TeamSpeak exists too
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.
XMPP?
Mumble?
Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
I guess that's the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.
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Matrix.
Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.
If you just need voice comms and basic chat mumble/murmur has worked great for me for ages.
Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.
Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?
Does IRC have performant voicechat?
That would be the WebRTC logic.
In addition to the replies you got already, discord has screen sharing/streaming. An experience kind of like zoom (I don't use it and dont see the appeal but maybe someone who does can elaborate more. My partner uses this feature sometimes).
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Discord is not even necessarily Electron. I'm running it as Datcord, which is a Firefox based wrapper.
Discord has a searchble chat history, which is what sets it apart from IRC. Everything else can be emulated by modern IRC clients, such as emoji and embedded / unfurling images and link previews.
However imagine the chat history as if you had a bouncer that has 100% uptime and joined all possible chat channels from their creation, along with offering you search and buffer.
If not IRC, either Matrix or XMPP should be capable of this.
I'm fairly sure Discord's popularity was due to aggressive marketing, likely during their venture capital funding rounds. Something which FOSS does not have.
The main benefit I remember from jumping to Discord from IRC back in the day was the ability to easily see past messages. That said, I'm not sure if that's a problem anymore on IRC since I haven't used it in ages. Even then, I don't think it would be too terribly difficult to whip up a self-hostable fediverse competitor to Discord. It would essentially be IRC++.
It's probably more of a critical mass issue, though not near the level of Reddit vs Lemmy or Twitter vs Bluesky vs Mastodon. Every Discord server is essentially a walled garden. A Discord server doesn't hold much advantage over a Slack server, GroupMe, Teams, or IRC. For that reason, it would be a lot easier to move individual communities over.
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Element/matrix all the way
if you want something that looks like discord there are themes for the clients, there's even commet.chat for a discord like experience (but they haven't added calls yet)
Calls and easily sharing my screen are 90% of my use cases for Discord. The entire appeal of it initially was that it was a more functional Ventrilo with both text and voice channels. Hopefully something FOSS gets further developed by the time Discord completely shits the bed.
Then i'd recommend the element client in particular.
https://github.com/aaronraimist/element-themes/tree/master/Discord
^^ there's also this!