We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?... because that's who I am going to have to convince
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it's really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It's decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own "server" on there.
You don't have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.
i haven't seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.
Pripietary...
It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. "Rooms" (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, b
I don't think that's true anymore. it has been encrypted by default for quite a few years now
Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, that's why it's in the position it's in today, yet it gets ranked lower than... Rocket chat??
If we're objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It's not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year
I don't really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing... Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can't even tell the difference.
looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing... Or am I just in the minority here?
I'll keep you company in the minority, since that's what I want too
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.
Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.
I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.
Although there is some kind of fun with "real time chatting" on a forum. Back then, It kind of became that way when it got heated. It's like a turn based game where all the players take their moves and execute at the same time lol
Agreed. I think the fact that discord kind of does all the things is what made it attractive. But it’s not GOOD at the forum aspect, and it has its flaws for the other use cases as well.
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i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.
My friend group also jumped to that first, unless it's federated though it's not going to be "like discord" enough in the long run.
Part of what makes discord so good to many is that it's one app where you can connect to various different friend groups/modding groups/artists/etc...
Matrix does allow that with its federation model, ts6 does not 🤷
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he's going to include Discourse..)
Why is SimpleX not mentioned anywhere in the article or the comments here? I thought it is similar to Discord. Am I wrong?
Some other alternatives not reviewed:
- Spacebar
- TeamSpeak
- Root
Spacebar sounded really promising when I checked them out years ago.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are: Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
Unfortunately, seems like it’s still not at a point where it could cover basic Discord functionality.
Edit: I should be clear, I’m not trying to discourage it. I really hope it succeeds to the goal of parity with Discord! Love to hear from someone who has used it a bit.
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It seems there's also Spacebar.
I don't know if anyone else has had this issue but I tried multiple times to sign up for spacebar/Fermi and it just didn't go through. Do they block VPN's for signups or certain privacy browsers?
I've not had an issue with signing up for any other FOSS sites with my setup. Just curious if anyone else was having this issue
No, he hasn't been running a discord server. It's a channel. Discord is running the servers.
God, I hated that terminology when I needed to talk with people about discord.
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The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
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If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.
I can't even create an account on Stoat yet. New account confirmation emails take hours to arrive and by the time they do, they are already expired.
This is not a discord alternative yet and not be for a long time most likely.
Apparently that's already in the backend since december, they're just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it
If they enable that and iron out the iOS app, it'd be a surefire migration for my whole crew.
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