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.
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.
Matrix
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.
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
