So seriously, what’s going to replace Discord? Everyone wants to leave, but to where?

And no, Matrix is not and will never be a viable alternative

I’ve seen mentioned these: * Stoat - pretty much same UI, based in UK, not sure where they get $$ * Fluxer - looks virtually like 1:1 Discord clone, based in Sweden, has paid tier pretty much like Nitro on Discord on official server * Nerimity - a little different UI, but still very Discord-y, based in UK, sourced from donations * Movim - this one is interesting, but it’s not really Discord style app; it looks more like cross breed between IM and social network (FB/X), origin in France * Strafe - looks like Discord, supposedly have e2ee * Spacebar - reverse engineered Discord, IDK about maturity of this one * Adapt - another wanna be

I’ve also seen Roomy and Voltage mentioned around too but haven’t personally looked into them.

The MIT license of Voltage is a big red flag for me, as it could allow for either a corporate takeover, or for the company to abandon the open-source version in favor of a closed-source version that they can sell or enshittify.

Roomy has pretty much the same problem being licensed under the MPL license, which allows for the project to be packaged into a closed-source proprietary product. I’d avoid it too, despite it being federated. The license is just too risky, and the only reason not to choose GPL is because the devs likely want that capital purchase exit strategy.

There’s a lot devs who know there’s potentially a lot of money to be made in a successful Discord alternative. They smell the blood in the water, know the venture capital vultures it attracts, and they’ll try to exploit the free labor that open-source projects bring, only to sell us out down the road after all the work has been done.

I’d say any option we move to must be licensed under GPL as a hard requirement, as that ensures it can never be exploited by corpos, and will remain owned by the community forever so that we don’t have to migrate again any time soon.

The two best options on the table that fill that niche are:

• Movim (Pros: GPL, federated, encrypted, can do chat, voice calls and screenshare, based on the battle tested XMPP open standard. Cons: is currently missing discord-like rooms, but the dev is working in it)
• Fluxer (New kid on the block, still very buggy, but is AGPL licensed and plans federation and encryption in the future. Backend is still unproven, don’t know how well it scales, but one to keep an eye on)