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What I really need is realtime multi-party voice chat
Do any of these support that?
I mostly use discord for light coordination and online voice chat during games or activities.
Teamspeak, ventrilo, mumble - but discord replaced them all with being easy to use.
Sadly, there is no real alternative with all the discord features. I mean, you could create chats in Zoom and use their voice/video feature, but at least one person would need pro.
Installing Zoom on your machine is a mistake.
Their install process is indistinguishable from malware abdv they have a history of shitting on security for all growth possible.
And sadly governments abd corporations rewarded them for it.
Their install process is indistinguishable from malware abdv they have a history of shitting on security for all growth possible.
Source?
those were mostly issues from around Covid when they suddenly exploded and hard to start caring about security
I don’t need all the features, just two.
everything else about discord I hate.
Check out teamspeak and mumble, maybe those fit
Teamspeak might be what I used 15 years ago
In my world the biggest advantage of Discord is the Availability on consoles allowing voice chat for crossplay. For all I know none of the alternatives you mentioned is available for consoles. I know there are people connecting their PS/XBox audio output with a computer running TeamSpeak to receive VoiceChat and in Game Sound from the same system but this is not a usable solution for most people.
100 % agree. Somehow Discord found its niche and no one else challenged it.
Edit: Xfire might have, but they died a long time ago
And that took forever to release! For over half the time discord has been around they didn’t have console support
possible, but still it’s a problem for me. Never liked Discord and was always happy with TS. But when I started playing with a friend using XBox I was forced to use it
jitsi is free
Technically, Signal, Rocket Chat, and Matrix all have multi-party voice chat built in. You probably won’t have a great time with it, and if you want video or screen sharing, you’ll have an even worse time.
Honestly just voice chat is all, I used to play SC2 with some sketchy apps that could do it… but 2026 feels like easy stuff got much harder.
Just tested out element and had no problem with screen sharing + video in a voice call. Haven’t tried out the mobile app for that (but I haven’t done that for discord either and on desktop, discord just doesn’t screenshare like half the time for me)
I’m kind of shocked if you had a decent/superior time and Element vs Discord, especially if you’re in Windows! This is a case where I hope I can be proven wrong.
Discord facilitates large audio and video calls, but if Element can manage even a handful of people at once, I would be impressed. In my experience, it hasn’t, but such things are kind of hard to test.
Isn’t that a multi-way call? Everything else is covered by forums (permanent) or IRC/Matrix/XMPP (quick)
Yeah, and for most of my friends I don’t need/want forums. I just want “Hey, anyone online?” and voice calls.
That’s what IRC/Matrix/XMPP/Signal (possibly) covers
Jitsi Meet.
I think Matrix has one as well that’s integrated nowadays.
I think that’s the one the French government is moving to, I’ll have to check it out.
Some of these don’t feel like real alternatives to me?
I want both the text chat parts of discord and the part where you can synchronously voice chat with screen share/camera share.
It seems like matrix is the closest thing, I hope it’s better than when I tried it in 2021 or 2022
signal is the dumbest thing they couldve put in the list. its like “top 10 minecraft alternatives; number 1, microsoft Word”
Yeah, discord has so many features that not everyone uses them. Open source proponents seem to prefer text communication so they ignore most of the shortcomings
Matrix has a new spec coming that will fix everything (they say). But last I checked it’s not finalised, and they have been working on it for years.
What, no ranking for XMPP and IRC? They are by far the best alternatives in terms of openness, and have the advantage of being more focused on text-only and basic communication, securing the “do one thing and do it well” path. For things like voice chat there’s Mumble, but tbh I don’t know how is it doing.
Depending on the client, XMPP can even replicate most Discord functionality. The Movim XMPP client can do group chats, group video calls, and I think screen sharing too.
Oooh I did not know that! It’s good to be able to catch up to the tech, thanks much!
I feel like XMPP is under rated, I used it in the past back when matrix was super new and not really production ready. I’m now revisiting them and matrix seems highly centralized in practice even if it was designed to be federated. There aren’t that many implementations and so many people use matrix.org as their homeserver. Definitely still thinking XMPP is the best option.
Mumble still works but from what I can tell its software ecosystem seems to be decaying due to bots etc. not being updated and breaking changes in their dependencies, people can still get them to work if they really know what they’re doing but it’s difficult. It also has some quirks that make it confusing for people to use, I’m in a mumble server and any time anyone new joins someone has to explain to them that they need to go through the menus to “register” in order to join the main channel, even though this registration is entirely within the application and doesn’t require email authentication or anything. There’s also frequently SSL warnings and things like that.
I’d assume the SSL warnings are due to issues with the hosters and not with Mumble itself (to my knowledge, the protocol has nothing to do with SSL). The other issue you mention with joining the main channel honestly sounds like someone at the dev team forgot to flag a feature for a good while, though, because autojoins should not rely on client conf only…
The fact they are being shown to users is jank (it’s a popup within the Mumble gui), the fact that the hosters ran into this problem is evidence that hosting Mumble is a big challenge because I am convinced they generally know what they are doing. The comparison here is Discord, for which neither the people running a channel or its users have problems like that.
Hi, I host a mumble server, if users are getting cert errors it is 100% the hosters fault and the error being shown to users is GOOD. Otherwise users could get man in the middled without knowing it. There is no excuse for users to get the error if the hoster is competent and has automated cert renewal setup correctly. And for the record automated cert renewal isn’t much harder than it is for a website.
It’s SSL warnings, they have to be shown to whoever is connecting, half the point is the system shouldn’t have to know if the connecter is a user or an admin or whateverelse. Of course, the real solution is still to solve the SSL issues behind the warning.
The comparison here is Discord, for which neither the people running a channel or its users have problems like that.
If Discord Inc ever forgot to update their certs, you can be damn sure we’d like to not have the warnings hidden from us. The only difference is here that status is not under control of running a channel / making community, so one could argue that’s actually worse.
IRC? That’s text only. It doesn’t even support viewing images, much less making voice or video calls. The majority isn’t going to install multiple clients to text and call.
That’s like proposing that people get rid of their smartphones to buy a separate camera, MP3 player, GPS device, and laptop.
Thank you for sharing this!
I would like to throw Kiwi IRC into the mix, perhaps it would suffice for some people.
Alternatively, IRCCloud.
if matrix can get some of the remaining issues fixed I think it has a decent shot at taking over, but people will probably pick another “federated” proprietary app like with bluesky
(That’s the Discourse logo for anyone who’s wondering as well. Which … Yeah, FOSS devs definitely use that over Discord but most people chat on discord, right?)
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