutely true, that’s not what makes it critical.
Revolt is the most promising alternative but I haven’t seen anyone really use it.
A ton of communities I’m interested in use Discord so I still use it. I use Armcord/Vencord on Linux and Bunny (not sure if it still exists) on Android.
I would love to use Matrix more. I’m in one Discord server I enjoy and would hate to lose touch with. I am otherwise actively minimizing my Discord use. My friends complain sometimes but I do not budge.
Discord is fine, it’s not great but it’s way better than it could be and it’s got a huge community
Convincing people to switch to your communication app of choice is a fool’s errand
I still use Discord, but once I get round to setting up my own Matrix server I’ll set up a Discord bridge with my most important friend group servers and move off it for good.
I only use Discord because modding communities are there, not because I like the app, it’s ass.
You’re not asking for a platform. You’re asking for alternative communities.
Communities are the hardest thing to move. Fact is, people use discord because the people they talk with are on discord. Same as any other social platform.
I still use discord with friends, matrix if more for foss software comunitys imo (kde, godot etc). As lkng as Discord doesn’t test their luck with people like Reddit does people will stay there. That was a case with Skype.