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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.

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.

I hear Snikket makes it really easy to host XMPP (aka Jabber).

Yes, but it isn’t a Discord replacement, but rather a WhatsApp replacement.

https://movim.eu/ is xmpp based and might be more suitable as a Discord replacement, but to be honest it isn’t quite there yet if you are looking mainly for a voice chat app.

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.

Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?

Seeing Teamspeak outlive Discord just keeps making me laugh.

Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn’t mean Discord is dying.

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.

@aeronmelon @ampersandrew crazy world isn't it?

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 like the alternatives, but they mean nothing with being federated.

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.

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.

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.

https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger is an XMPP client from by the ejabberd people that seems aimed at being a Discord alternative. I think it is intended to support voice and screen sharing eventually, though it looks like they want to focus on getting text chat worked out for the time being.

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.

I’ve had the most people switch over to element (a full 2 people plus myself)

Hmmmm voice chat eh?

Well then it’s time to recommend Mumble!

But then it’s not chat anymore. Or screenshare.

There are many good tools that solve individual issues. But Discord solved many of these issues in one tool, and that also has its charme.

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.

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.

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 : (

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?

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.

“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.

Damn it this is the first I’m hearing about Fluxer’s AI development.

The project I posted here yesterday focuses on providing text, voice and screen share. My goal is to provide an easy to host tool for those three things. Check it out if it’s just those things you want in a single package.

I have tested a few of these for a small group (~15 people). My experience:

Matrix (Element) — The most feature-complete option. Spaces work well as Discord server equivalents now. The big downside is Synapse’s memory usage (easily 500MB+ with a few rooms). Dendrite is the lighter alternative but still not fully stable for federation. If you are keeping it private (no federation), Dendrite works great and uses way less resources.

Revolt — Closest to Discord in UX. Self-hosting is doable but involves several microservices. Good if your users expect a Discord-like experience and you have the infrastructure.

Mumble for voice — If voice chat is important, do not sleep on Mumble. It is ancient but the audio quality and latency are excellent, it uses almost no resources, and the setup is trivial. We run it alongside Matrix for text.

The age verification situation is pushing a lot of communities to finally make this switch, which is honestly overdue. Self-hosted communication should be the default for any group that values its privacy.

They’ve got xep-0503 on the roadmap, so it’s not there yet, but is for sure something worth keeping an eye on.

Xmpp already survived Google divesting from it, so I’m more inclined to believe it has real staying power compared to all these new apps partially written by ai or with problematic security policies.

I am so pissed that Element does not support push to talk OR a minimum noise gate

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.

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).

Mumble isn’t requiring you to submit your ID.

Even if the age verification wasn’t a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually.

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.

For XMPP, the Movim client is currently the best option as a discord alternative.

It has group voice and video calls, screensharing w/audio (need a chromium browser to share the audio for now), and just added discord-like channels with rooms (though it’s not as smooth as Discord). The Dev plans to implement drop-in voice rooms at some point as well.

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 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 too – 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.

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.

Element supports all of discords core features.

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.

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

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 feel like comet has all of discords features, no? 

That’s precisely why they have to be resisted and/or we have to look for alternatives that Do One Thing Well. Among many other issues, the networking effect issue with EverythingApps is quite double-faceted in that, because they do everything, their “weight” not only acts as gilded cages to prevent people from leaving, but also to prevent developers, working on their spare time, from developing something that can be reasonably understood as an “alternative” (because the alternative has to also Do Everything).

It’s basically playing a loser game to lose, see eg.: Mozilla always at best playing catch-up to Google, or why we can’t seem to move from BloatedWebWithReact to something like Gopher (or even make a proper Gopher 2.0).

All that said, I feel like XMPP and Matterbridge are approaching this from the right perspective. Just implement a global communication protocol and leave to platform makers (or platform users) the task of bridging from and to whatever directions they want.

It’s disgusting yeah. I try to avoid projects where Discord is their only news and/or support outlet.

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.

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.

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

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?

almost got it:https://media.tenor.com/Nbm426IFONkAAAAM/jack-nicholson-grin.gif

Because people prefer convenience to privacy and accessibility, I guess?

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.

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

These are core features? For me core feature is channels, audio/video call and screen share and element can do all of that.

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?

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.

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.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #178 for this comm, first seen 17th Mar 2026, 08:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I’ve been getting by just fine with a combination of Telegram and Element.

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

Got a link that’s not YouTube?

I don’t. And I don’t know if they put their videos elsewhere.

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.

That’s why my side project energy has been focused on making decentralized solutions more appliance-like reliability and boring.

A “do everything” app is overkill. I am not a fan of many features Discord implemented over time. But the initial offering of having text chat, voice chat, video chat in one app makes sense. It’s just super convenient to switch the communication type depending on what you are currently doing, without having to onboard and switch between tools.

It’s also hard to draw a line, if you want to go “do one thing well”. Mumble also includes text chat, and user management, ACLs, etc. … for text chat one could use IRC, for user management there are IdPs, and so on. XMPP also doesn’t just do “one thing”. The “X” (= extensible) is heavily used and there are extensions for all kinds of things. Some of the big messengers out there are (or were) using XMPP under the hood (just without federation).

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.

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 also always liked how old school forums are structured. Nice, neat categories and most active/recent stuff on top.

Maybe some people will migrate things back out. I wound up moving a bunch of stuff to a self hosted wiki.

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.

hey that looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. will keep an eye on development for sure!

Because a open sourced self hosted solution hadn’t been created yet.

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

oh I’m sure something existed, it just wasn’t popular enough.

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.

@quick_snail @ampersandrew yt-dlp works a charm for such occasions. You want the "nightly" build cause Google is actively resisting them, always, but they always win after a number of hours or days.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

telegram is just as bad if you care about privacy

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

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.

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.

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.

For those who are still getting their arrangements together to leave discord but are uncomfortable about running the client in the interim, checkout 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.

How do you guys organize games? Discord I assume? I might be keen to jump into a pug at a weird time sometime.

Because they block access without signing up.

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])

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.

I use Tailscale

Per their website, it appears to be a free VPN? https://tailscale.com/pricing?plan=personal

Yet they have Mullvad (another VPN) as an optional addon? That’s confusing.

oh wow this is exactly what I was looking for but with mattermost. Gonna have to give this a try later and I’ll see. What are you having trouble installing, the plug-in?

Thankfully these guys dumped many public Discord servers, privacy concerns aside, the information won’t really be forever trapped

Right now I’m just getting discourse to run via docker compose. I have that up and running finally and got to the splash screen locally but of course it needs a domain so I’m working on that route while my reverse proxy is throwing a fit.

I haven’t gotten to the plugin yet but just reading up on the git documentation it sounded like running it in a docker compose isn’t officially supported so I was just posting to see if maybe someone had has some experience and could offer up some pointers before I bang my head against a wall this weekend.

go-away says I’m a not, and the page doesn’t load

Yes, i have no clue why people insists on using such shit platform when there are viable solutions easily accessible.

My hopes for the future is that people band together and share servers, perhaps in the form of unlimited federatee non-for profit orgs, or perhaps even a buch of smaller orgs under and umbrella org, just like for forball/sport clubs and so on.

We need to push out all large for profit companies that abuse their user bases.

No, Tailscale is an overlay network. In it’s simplest form, it can act as a VPN. But it does much more than that.

Tailscale installs a virtual network device and allocates IP addresses to any device you install it on and sign in with your tailnet. Think of it as a virtual meshed LAN that runs on top of your physical network.

Tailscale becomes your control plane and provides advanced access control options for all your users and devices.

You need to allow JavaScript in order to do it due to bot scraping.

So it’s only a VPN if you purchase the Mullvad addon?

And without the Mullvad option, it’s not really a VPN, but rather a way to get a different IP?

It used to be packaged with Overwolf, that was the dealbreaker for me back then.

The Mullvad integration allows you to use Mullvad as your VPN for internet browsing while still being on your tailnet.

So normally, running two different VPN services can cause a bunch of problems, if it even works at all. Tailscale’s Mullvad integration fixes that.

Tailscale by itself is an overlay network. It’s literally a second network that your computer is connected to, but instead of it being a physical network with wires, switches, and routers, it’s a virtual network, a network that runs as software.

So imagine your computer right now at home. You plug into your router, and you have a local IP address, something like 192.168.1.20 right? If you run ipconfig on Windows or ip a on Linux, you’ll see your network adaptors listed with what their current IP address is. So if you’re running Windows, you’ll see your physical network adaptor listed with the IP address of 192.168.1.20

When you install Tailscale on that computer and log into your account, then run that command again, you’ll see a new network device listed, and it will have a totally different IP address, like 100.89.113.14

That is your Tailnet IP address, it works just like your “normal” IP address, but instead of it being a physical Ethernet adaptor on your motherboard and plugged into your home router, it is a virtual adaptor (software) running on your computer, connected to the Tailscale network, which has servers all around the world.

When you install Tailscale on a new device, say an old computer that you are using as a Minecraft server. That computer will get a new IP address on your tailnet, say 100.94.65.132

Because both of those machines were added by you to your own Tailnet, they can see and talk to each other by default. Meaning you could run a ping command from your home computer to your Minecraft server’s Tailscale IP, and it will respond.

Because this runs on the internet through Tailscale’s servers, you can do this from anywhere. That’s the “VPN” type functionality you are talking about. No matter where your home computer is, you can still access your Minecraft server because it is on your Tailnet, just as if it were still plugged into your router right next to you.

This is how I access my entire home lab from anywhere in the world. For example, I have a Jellyfin media server (like Plex) that I have a bunch of movies, TV shows, anime on. It’s running Tailscale and is on my Tailnet. I have Tailscale installed on my Android smartphone too.

So if I am staying at a hotel in another state, or visiting my family on the other side of the country, and I want to watch a movie or show that I have on my server all the way back home. I just run the Tailscale app on my phone, then open the Jellyfin app and I see all my home media right there on my phone and can watch it flawlessly. Even though I am at my parent’s house, on a totally different internet connection, 500 miles away from my home.

Same for me.

The moment I can use Docker, I’m spinning it up with Tailscale and invite those who are ready to swap.

Fingers crossed it turns out as good as we hope!

I think Matrix is the most suitable alternative. For me at least. The Element web and desktop app is almost on level with discord and on matrix.org and other popular instances you get element call too.