Discord alternatives

Are there any good ones? I don't think I need to explain why discord is TERRIBLE from a privacy standpoint, but... there just doesn't seem to be any viable alternatives to it. There was keybase which was amazing, but then... they fuarrrking sold out to Zoom! A discord alternative should have: >The ability to create groups/communities with multiple sub communities for varying topics (this is where a lot of "discord alternatives" fail miserably) >The ability to post pictures/send files >They should NOT require you to use an email or phone number when signing up >Their servers (the actual, physical server storing the messages, not the groups/communities), must be open sourced, so if the owners turn tyrannical and start banning everyone and selling people's data, we can just switch to a non-official server, or create our own server After looking through what's out there, unfortunately, every "discord alternative" always has something that's a deal breaker >matrix/element The "federated" feature is a broken mess. Almost all the rooms are located on the default matrix.org server which causes it to constantly lag the fuarrrk out. The way they handle "rooms" and "communities" like separate entities is really fuarrrking weird, confusing, and inefficient. And, it's just missing a lot of features. You can't even delete rooms/communities you create! The best case scenario is deleting all the messages and getting everyone to quit! I don't think I need to explain the inability to delete rooms/communities is a HUGE privacy concern! >rocket.chat This one's a lot cleaner than matrix, but is lacking the ability to create groups with sub-chats, and the rocket.chat team has been doing some... weird things, such as pushing their payed services for server hosting and bots. I know you can just avoid those, but it still turns me off. >keybase This WAS my favorite alternative, but well, as you know, they sold out and were bought by Zoom... fuarrrkING ZOOM! The EXACT same company that just a few months ago was called out due to privacy concerns! Even Microsoft is more trustworthy than Zoom! >XMPP I don't know why this keeps getting recommended. It's just IRC but more finicky and less people know about it/use it. Not only is it missing the sub chats feature, but you can only have 5000 members per chat (some discord chats have over 60k members! So XMPP can't be a discord alternative! It's more of a whatsapp alternative if anything). >IRC This one's probably the most obvious one. It's been around forever, is bare bones, and can be configured to be private. The only problem is that, aside from missing the sub-chats feature, you can't post pictures or files, and those are things every discord alternative MUST have! >Signal, Telegram, Line, Whatsapp, ect. Basically, all of these phone apps that claim to be "private" and "E2E", but when you actually read the TOS, you realize that this is not only a lie, but the fact that is asks you for your phone number should already be a HUGE read flag! So, what do you guys think? What discord alternative do you guys recommend? Obviously, some of these are still being worked on, like matrix/element and rocketchat, so there is a possibility that some of the features I preach about might get added in the future, so it would just be a matter of choosing the right chat to support and having patience. But as it stands right now, which one would you recommend?

>>11977 >must support pictures/files >open source >no way to track/id users >handle 60k users I think I see your problem. Offering the latest features while scaling to 60k users doesn't come cheap in terms of engineering time. There's no way to monetize what you want. Only way to build it is with VC money. Of course Keybase sold out to some soykafty company. Every VC backed company eventually will. Kids these days. VC backed freemium services have spoiled you to expect everything for nothing, then get mad when it comes to an end. If you want an open source Discord that lives up to your standards, be prepared to build it yourself.

Your complaints are, on their own, valid, but put together it amounts to asking far too much while simultaneously expecting privacy. This isn't insurmountable, rather it just requires you to stop putting all your eggs in one basket. You're better off using a handful of different things for different purposes, rather than expecting a single convenient app to do it all for you flawlessly. If you're having issues with the matrix.org servers (I do too, but never enough to complain about it - life isn't a hurry!) then look into hosting your own. Signal's use of phone number and how they handle privacy isn't nearly as bad as you think, I think people immediately nope out when they see the phone number registration and refuse to hear them out. If you're in that boat then so be it, I don't particularly have any interest in convincing you when all of the info is available. Keybase, yes, don't use it. I don't trust Zoom either. As the above Lain said though, it's hard to blame them. You can only give so much before it's no longer sustainable, and hence why I started with the suggestion that you look intl self hosting. XMPP is not good for the specific point of a huge amount of people, because that isn't what it's for. My bike isn't good at being a bus either. But, I'm not gonna wait at a bus stop to get to my job up the road. In any case, my point here is that your issue is you're asking too much and offering to do too little work. Assuming you're genuinely engaging with a community of 60k people (which, let's be real, you aren't) then you simply are not going to communicate with them all at the same time in a private manner. What it sounds like you need is a handful of different alternative softwares serving different functions. If you have a large community based around a common interest or something, then you need some sort of reddit/twitter alternative. Because I don't care for these kinds of large online communities, I can't say much in terms of recommendations, but the Fediverse comes to mind. Maybe a Mastodon instance that's self-hosted and invite-only in which you and your 59999 other friends can share links, chat publicly, etc. When you want to talk to a specific person, or a group chat, then you switch over to something like Signal or XMPP. Hell, even just email with GnuPG. When you want to do a group call, maybe you'll meet up on (your server!) Matrix or rocket. Check the different categories on https://privacytools.io and note how they *are* in different categories. There's been a huge surge of these threads lately, I find. Some variant of "pls how to exit botnet conveniently and without compromise". I wish people would check the catalog more to see what's already up. In that vein, take a look at the threads already up for similar discussion. TL;DR - You're asking a lot. Reassess.

Communication platform? desutalk although I don't even know how it works. IRC is fine and I don't see any problem with it, also something I haven't used for a long time so I don't know about it now, maybe they migrated somewhere, even most software development projects use telegram these days. I think content/emoji support takes huge toll in bandwidth cost for the price of media "meme" posts. There's already platforms for that namely every popular web services out there (yt,reddit,discord,fb,tik). The only place I find as a good "social" and "content" environment is at least github. I find it very distasteful that the internet used to be all about content and discussions 10+ years ago, wherever you look now it's all just memes contributing nothing of worth, products/adspy, and a lot of "give me your mobile number" sites. >TOS Most are lies and they would comply to law enforcement anyways to avoid getting sued. Combining with the fact that the big tech now being the ruling class and they're easily the ones shaping the 'laws' in their favor currently. >E2E and no logs No logs is probably the most laughable thing you'll ever hear when the definition of "no" is actually deletion of logs in a disk that undergoes one pass write in its lifetime. E2E seems like they can just use "oops there was a bug" or deliberately let your data out in some incompetent way / another oops.

I heard of this one called Session https://getsession.org/ It's a fork of Signal that doesn't require a phone number. It honestly just seems way too good to be true. I haven't been able to find too much info about it or the people behind it so I don't know if I should trust it. What do you guys think?

>>11977 Jami is going to have multi-user conversations and chat bots one day. NAT and firewalls make it problematic sometimes due to its p2p architecture.

>>11990 to be honest i'll be happy when jami has a client that isn't electron app dogshit.

>>11992 >jami has a client that isn't electron app dogshit. It doesn't use electron. Clients are written in Qt or GTK and use webkit to render the chat view.

>>11994 Oh, my mistake. I still hate it though.

>>Signal >Basically, all of these phone apps that claim to be "private" and "E2E", but when you actually read the TOS, you realize that this is not only a lie, but the fact that is asks you for your phone number should already be a HUGE read flag! Do you have anything to back this up?

>>12007 not him. I don't think there is any debate on the encryption aspect of Signal, but Signal has definitely has its demerits. The whole Play Store vs F-Droid debacle, where Signal even forbids volunteers to maintain their app on F-Droid, is one example. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127 is the famed github issue, a bit awful to read. I think there has also been general hostility towards forks and other independent projects. Personally, not being able to use it on a desktop alone (I don't know if this has changed) without entering a phone numbers just makes me not want to even consider Signal.

Only way to get what you want is to piggyback off one of these bigger companies. Look at google and coreboot. We got a third party discord client called ripcord, sadly not open source but if you take something like it and implement E2E then a subset of discord users could benefit from their servers and feautures but with privacy. Maybe not perfect though but it would check something off your list

>>11977 Matrix was the most realistic alternative simply because there are people on it but you are already aware of its shortcomings. Personally I've decided to stick to IRC to chat about projects, and I hate politics so I avoid them. Other than that I have decided to waste as little time as possible on idle talk, including Lainchan, and it turns out that no chat client is the best client.

>>11977 Matrix is growing, and will get better, but people have to us it. Federated is a big deal. Centralized Services will never be good for privacy and always be single points of failure. Federated is a special type of decentralisation where later better networks can bridge.

>>12009 I think they said they're going to make phone numbers optional in the future. That "pin" thing they added recently is supposed to be the new way to verify users.

>>12014 This would absolutely NOT fly by under discord's radar. If such a thing happened, there would be law suits and ban waves up the ass. People already get derezzed off of discord for no reason, now they'd have a reason.

>>12007 >>12009 >>12030 Yeah moxie is a jackass and makes some retarded decisions (which he refuses to reconsider even when he faces significant legitimate criticism) but putting signal on par with telegram, whatsapp, etc. is disingenuous.

>some discord chats have over 60k members! So XMPP can't be a discord alternative! lmao i don't think even 1000 of those users actually use the discord lol

>>12041 I have no idea why would anyone want to be a in a chat with more than 100 users. After a certain amount they become unusable and there are always a bunch of attention seekers monopolising the conversation

What's up with young kids and their addiction to low-attention span chit-chatting? Literally every such technology since 80's has been aimed for people under 25: CB sim, IRC, early java webchats, ICQ, SMS, and so on. Adults use bulletin board/mailing list/forum format, it allows meaningful discussion to unravel in thread/tree structure, you can post images and attach various files on pretty much every modern forum apart from meme textboards written by cs undergrads. Of course, a default web forum doesn't have those cool modernist circled flat buttons, you can't have virtual sex with underage e-girls/traps or do "epic" raids in your grinding MMO over voice chat (you actually can if you install mumble, but apparently that's too much work for modern degenerates), and server, the hardware affordable to average person or virtual servers for rent, not chatrooms on some corp's supercomputer swarm in NSA's datacentre are not really suited for 60k people sending messages simultaneously, albeit such vanity feature is indeed not needed. I can't even imagine this number of people to be managed efficiently by a group of underage mods in a single linear chatroom that bases it's interface upon recency and not content. A human brain has capacity to recognize/know well around ~300 persons (imagine all the garbage stuffed inside us with all celebrity/politics spectacle), and best teamwork efficiency is achieved in groups under 15, above that number noise/signal ratio becomes too high, this is like an average international company personnel or a population of a town, and those require lots of work to communicate with each other efficiently, even lainchan has less unique posters than that, and there are 16 boards each with a hundred of threads in it, it requires a team of janitors and regular donations. Adults, not video game playing manchildren don't spend their lives glued to computer screen all day and they don't spend it playing games and participating in meaningless chit-chat with their buddies when they do spend this time at the computer. >boo-hoo give me X for free You basically want something with poster and feature count bigger than lainchan which by the way costs $55 per month in server rent only, that would be around $1000 in equivalent hardware purchase plus electricity bill, provided for you gratis and with no effort at all. Either do it yourself, split funds and maintenance duty with friends, or sell your ass (like discord kiddies) to a corporation for service they provide you for "free".

Zoom developers made poor product that became popular because of circumstances and marketing, they also made some money they could spend on improvements. They decide to acquire a product with better technical solutions to improve their own. Keybase doesn't become worse from acquisition by Zoom since their software is still free/open source. Same way Signal has not become worse because Facebook hired them to do some work on WhatsApp and Messenger.

>>11977 >>XMPP I don't know why this keeps getting recommended. It's just IRC but more finicky and less people know about it/use it. Not only is it missing the sub chats feature, but you can only have 5000 members per chat (some discord chats have over 60k members! So XMPP can't be a discord alternative! It's more of a whatsapp alternative if anything). Do you have any sources for the claim with the 5k users per chat? I can't find anything about this. Also XMPP is not just text messaging. It has extensions for voice chat, video chat, file sharing, etc. I've been using it for over ten years now and really like it.

>>12053 This, and anyways why would someone be in a room with 60k, the notifications soykaf will literally explode so you disable them then youre not going to get anything theyre talking about and miss every conversation, so it's fuarrrking useless imo

>>12045 I'm gen z and primarily uses mumble and irc. You just sound like an old tard who never had any internet friends and copes by telling yourself that image boards and forums are the mature mans discussion platform. Spoiler alert: you just typed out an essay on a board themed around a 14 year old anime girl, real high brow sites you engage in there, gramps.

>>12041 >>12042 That's not the point! The fact that the option to have huge chats with thousands of people isn't there automatically rules XMPP out from being a discord alternative.

>>12053 >Do you have any sources for the claim with the 5k users per chat? When you create a chat, and you go into the settings, there is a setting for "maximum number of users allowed" and the highest you can set it to is 5000. >>12055 In discord this isn't a problem because discord chats have multiple sub chats (or "channels"). So while a server may have 60k people signed up, there won't actually be 60k people talking on the exact same chat at the same time.

>The ability to create groups/communities with multiple sub communities for varying topics (this is where a lot of "discord alternatives" fail miserably) Somewhat valid. There are a couple of communities I participate in that run their own IRC server and use multiple channels for different topics, but it's not an immediately obvious use case for how IRC is typically presented to users. >The ability to post pictures/send files retard alert. This is a client feature, not a protocol feature. There are numerous IRC clients that have inline image previews and shortcuts for uploading to file hosting services, for example. >Their servers (the actual, physical server storing the messages, not the groups/communities), must be open sourced, so if the owners turn tyrannical and start banning everyone and selling people's data, we can just switch to a non-official server, or create our own server Expecting large organizations to run your communications platform is part of the problem. w/r/t to XMPP complaints, many-to-many mass communication is a different problem than personal groups or one on one. Discords 60ks are soykaf, anyways, and you have bad taste (not that this is a particularly useful response anyways)

>>11977 >Ctrl + F no tox Using qTox right now with some of my friends. Can be used to text chat/upload images/stream video. Enforces end-to-end encryption (with perfect forward secrecy). Doesn't hide your IP so be aware of that. https://tox.chat/about.html

>>12088 >When you create a chat, and you go into the settings Not him, but what do you mean? XMPP servers don't usually have "settings" per se. You just set the configuration in a file. Are you sure this isn't just a UI restriction in your client or something? For reference, here's the spec for XMPP multi user chat: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html It doesn't seem to define a maximum number of occupants. Granted, if all of the popular server implementations (prosody in particular) restrict the number of occupants than this would still be an issue. However, I haven't been able to find info on that either. >So while a server may have 60k people signed up, there won't actually be 60k people talking on the exact same chat at the same time. This is how XMPP (and IRC) work as well. The server has a list of chats/channels/rooms and not everyone who is connected to the server talks in the same one. The 4k user restriction (if such a restriction exists) is essentially just how many people are allowed in a given channel at one time. I think you might be mapping discord "servers" to xmpp chats, when really a discord "server" works more like the xmpp server itself. The difference is just that usually in XMPP anyone can create a chat whereas in discord only the "server" moderators can do that; essentially an XMPP server is like a big shared discord/matrix "server". All that being said, I will grant you that if you are using a public XMPP server rather than hosting your own, you don't have as much control as you would get from discord.

>>12107 any comfy group chats in tox?

>>11977 > IRC: The only problem is that, aside from missing the sub-chats feature As easy as "fellas, let's discuss this in #$(channel-name)-$(subgroup-name)". > you can't post pictures or files, and those are things every discord alternative MUST have Pardon, but I enjoy the absence of this. This only results in a soykafton of image meme macros to be posted without any use whatsoever. And if you need some files, IRC has XDCC or just use some short lived webhost-thingy. However, if you want something more "hip", roll with Matrix.

>>12110 > roll with matrix why not xmpp?

>>12111 why not GPG encrypted morse code smoke signals?

>>12111 Dunno to be honest. Last time I really used XMPP - round about five years ago - there were no trendy features like multiple threads. The usability of XMPP and IRC was way more similar as the one of IRC and Matrix. However, as stated above, I just like the IRC and maybe XMPP clients got better. Use whatever floats your boat. >>12112 At least a cheap ham radio, minimodem and GnuPG would work.

>>12107 Tox is more like a imessage alternative though. You can't make a chat and create an invite link for random people to enter it like on discord. >Doesn't hide your IP so be aware of that. Is there a way to use it with Tor?

>>12114 Pretty sure you can use it with Tor.

you can post files on IRC, you just can't view images without downloading them. If you're not messing with normal people, image macros aren't exactly a must.

>>12116 >you can post files on IRC No, you can only link files, or send them via DCC to another user. The files are not hosted on the IRC server in any way. I like IRC better than Discord or Matrix but this is incorrect.

>>12109 no

>>12117 Well I agree with the specifics, but isn't it good enough? What's is the point of hosting files on a communications' server? Linking to files is perfectly good enough, especially for virus spreading and stuff.

>>12119 I prefer text only with no memes clogging the page, but you cannot upload files in your IRC chatroom like on Discord, Matrix or Telegram, only link to external file hosting services. Whether or not that's preferable or irrelevant is not the point because lainon asked for a service that allowed it.

>>12109 Yes but they're not kind to new people you will most likely get the "zomg ur fbi!" deal if you try to join them.

>>12087 why does that even have to be an option?

>>12087 >>12142 Actually, why is it not an option for XMPP anyway?

>>12087 >huge chats with thousands of people I haven't been able to find anything in the XMPP MUC spec that sets a limit on the number of participants in a chat. I also haven't found anything in prosody's docs (although I didn't look very hard for the latter). The fact of the matter is that the number of people you can host in a chat depends on the infrastructure you are able to pay for. If you ran your XMPP server on a distributed network of thousands of hosts across the world, it too would be able to accept thousands of people per chat. Hell, some of the social media giants are literally doing this exact thing with XMPP behind the scenes to run their chats. It's primarily a money problem on the part of server owners, and secondly an implementation problem since most FOSS XMPP servers aren't designed to be run on distributed hardware (although if you really wanted to make it happen I'm sure there's a way to do it without writing too much code... and frankly if you could afford the network in the first place you could probably afford to hire a programmer to implement it for you). It's not a problem with the spec though.

>>12361 Actually, I don't even know for sure what the upper limit is on a prosody server running on a single host. It's seemingly a pretty efficient implementation. Most people just run it on a cheap VPS because most people don't have money but I'd imagine if you could afford to colo a high end server (or small cluster of servers) in a datacenter with plenty of bandwidth it should be possible to have thousands of users.

>>12117 >>12120 It would be trivial to run a file hosting service on your IRC-server and combine the two.

>>12361 That's actually why I asked >>12347 , I couldn't find any reason inherent to XMPP itself. Also for distributed XMPP there's this: https://github.com/processone/ejabberd

>>11977 depends, discord is a social media platform and those are only as good as their userbase sure you might have an amazing FOSS, secure client but it wont matter if nobody uses it technically there is stuff like riot but its stupidly laggy and nobody uses it even if you convince a server to move to it, good luck having it stay alive as most discord users use more than one server(speaking from experience)

>>11977 I wish I had an "alternative" where the actual environment is different. I don't even care about privacy anymore. It seems like no matter where you go it is nothing but >anime, porn and other free to consoom trash that all looks the same and is made to please the same person, it doesn't even matter what it is as long as you can consoom for free. >your worthless regurgitated listicle opinion on politics and world issues that nobody has the attention span to discuss articulately or read the data for, let alone the honesty, objectivity or rhetorics. >the hot job right now (programming) discussed on the same lazy surface level as sportsball, taking great care that absolutely nothing is created and no effort is made. and if you're on an "alternative" platform >insider trading and daydreaming about the platform's grand project to fix the problems that consoomers have brought to the internet (except it will sell out when it runs out of venture capital, if it doesn't disintegrate on its own when the trannoids invade and demand to be put in charge). THAT'S IT The entirety of human discourse in 2020: 3+1 entries in a list with a lot of overlap I'm so fuarrrking tired of the same 4 subjects day in day out, there are so many things I would like to talk about but people have become unresponsive to them. It's like talking to broken soykafty chatbots

>>12361 >I haven't been able to find anything in the XMPP MUC spec that sets a limit on the number of participants in a chat. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4149380/whats-the-best-open-protocol-for-chat-room-software > Contrasted with IRC, I've personally seen thousands of connections to a single instance, and the memory utilization is usually 60-70% less. also, XMPP not supported multicast.

>>12732 Does anything in that thread refute the thing you're quoting? I don't think anyone is arguing that XMPP uses less resources per user than IRC. The point was that the number of users you can support is a function of how much server you can afford, not a hard limitation of the spec or a particular implementation. XMPP servers can and do support thousands of users (I used to work at a company that did all of our internal chat over XMPP... for thousands of employees). It's just that a system like that is expensive. So if you have to support X users and you have $Y to spend per year on it, you just do the math and figure out if you can afford to host an XMPP server instead of an IRC server.

>>11979 Discord can't do it, either. Everything on their webshit is broken every other time you look at it the wrong way.

Followup: Reading OP's tone of voice gave me cancer. Wish me luck.

>>12739 > tone of voice You can hear text?