Good thing there isn't a filter for "has working voice channels that aren't a hot mess", the list would be immediately and fully empty. With the exception of Mumble perhaps, but that one instead doesn't have any text channels or community features.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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TeamSpeak is unfortunately missing.
But anyways, I don’t like any of those solutions. That means, I will come up with my own.
Okay, I admit it. I don’t have friends.
You can be my friend
None that I can't text, call, or email for sure.
And if all your friends are hyper focused on tech and decentralization and open source software, they should have no problem switching!
If, on the other hand, you have friends who fall into the rest of the 99.9% of society, they will react like you suggested they replace all their meals with raw potatoes.
It’s a pretty steep hill for most people to make a full on switch like this. I have, for the past year or so just begun suggesting that people download the app (element for example) when the topic of evil tech companies comes up. At least that’s a first step. Then when such a topic comes up next time I ask if they tried it out etc. My hope has been that they would at least know one alternative when stuff like the recent Discord ID thing is happening
I'm moving and my friends can either come along or be left behind.
0.1% is generous. It's much smaller.
True, most normies probably don't even see any issue with Discord's ID. They'll just do it when it pops on their screen, and move on with their lives.
How did they get to discord in the first place then?
Because, shockingly, Discords user base is not made up of people hyper focused on tech and decentralization and open source software. It's mostly people who just want to play video games with their friends.
Sure but it's not intuitive, it's a pain in the ass, yet there they are. They learned something new at one time, moving away from whatever they had before, why can't they again?
But the entry barrier is very low. Click on a link, enter a nickname and start chatting. It literally could not be any easier.
This is different for all of the alternatives.
Except when it isn't. Like the confusion of a name, claim a name, channels, requirements to meet some bullshit before you can speak, and chat in which area and all the while it looks really awful.
I did basically the same thing with someone today, I sent them a link they clicked and we started chatting with Jitsi.
Realistically the issue is creating the place to go, not the service itself. That is the more difficult part.
If everyone else moved, they would too. But no one will, so they won't. Same as it ever was.
Yes, just like how they got there in the first place.
I’m in the process of getting this going in my lab. I appreciate these efforts to find alternatives.
That being said, can I get some opinions so I can pare down the list?
Would be great to have E2EE and audio. Video bonus. I don’t think I’ve got much in the way of preferences beyond that.
My latest leaning is hosting the Matrix protocol.
Also the only friends I have that would be willing to move off the easy corporate software are tech literate, so I have the option to distribute VPN confs and the like. Has anyone hosted chat over their own VPN, or does that just become a mess because STUN/TURN needs to be “free”?
(Sorry I’m still learning a lot here)
TURN server doesn't need to be free, you just need everyone to be able to access it.
The product I work on in my 9to5 would be perfect for your use case from the technical side of things but sadly the commercial side is a completely different story that makes it not even worth recommending.
I quite like Nextcloud with Talk (spreed), but it's a whole cloud suite. Nextcloud is E2EE, and NC Talk does text, voice, and video. The phone apps are nice too. The only problem is connecting more than 2-3 people in a voice/video call can be a bit much, so they recommend a high-performance backend (either a paid service, or annoying to set up yourself). It might be overkill if you don't also use Nextcloud's other applications, but I use a lot of them extensively, especially when feeding CalDav calendars etc into Home Assistant. Friends making an account on your nextcloud is pretty trivial, even for people who aren't technical. I use the VM hooked to dedyn io for outside access, and it was all very easy to set up. I've had it running for about 6 years now, and only had a problem updating for a while, but it was resolved by the community forums.
snikket is pretty slick. omemo is worrisome though
OMEMO is better than nothing. Much better than OTR or PGP (looking at you DeltaChat), and the biggest problem seems to be the metadata and old versions used in some clients. The encryption (of message contents) at the very least is decent.
OMEMO is better than Matrix's encryption, which the later doesnt offer proper forward secrecy and breaks all the time leaving messages inaccessible.
oh that makes me excited! i was worried my bugging the fam may have been a waste, or not as useful as id hoped
It still isnt great. Better than DeltaChat/Matrix but decently worse than Signal's security.
oh that takes away that excitement that was previously restored
Lol
If you want to go super de-centralised. Just remove the internet and go for a mesh network :P
Honesty we should return to smoke signals
Although I have to admit meshNYC looks pretty cool
Im confused by this list. It includes the matrix server implementations synapse and continuwuity, but not matrix itself or any of its clients. The only matrix client that could reasonably replace discord is element but its not even there.
The whole website and list is dedicated for self hosting solutions. Unless it's peer to peer, any client apps aren't really the self host-able part, so it only makes sense to include the server side of the software.
I think you’re just confused about how Matrix works.
Synapse is Matrix itself. It is the reference home server implementation.
Matrix itself isn't a thing, Matrix is a spec/protocol. Synapse and continuwuity are implementations of the server, with synapse being the "reference implementation." Client apps like Element (the reference client) would be good to have there, but I'm not sure selfh.st will want to list clients because there is quite a few.
Synapse is the backend that you install on the server. Element is the client that connect to your backend. Now Matrix has many backends and many clients. Synapse + Element is probably the best fully-featured combo that we have, but also the most complicated.
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Short list. Do I need a plug-in that isn't mentioned because UX is dead?
