this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026

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312

Question: Is there a Self Hosted Discord like app? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 4 days ago by Vaggumon@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

170 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Pretty much what it says on the tin, but for more context. My friends and I use Discord to play D&D and other TTRPGs. We also use it to send memes and just have conversations. We mostly do the chat, text, images, gifs, etc. But we also use the voice and video chat pretty regularly too. Screen share sometimes as well. So I'd like to try to find something that has all those features if possible.

The new ID or facial recognition requirement they are implementing is a deal breaker for a few of us, and so if I can set up some kind of alternative to make it a non-issue, I'd like to.

I'm running Ubunutu 22.04 LETS, AMD 3700X, 64GBRAM, 10x 6TB HDD, and and 2 4TB NVmE. Have a 2gb up/down internet connection. So I don't think we should have any issues making it work smoothly for 7 people.

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[–] TerHu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I‘ve been looking into this a bit and whilst i haven’t really tried any of the alternatives, i did collect some notes:

possible contenders

zulip
- apache-2.0 self hosted more work focussed
stoatchat (formerly revolt)
- AGPL-3 self hosted
teamspeak
- proprietary ... self hosted older ts3 with ts6 announced
mumble
- license seems foss - self hosted
spacebar
- AGPL-3 self hosted
return to irc or xmpp

probably no

matrix - could not decryptinator
- a hassle regarding voice
peersuite
- very very young and not really ready
- https://lemmy.dbzer0/post/45470657

DO NOT

mattermost
- play stupid games, win stupid prices
guilded
- owned by roblox
slack
discord
ventrilo
- proprietary - not selfhosted - no linux

please let me know what y’all think

[–] dude@lemmings.world 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Most of the possible contenders lack video calls and some also other needs mentioned by the OP. Nextcloud Talk has them all

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[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 16 points 3 days ago

https://github.com/spacebarchat/spacebarchat

Literally reverse engineered discord, made open source.

[–] greyscale@lemmy.sdf.org 120 points 4 days ago (5 children)

The main issue is you'll never get the cretins that use it off it. Communities.. they're just sitting there burning the library of alexandria.. all the esoteric knowledge they're "putting on discord" is just gonna vanish.

over a billion in vc funding and discord is as shit as it is.

[–] xvertigox@lemmy.world 57 points 4 days ago (2 children)

As an archivist and data hoarder I hate discord with a burning, visceral passion.

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[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's funny you mention the VC funding. As far as I can tell, it's only made it worse. Discord would have done great if they just kept expectations low. Instead, they're now expected to create massive returns. That must come at the cost of consumers. I hope consumers get tired of it and leave, or someone else comes offering the simple service Discord used to provide.

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[–] SystemL@literature.cafe 20 points 3 days ago

Surprised no one has said it yet, but matrix.

[–] Actionschnils@feddit.org 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

We switched to element (matrix-protocol) a while ago. Until now it worked fine for us - without any real problems. It already got a native voice/video-call implementation. But i heard that selfhosting isnt that smooth

https://element.io/de

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. WebRTC (like voice/video calling) tends to throw a fit without some sort of TURN functionality. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.

Edit: I looked it up. Cloudflare offers TURN servers, with the first 1000GB for free each month, but then it charges for use after that. But that does mean a server that gets used for video calls more than a few hours per month could end up incurring costs. Because that TURN server would be handling all of the video streaming data, so it will quickly eat that 1000GB limit. It also means true self-hosting is prohibitively difficult, as you’d be tying yourself to an external provider unless you go out of your way to host your own TURN server.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Why federate if you’re just expecting a small group of friends to use it?

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[–] BenderRodriguez@lemmy.world 64 points 4 days ago (3 children)

element.io uses Matrix. It's not bad.

[–] icosahedron@ttrpg.network 20 points 4 days ago (4 children)

yes i second matrix. it's different from discord in a lot of ways, but it's still a pretty seamless transition. for anyone who wants to host matrix, i recommend the continuwuity homeserver software. it's much easier to host than synapse and is significantly faster for 99% of use cases

if you're just trying use matrix, i prefer cinny over element for the client. cinny's ui is also very similar to discord's and it handles space/room grouping very intuitively. there's also fluffychat (less feature rich) and schildichat (element fork), among others. however, element is currently the only client which fully supports voice chat

for instances, i recommend choosing something other than matrix.org. right now, matrix is barely decentralized because the vast majority of users choose matrix.org, which isn't great. also matrix.org collects a lot of data and requires more information to register than most servers. some other good public instances are:

tchncs.de
unredacted.org
catgirl.cloud
calitabby.net

there are also many, many smaller public instances, but it's probably better to choose a relatively big one for moderation reasons. a lot of people think matrix is dead or no one uses it, but there are plenty of active communities if you know where to look

for your friends who refuse to quit discord for some reason, matrix's ecosystem also has lots of bridges. if you're willing to self host, i recommend out of your element. the only caveat is that it doesn't support e2ee rooms

[–] BruisedMoose@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

My project for the week is getting Matrix and Continuwuity set up. Half-hearted initial attempts have been unsuccessful with the Continuwuity container just in constant restarts.

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 23 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Can confirm, I host Matrix (homeserver synapse) and Element. Voice is a pain to get set up but I hear there are other matrix services which will do this for you easier. It's a process though. You can get text chat up in a day, voice is going to be a bit after that, a lot of tinkering.

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[–] ollie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 4 days ago (6 children)

matrix is unreasonably hard to set-up, why doesnt the docker container or the compose include voice chat? i cant even sign up for stoat to try it out.. is this the best we have against discord in the big 26 😭

[–] carrylex@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago

Voice chat works out of the box with Matrix.

It uses WebRTC and tries to do P2P connections. Note that this leaks your IP to the other caller and vice versa, but it's also quite fast as you can establish a direct connection.

If P2P fails it will try to fallback to your configured TURN server and use that one for relaying.

However not every instance has one (as TURN servers are usually not that modern and straight forward...) and if this is the case it will fallback to Matrix's global TURN servers.

[–] aksdb@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago

XMPP is also still a thing and IMO much easier to host (at least ejabberd is). Look into Movim, which looks quite nice as a discord replacement on top of XMPP.

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[–] SchwertImStein@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 days ago

https://stoat.chat/

[–] quaff@lemmy.ca 35 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (7 children)

Check out https://stoat.chat/, it's the closest self hostable group communications platform to Discord.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 38 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Just a fair warning in reply to this that the self-hosted version of Stoat doesn't currently have voice chat. It's an open issue that's currently paused until they can finish their rework.

If you have the skill for it, it seems like you can patch work the existing voice chat back in, but it's not part of their initial setup and there's no instructions on how to do so properly

[–] verdigris@lemmy.ml 21 points 4 days ago

Well that seems like a fairly big deal.

[–] quaff@lemmy.ca 17 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Link to their voice chat implementatoon.

Looks like you can enable it on self hosted version. Probably worth someone trying it out personally. Before giving up on stoat.

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[–] hesh@quokk.au 20 points 4 days ago (8 children)

Honestly the name choice adds difficulty in getting friends to take it seriously. Why did they pick "stoat"

[–] Tetsuo@jlai.lu 33 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Nowadays everyone accepted the name "Discord" but I think it's a pretty poor choice of branding too.

A communication app called Discord is pretty weird too.

A stoat is a pretty cool animal.

I think without prior knowledge of any voice chat Discord would probably rate worse in perception than Stoat.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Nowadays everyone accepted the name “Discord” but I think it’s a pretty poor choice of branding too.

A terrible name for an app meant to facilitate communication. Always baffled me. But the name is so widely recognized that nobody thinks twice about it.

I always thought Noosphere would make a cool name for a Discord replacement, especially if it incorporates a way to permanently catalog the knowledge accrued by the community, say as a built-in wiki. That might actually make it viable as a support platform.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 17 points 4 days ago (14 children)

you mean unlike the tools discord has replaced, such as "mumble", "ventrilo", "roger wilco" and "trillian"?

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[–] quaff@lemmy.ca 16 points 4 days ago (2 children)

No clue! It was revolt before. I think they had trademark issues with that name. What's wrong with stoat?

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[–] quantumcheap@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Self hosting a Matrix server was daunting when I first looked into it, so concerns over it being difficult to deploy are pretty founded. But that changed when I discovered this repo. This makes quick work of getting one spun up, but the true gem of this is their documentation. They've probably got the best documentation I've ever read that explains the "why's" and not just the "how's".

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 9 points 3 days ago

Something that wasn't posted here yet but I just got told about: https://fluxer.app/

A chat platform that answers to you, not investors. It's ad-free, open source, community-funded, and never sells your data or nags you with upgrade pop-ups.

Over time, we'd love to explore optional monetisation tools that help creators and communities earn, with a small, transparent fee that keeps the app sustainable.

[–] blueworld@piefed.world 32 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (7 children)

There another thread about discord requiring a face scan next month,so I think alternatives might start getting pushed.

Such as https://stoat.chat/

Edit: Not sure you can self-host it, but it does have a back end server listed in it's source code with a docker, however it might just be for code testing.

Right RTFM... https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted yes you can self-hosted it.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 20 points 4 days ago (1 children)

To create an invite you:

# drop into mongo shell
docker compose exec database mongosh

# create the invite
use revolt
db.invites.insertOne({ _id: "enter_an_invite_code_here" })

That's pretty jank.

Also - I'm getting pretty fed-up with self-hosting documentation that assumes very specific environments and goes into detailed configuration for that environment. Don't tell me how to setup a server and how to enable/configure SSH and setup UFW as part of setting up your software. Just tell me how to setup your software and what ports it uses.

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[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 30 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

Back in my day, (shakes cane), Teamspeak and Ventrillo were the big voice chat platforms/tools. Both have text chat and channels/rooms; but their focus is voice chat for gaming.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Ventrillo.

Dammit, son, makin' me feel old now

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Roger Wilco

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[–] ati@piefed.social 11 points 4 days ago

What's that you say? IRC?

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[–] carrylex@lemmy.world 22 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Matrix hoster here.

I would recommend Matrix as it has pretty much everything, including cross platform clients, threads, voice/video calls, screensharing, spaces (aka servers), federation and E2EE. Matrix also has bridges for Discord and pretty much every other service so this could ease transition...

But self hosting requires reading the docs and having some in depth knowledge and understanding as it can be quite complex.

I would recommend just creating a Matrix account on one of the common global servers and testing it.

If you want to self-host there are some pre-defined setups available (example) but I would still recommend to bring at least 5-10 hours.

Regarding operations: It's really resilient and barely ever breaks and also doesn't need a lot of resources. A 1-2vCPU server with under 1GB RAM server is enough for less than 10 people.

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[–] helios@social.ggbox.fr 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

My guess is that it would be difficult to find a piece of software that does all the stuff discord does. But I also think it's a non-issue. You could split these needs onto multiple solutions. My group uses mumble for gaming voicechat, Signal for group conversations, and a simple rtmp server for streaming. We don't need nor use discord and never did.

I like the idea of a single piece of software that does one job well instead of a giant powerhouse that does everything.

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[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 23 points 4 days ago (1 children)

TeamSpeek or Mumble.

Both have excellent voice chat.

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[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 22 points 4 days ago

Matrix?

[–] Wawe@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

I replaced Discord(and Whatsapp) with Matrix/Element as voice chat (and general chat) with my wife. I remember running it with Docker was bit annoying to set up (I was selfhosting beginner when first doing it now it could be easier), but with Yunohost it is one click install (if you are willing with swap operating server).

Nextcloud Talk could work for your needs, but I have not personally used it so hard to recommend it.

[–] Novocirab@feddit.org 15 points 4 days ago (8 children)

The Mastodon founder, Eugen Rochko, has just announced that "We’ve moved our internal communications from Discord to Zulip at Mastodon".

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/116041405748460511

Zulip is probably more focused toward work than TTRPGs, but it can't hurt to try it. (I haven't tried it personally, yet.) It is self-hostable.

https://zulip.com/

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[–] pedz@lemmy.ca 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I still use IRC. There are now modern web clients like The Lounge or Convos that can display/share images in the channels, keep history and push notifications. Apparently Convos can do video chat but I never tried it. Unfortunately I'm not aware of screen sharing features for any of these.

So on a very simple setup, you need an IRC server, then install and connect one of those clients to your server, and use them through a web browser, either on a computer or on a phone.

It's obviously not entirely Discord-like, but it is a simple way to chat and share images.

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

IRC, RocketChat, Slack. Technically Matrix, but for your usecase I wouldn't recommend it, as it's a bit heavy, and if you're just planning on using it with other people on the same server there's not a point.

EDIT: Just noticed the voice chat thing. I've used Jitsi for that, and it works well. Also self-hostable

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[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 4 days ago (5 children)

XMPP aka Jabber.

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[–] cosmicrose@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 4 days ago (7 children)

Matrix is an option but it’s slow and breaks all the time. I’m a big fan of XMPP myself but good luck convincing anyone else to make an account 😔

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[–] sol6_vi@lemmy.makearmy.io 2 points 3 days ago

I'm hosting a matrix server it was rough but not impossible. Using conduit as the backend. Now that the setup is finally done it was so worth it. I would do it again if needed. Coturn was easy to set up along side it.

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