Fediverse

Isn't that Matrix?

ActivityPub wouldn't work because it's not a messaging protocol. It's a publishing protocol. The closest thing you have is Lemmy- where you have a server (instance) with channels (communities).

It'll be easier to achieve something like this using SMTP (email protocol) than with ActivityPub.

Matrix and XMPP are your best bets (although XMPP doesn't necessarily natively have video call, usually you'll have an accompanying TURN server)

What you can do with email, xmpp and the fediverse is have the same username. It is possible for someone to make a platform which gives you one name and it accepts email, xmpp and fedi. Unfortunately, Matrix, for some strange reason uses the format of @name:server instead of the standard name@server (activitypub might use @name@server but that's close enough and a lot of lemmy frontends don't even care for the initial @. In reality that initial @ is probably just being used to ping them, now realising.)

What about Matrix and XMPP?

Just fyi there is matrix which is federated but it doesn't use activity pub protocol and it's not directly a drop in replacement discord. Voice/ video/ screen sharing aren't quite on the same level as discord.

too overwhelming in UI/UX for majority of people coming from Discord

Uhhh, Discord's user experience is one of the most chaotic fever dreams I've ever come across, and is a large part of what makes me want to get away from it (among many other reasons).

One of the really frustrating things about Discord is that people are using it for things that it's not good for. Like documentation, or really anything where a new reader is looking to find a persistent source of information. Chat should be good at chat, and wikis should be easily accessible on the open web - not in an obscure digital group that has to be joined to be seen.

It's like when people start a business and then use facebook as their "site." No that is not a site, and you know what, I don't want to shop there anymore either. Same energy.

Discord has both private and public channels. I won't bother considering their threaded discussion offerings, because they're absolutely horrendous.

ActivityPub is primarily public. You have scoped visibility that enables things like private messaging, but there is no implementation that allows for federated private group discussions.

There are proposals and a few implementations, but they all rely on everybody else to implement the same proposal, otherwise messages leak out, and that defeats the entire assumption of the private group.

It's not an unsolvable problem, merely one that hasn't been successfully solved yet.

As for whether AP is a good fit... It'll work. At the end of the day you're exchanging messages. Whether they're long form or chat messages makes little difference.

If i understand correctly, Discord is a chat application for private and group chats. There is Matrix chat that works reasonably well as a replacement.

It's decentralized, open source software, and i've used and tested it for at least a year now. It works well enough. It does not use the ActivityPub protocol though.

Mind that Matrix chat tends to private/group chats, which means they're not typically visible to everyone else. Which means it would make little sense to try to embed them into the rest of the fediverse, which is openly accessible.

It's totally possible to make a true 1-1 competitor to Discord but no one has done it yet.

Nextcloud Talk is probably the closest thing with federation. But Nextcloud is notoriously complicated to host. And for some reason super unpopular outside of Europe.

Stoat (formerly Revolt) is very close, both in functionality and UI. But is not federated (and has no plans to) and for some reason not very popular. Also doesn't come with the wealth of configuration and moderation tools that Discord does.

Matrix works but it's super slow, bug-ridden, and complicated to use.

Zulip is similar but I've used it fairly extensively and still have no idea WTF is happening. Also not federated.

Of course there's always IRC and whatever other ancient comms tools that still work fine but are very dated and lack functionality.

Discord? UUUUGGHHHHH. For chat, XMPP already exists.

But overall, one of the issues of "why does an alternative to XYZ not exist?" is that usually, when we talk about those corporate jails, XYZ does too much for anyone to up and create a 1:1 alternative. This is valid both in and out the Fediverse. Discord is currently a chat platform, a video platform, a streaming platform, a documentation platform (ugggh), an issue tracker (UUUGHHH), an FBI / ICE honeypot, and a picture gallery.

For unreasonable people (the majority of the internet as it would seem), even lacking one of those features is somehow a "deal breaker", when it actually makes perfect sense in terms of maintainability and independence to design and work up an alternative to characteristics such as chat or videos individually, rather than to platforms. Text chat? IRC / XMPP. Video calls? Jitsi. Picture gallery? phpgallery. Documentation? Wikis. Issue tracker? Forgejo / Chiselapp. ICE? Get Kirk'd.

So for people who create solutions for their own scale and usually without a profit or a means to operationally maintain the project, they are at a severe disadvantage that people won't put up the effort to even learn there is an alternative. I'm guessing partly it's because YT, TikTok and ChatGPT have turned people's attention span to brainrot to such a degree they can't follow a simple instruction pamphlet with pictures.

Is Discord social media? Social sure, but not media really.
It always seemed to be more a live communication/chat app to me.

I've barely ever used Discord, I'm not entirely sure I understand how it works, because individuals host their own servers? "Join my Discord server." So, Discord as a business provides software and...user account brokerage? In terms of functionality, it does basically what an IM client/forum engine and Ventrilo did?

There's actually shoot.