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by leach 1138 days ago
Is there any viable self hosted discord alternatives? Discord is setting itself up to basically have all user data on everyone and be able to track it. The 38% stake Tencent owns eventually has to reap benefits for the CCP. Looking to distance myself from the application in general.
4 comments

I and some discord friends use a matrix server as a backup + place for convos involving PII but we only really do text and images. Depending on your needs it might fit for you too.
I set up a matrix server with voice chat for myself and a friend but hosting the TURN server through NAT is tricky and (perhaps it was my stack) it didn't always connect (one of us would click the call button and the other person may or may not get a call notification, and clicking answer may or may not actually connect the call). I'm no expert so maybe there's something I did wrong.

Text chat + images work quite well though.

TURN + NAT is always going to be a pain. If IPv6 isn't available to you or all of your friends, going for a VPS seems like the best choice to me. Just don't go for the extremely expensive server providers (i.e. Amazon) if you care about affordability.

This will cost a few dollars per month but it makes hosting UDP services becomes a lot easier.

Rent a VPS. They are a few bucks a month.
There is a free open source self-hostable reimplementation of Discord, called Spacebar: https://spacebar.chat