starmanPlease don't use Discord for FOSS projects
merthyr1831If you’re desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
- rocket chat - General purpose chat platform, very similar discord
- mattermost - developer-centric platform, similar to slack
- Matrix - open protocol, has a bunch of desktop clients
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that’s rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom***
***yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?
Stop recommending closed-source, paid solutions. It makes you look like a shill.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence & consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets. As such it’s highly centralized & the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server, the most popular client, the specification, the largest server- which syncs back the metadata.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but it’s self-hostable & AGPL so I’m not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from. At least it’s less wasteful than trying to be decentralized & if you wanted lightweight decentralization, you would reach for XMPP.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence
It get some resources from them at the start, but they do not fund it for a long time.
consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets
When you join large rooms like #matrix:matrix.org, it consumes a lot of space. But otherwise it is not that heavy. I hope they fix this, as this can be fixed with better resource planning, the biggest tables on the database are those like state_groups_state that does not hold bare information and just group information together for quick search. (I hosted a server and MatrixHQ room took 100GB…, 95% of the database).
As such it’s highly centralized
Looking at server list it seems very healthy. Also (opinion alert) I think having thousands of public server running by a randoms like there is for big chunk of Fediverse will not be as healthy as dozens of well funded community servers.
the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server
Synapse is not the reference server, there is no one official implementation for a purpose. And old news, it is now hosted by Element under AGPL.
They could still be funding it in other ways. It’s a conspiracy, but one that would make some sense.
I gather you are saying there still are real storage issues. The bigger your server grows the more wildly this can get out of hand once just one of your users joins a big room. The whole model is about distributing the syncing of messages & no matter how they slice it to speed parts of it up, I feel it will remain an issue by design unlike other protocols that treat realtime chat as ephemeral & just give you enough history to get context of the current conversation. I’ve already witnessed 3 servers try to grow a following, then when users came, the bill inevitable shut them down–in the same way that Mastodon can skyrocket bills due to fundamental designs. Other protocols also handle decentralization better in ways that don’t require massive funding & empower users to host their own decentralized server–to which I think is healthy & desirable.
Synapse more or less acts as a reference server in the way that all Twitter-likes are basically required to be Mastodon-compatible.