A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I like xmpp, but it is not a discord alternative. It is a WhatsApp / Signal / iMessage alternative.
It doesn't have 80% of discord features, I use discord a lot and I don't have a single group chat.
Matrix / Element is a way better alternative feature wise.
The main complaints about Matrix I've heard though are about behind the scenes stuff rather than features, which the video touches on:
But there are some reasons why I think XMPP is superior. In Matrix, when you join a room, your server downloads and stores the entire history of that room. If someone on a federated server posts illegal content in a room you're in, your server is now hosting it, and you are liable. Whereas in XMPP, messages are relayed in real time. Group chat, MU history stays on your server hosting that room. So your server only stores messages for your users which means that no content caching there is no content caching from other servers. This is a fundamental architectural difference which makes the XMPP protocol better in my opinion.
Personally I don't know that much about it but I briefly looked into what it would take to write a client for Matrix a few years ago and it seemed pretty daunting to work with. Maybe it would be possible to write software that implements more Discord features on top of XMPP to have something that works more smoothly.
Funny enough there is a layer for discord like stuff adding into https://movim.eu/ which relies on the backed of an XMPP server.
i quite liked element as a replacement for whatsapp and discord when i got a few people to switch. just had too much stability issues at the time and they went back. will never get them to switch again...even with ads and age verification crap going on.
Element is still as buggy as ever, unfortunately…
The only realistic alternative I've found so far is Fluxer, and that one is still in Beta. Very promising though.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| TCP | Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP |
| UDP | User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications |
| XMPP | Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #120 for this comm, first seen 26th Feb 2026, 20:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Great bot
I want something that works like Discord for my gaming group (~120 people) and is self-hostable with a single „docker-compose up -d“.
But I started looking regularly for alternatives, and we will get there :)
It's not quite as simple as a single docker compose, but the Element Server Suite for hosting a matrix home server (synapse) was fairly simple to get working.
I'm already self-hosting a XMPP and a Matrix server, just in case. A shame that most of the group chats I've found there are about free software, assorted geekery, but not much of what I'd usually find on Discord - hopefully that changes in a few years.
Plant the first seed and create those groups.
Fair that! Only problem is, I don't have any acquaintances, but if I ever fix that, then maybe we can work on that.
This is always the problem. Internet folk are normal now, they dont have tech skills. In ye olden time we were used to irc and mumble and had no problem switching to other clients if needed. Now people freak out that they need to make a new account somewhere else to leave discord and good luck explaining something like Matrix to them!
I'll join.
What's Lemmy's opinion on Fluxer?
I love it and use it daily. Once it becomes stable, gets a docker container and documents the self-hosting flow, it will rule the universe.
What I've seen makes me bet I could be dragging iso27002 out and marking all the rules it breaks. ..and the devs won't know what that means.
They're extremely new and open about what's missing though. Their plans apparently got somewhat thrown all over the place by the sudden extreme interest and quite a few things aren't yet in place (such as the self-hosting guide). Still works surprisingly well, and what they do goes into the right direction (no VC funding or investors, removal of the CLA, bound to GDPR, a full FOSS atack, etc).
I've seen this posted several times and this is the second time I've tried to access their self-hosting docs and get a 404. Where's everyone going for installation instructions?
Googling I got their docs and a github for running through docker, the docs which are empty, and the docker that has the help of claude code.
I try to not poo poo folks working on projects too much, but like why am I here over XMPP or Matrix?
That github looks like a fork of the original code. I never heard of fluxer so I can't really trust it since I've only ever heard people gathering opinions rather than reviews, a fork even less so. So for my honest opinion, it's a no for me since it seems like a very round about way to onboard anyone who wants to self-host.
Since we're here, I've tried giving stoat.chat a go and got it semi-working but the way they have the project set up, there's a lot of optional "bloat" that gets tacked on from the build.
What I had success with, was Continuwuity. Their docs were so good, I was not only able to set up chat but also new and legacy voice and video under 4 hours.
Yeah that is yucky, seems like self hosting hasn't really been at the forefront of intention for the project. From the looks of it, them being in Sweden it might have started as a "buy EU" sort of discord clone that was pulled into the death of discord conversation with the ID stuff.
Interesting times 🫠
Curious your thoughts on stoat, that came out of revolt correct? What sorts of bloat did you find?
4 is definitely a good benchmark for self hosting! lol Have you run Synapse, and how did that compare?
Sorry for the later reply, was working (oops, not really). From what I read, Stoat is just a rename of Revolt and the platform should really remain the same (when I had this up, some of the UI still read Revolt).
For the bloat, as a self-hoster (speaking for myself and not on the behalf of anyone else), you should try to be provided with the most direct solution to a specific issue. When looking at Stoat, and the output of the generate_config.sh, they basically shove down a whole lot of solution at one time. There's from what I can tell, 15 different configurations for containers, over half of them are static versions and who knows how they all intermingle between the configs (Jesus, that's a lot of config files). This produces a monstrous web of configuration that I really have no time to digest and get working for something I'm just 'playing around with'. All this and I didn't even attempt to integrate voice and video. Also (as a nitpick) requires you to spin up caddy but has a config to point to that to a different reverse-proxy if needed (I already had nginx proxy manager and got this working but the whole thing fails if you don't spin up caddy. insert sad horse noises).
This is where Continuwuity comes in, I have 4 containers that I have bespoke configured myself by reading the configs and 2 config files that I hand made based off the docs. I feel WAYYYY better at hosting this than Stoat. Even got the wife to help test the video and voice and it works great with Element. From start to end, took me 4-ish hours to be done.
I have hosted Synapse before and got it up and running but not with voice and video. IMO, it's a little bloaty as well (not nearly as bad as Stoat) but it's doable. Never attempted voice and video for this but again, Continuwuity is just much more straightforward and less overhead.
No worries, thank you for the detailed reply!
Sounds like a solid way to do it, and a support the uwuification of all software, so that's an extra bonus! Might have to futz around with it and see what sort of mess I can get myself into.
Because the people make the platform, and not the functions, and for lots of people you need a lower entry barrier, and the entry barrier for both of those is a good bit higher than fluxer.
Don't get me wrong, if matrix was a bit more convenient (easier to understand and to use like you would discord, and less bugs of which there are still a wide range of), I'd 100% advocate for it. But I can only tell my friends to use something if it's convenient enough that they will genuinely avoid a degraded experience.
That's valid, and I think I was coming off a bit of frustration from the previous comment I made in this chain. There are so many new apps that all try and build the features of discord, but always seem to base in closed protocols and so rarely use protocols that already exist, and with that add to the "15 competing standards" problem. Which is why I get much more excited by projects like Movim.
With all of that though, while I agree element has hiccups, XMPP has been around forever and is solid. We saw this with twitter migration too, the existence of other servers makes it seem more difficult, when that's not really the case. As this video shows, go to the place to want to sign up, give a user and password, confirm you're human, and use it. That's already less than the email confirmation of discord.
Now this is a question: how far can you get with xmpp? Could you build an interface on top of it to look exactly like discord with all of it's functions? Or does something like that already exist?
My first instinct with these older protocols is that there's no way they could support 10 people in a voice call with concurrent camera streams and 3 screen captures. I'm genuinely curious how far xmpp goes.
XMPP is wildly extendable, my limited understanding is that Jingle is the extension used for this. From the abstract:
This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for initiating and managing peer-to-peer media sessions between two XMPP entities in a way that is interoperable with existing Internet standards. The protocol provides a pluggable model that enables the core session management semantics (compatible with SIP) to be used for a wide variety of application types (e.g., voice chat, video chat, file transfer) and with a wide variety of transport methods (e.g., TCP, UDP, ICE, application-specific transports).
I haven't seen anything about the the extrema of the use cases like that, but Movim is working on building out many of the features of discord and it is built on XMPP.
Ok so when you're talking about xmpp as a discord alternative, basically movim is kind of what people should be paying attention to.
I'll def check that out. I am also passively observing progress on stoat.
It's a new project (as far as I can tell it just went public a few weeks ago) they have exploded in popularity in the last week and they are amid migrating their backed hosting provider ATM, they have been having service interruptions for the last couple of days
It's hard being the ~~popular~~ new kid. Thanks for the update!
The sentiment I keep seeing is that it's vibe coded, though the dev claims that AI was used but not in any core components. It's one I'll be waiting out personally, the whole huntarr situation has me pretty skeptical of any new projects
I think generally more positive than negative, but hesitant. There are so many different competing apps and discord copies that have risen and fallen, it's hard to really get attached to any that have little movement in fighting the network effect.
Seeing it already has the beginnings of enshitification with freemium features, while federation is "in development", particularly in communities like lemmy the question become why pick this over something that already exists and is an open standard?
Like looking at the "plutonium" page, it's clear they want to copy the features of discord nitro, and if we are to fight the network effect fight with the energy of discord's recent fuck up, I would rather land on XMPP or Matrix, if I have any push.
There are so many different competing apps and discord copies that have risen and fallen, it’s hard to really get attached to any that have little movement in fighting the network effect.
In other words, you are saying that there is too much discord in this space?
Down with discord!
I'm starting a new app called Concordance, and it will only bridge between different apps no matter where they are from 😤
Let me save you a few keystrokes, there's already an app called Matterbridge: github.com/42wim/matterbridge
I've tried it. It performs poorly.
XMPP kinda sucks
Yeah. It sucks that the protocol works and everyone can use it. It's the worst.