this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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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.

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[–] aeronmelon@lemmy.world 117 points 1 month ago (11 children)

Seeing Teamspeak outlive Discord just keeps making me laugh.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 58 points 1 month ago

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

[–] iamthetot@piefed.ca 42 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"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.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Even if the age verification wasn't a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually. So it's not going anywhere for now, but I'm pretty sure the investors will want their money back sooner or later.

[–] xvertigox@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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 : (

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[–] Svinhufvud@sopuli.xyz 33 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 month ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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?

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago

Mumble isn't requiring you to submit your ID.

[–] Svinhufvud@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 month ago

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).

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[–] kieron115@startrek.website 31 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Because people prefer convenience to privacy and accessibility, I guess? If there was an easy way to scrape/crawl discord data I would be hoarding everything I could to repost on lemmy or something but AFAIK there are no easily automated ways to access it.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] aquovie@lemmy.cafe 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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
[–] gdog05@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] other_cat@piefed.zip 7 points 1 month ago

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

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[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

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.

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[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago (12 children)

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.

[–] nfreak@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] ComradePenguin@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I am so pissed that Element or any other Matrix app does not support push to talk OR a minimum noise gate. If it did it would clearly get tons of new users, it would be pretty much no question which plattform to replace discord with

[–] littleomid@feddit.org 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] zoe@piefed.social 11 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

Fewer Letters More Letters
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
IP Internet Protocol
NAS Network-Attached Storage
Plex Brand of media server package
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPN Virtual Private Network
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

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

[–] dudesss@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I like the alternatives, but they mean nothing without being federated.

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dudesss@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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 to -- but 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 and getting help.

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Got a link that's not YouTube?

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] msokiovt@feddit.online 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

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[–] MrTolkinghoen@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hmmmm voice chat eh?

Well then it's time to recommend Mumble!

[–] aksdb@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[–] loppy@fedia.io 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger is an XMPP client 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.

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