[popcar2]

I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives.

Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.

Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.

Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.

I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.

Ditto on Mattermost.

Discourse is a forum.

Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.

[cheeseomlit]

>Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people

Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls

[BowBun]

They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.

Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.

[giancarlostoro]

I have said many times, Discord isn't just chat, it is 100% a social media app.

I think there's definitely more than 10 thousand servers... Unless they mean active? Even so... there's 3.2 million Discord servers with the Disboard bot installed, that's just Disboard, a way to advertise your Discord. There's likely millions more with no bots.

[price]

I think the gp is saying that out of those millions of total Discord servers, there are >10k of them that each have >10k users.

In other words there are >10k large servers, in addition to the much larger number of smaller servers.

[cheeseomlit]

I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers

[cheikhcheikh]

By definition it should obvious the million-user server is a popular feature since it has a million user.

[gusgus01]

Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.

Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.

[AceyMan]

obligatory citation: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." —Yogi Berra, MLB HOF catcher & manager

[forgotaccount3]

> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.

Going back to something you said earlier:

> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.

So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.

[elendee]

you could sign into A and your friend could sign into B using the single sign in, but you wouldn't be able to message each other is the problem, there is no platform bridging the logic gap, so you would both need to have A and B open. (afaik. didn't read about Rocket yet)

[jsbisviewtiful]

> Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers

Large community servers are plentiful. I'm in a few that are definitely several hundred if not a few thousand users. It's pretty common to have a public server for cities too.

[pseudalopex]

The question was 1+ million people. Any alternative in the article but Signal could handle 100s or 1000s to my knowledge.

[jsbisviewtiful]

Multiple sources cite different totals but it does seem like there are multiple 1+ mil servers.

https://www.deepcord.com/leaderboard/top-members/all/all-siz...

[pseudalopex]

The question was not are there Discord servers with 1+ million people. The question was do most Discord users use Discord to join servers with 1+ million people.

[secabeen]

> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.

That is totally true, but is that server really going to be one with NSFW content or channels? Those huge servers are great spaces, but every one I've been on is fully functional if you are on a "teen account" without doing ID/Age verification.

[neutronicus]

I don't join massive servers, but I use Discord almost exclusively with strangers.

All my IRL group chats are WhatsApp. Discord is for the local board game bar, various regional tabletop gaming scenes, my favorite basketball podcast, my favorite miniatures game, etc.

When I want to get into a community, these days I get a Discord link (which I guess I prefer to the Facebook Groups of a decade ago).

[orwin]

Any multiplayer game that doesn't have an integrated matchmaking have _big_ discord servers. Basically most paradox games, civ5 and civ6, probably others. All the organising that used to happen on forums now happens on discord servers

[w4rh4wk5]

From personal experience, yes. Most of my friends are part of multiple large servers, often interacting with a small subsets of these communities. At this point, I don't think there is a comparable alternative.

[davkan]

My experience using discord for technical projects and communities is largely similar to IRC. I jump in, ask a question in the appropriate channel, someone answers quite quickly, i say thanks, I leave.

I’d prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can’t say the experience is that onerous.

[colordrops]

"Discord alternatives aren't needed because I'm different from the majority of millions of people that use it differently than me."

[Redoubts]

nobody joins a million person discord, it's too crowded

[scyzoryk_xyz]

Agreed 100%, can confirm same here. All true.

Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.

[opan]

This may be a good time to consider whether one program should really be handling all those things, or if it's putting too many eggs in one basket and asking too much of any one program. Discord seems comparable to a Chinese superapp, made to trap its users and become an irreplaceable part of their everyday lives. I think I understand it's hard to give up some of these features once you're used to them, but it seems worth doing. Personally I use a mix of IRC, XMPP, and Matrix, mostly IRC (internet people) and Matrix (IRL friends/family), though. I believe XMPP and Matrix both have some sort of voice or video chat support across some clients and servers, but if someone were to try to call me through them, it would seem "weird" to say the least. I usually get people on Mumble if we're gonna play a game and want a voice chat going. It's rock-solid, everyone I play games with seems fine with it. When we're done voice chatting, we close Mumble, a bit like hanging up a phone call.

As for video calls and screen sharing, not something that's been super normalized in my circle. Some of us stream to Twitch with OBS, but it's rare to say "hey come watch my computer screen for an hour in a 1-on-1 call". There is just one guy who seems like a heavy Discord user who seemed to want to do this sometimes. I showed him Jitsi to placate him, we can both join a session in a browser without accounts and I can see his screen. I wasn't a big fan of that, though, I'd rather just not let that be normalized, personally. A screenshot, video clip, describing it to me, letting it go, any of that seems better than being trapped in a screensharing/video call of uncertain length.

[alfnor]

The private servers I'm in always have a few people screen sharing whenever a voice chat is active. They're either sharing their gameplay (semi-privately, hence no Twitch) or they're co-watching movies. Oh and every so often, screen sharing is used for getting someone's opinion on image editing or a song in they're making. I've also given people remote tech support which is way easier to do when their screen is visible.

But it's worth noting that as an older Gen Z, this is just how people hang out nowadays, so we'll be watching anime together in the server until we fall asleep or whatever. That's why screen sharing isn't as useful as screenshots and video clips.

[axus]

The benefit of one big app is a consistent identity. Seeing that an account was created years ago, and how long it's been a member of the current server, helps identify spam and scams. When a user you're familiar with provides a link to another Discord server, its more trustworthy.

Discord has also done a good job protecting identity; better than DNS has :) I use lots of other apps with "real" identity, Discord is good for centralizing non-work, non-family activity.

[pixl97]

The particular problem with most of humanity is we value convenience over just about everything else.

Superapps are just going to just keep winning because of this.

[4WIW]

You can use as many different apps for yourself but good luck sustaining a community/team/org that requires learning 5 apps for participation, especially when not all users are savvy.

In order to sustain an ecosystem instead of mega-app, that ecosystem needs to be really smoothly integrated, and I know of no good examples of this

[tabbott]

This article looks rather rushed -- the description of Zulip is not accurate, and I suspect that folks working on the other products may feel the same way about how their projects are described.

I lead the Zulip project, and I'd like to clarify that Zulip's free community pricing does not have user limits, either in Cloud or self-hosting. The 10 user limit for free mobile notifications only applies to workplace/business use. Larger communities are encouraged to submit a simple form to get approved for notifications beyond 10 users.

And this complaint seems quite strange:

> Even for self-hosted plans, anything above the free tier requires a zulip.com account for plan management.

How would a paid subscription work without an account for managing it?

This is an important and timely topic, but I wish a more deeply researched article was the one being widely circulated.

[saghm]

This a good point that I hadn't considered. At least in my experience, DMs are a useful but secondary feature that mostly are useful because it's not uncommon to make connections with people from interacting in the servers themselves. I had been mentally modeling Discord as a chat app, but in a lot of ways it feels more accurate to think of it almost like Facebook with just groups and DMs, only the groups are realtime chat. Over that years I've heard various people talk about using only groups and maybe events as the last things they still used Facebook for, and I deactivated my account years ago but still use Messenger because of the years of contacts I had already built up on it (and the fact that it still is possible to use with a deactivated Facebook account), which provides at least some anecdotal evidence that Discord is basically providing the stickiest features of Facebook.

[dvngnt_]

Stoat isn't working well for me. It's taken over 24 hours to try to register a new account. First I couldn't register after doing several captchas. Then I had to wait for a verification email which took over 12 hours. I signed in to one client, but attempting to reset a password results in the same waiting game and error when selecting a new password.

I wish for the best, but they're probably putting out fires from the increased load

[giancarlostoro]

The closest realistic option is probably XMPP and Mumble. I just think both need a modern UI that supports everything that Discord offers OOTB. I am working on a client for XMPP on the side, nothing special yet, but I can login and chat with myself on a prosody instance, so there is that. Would love to work on open source full time, but it never seems to pay the bills. I do intend on eventually open sourcing my client.

[tcfhgj]

Matrix + Cinny might be a good option, too.

It has a Discord like UI, but the voice and video they're working on isn't released yet

[Semaphor]

All the people I know who joined big servers, have nitro and do it for their emotes. My impression of really big servers is that they also skew really, really young.

That said, I agree that not having to create a new account is a huge barrier of entry removed. A lot of the servers I’m in would probably not be a thing, or at least be even smaller, if everyone had to create an account to join.

[pseudalopex]

They discussed community and moderation features. The functionality and safety scores considered them.

Many groups use Discord as a Slack alternative or forum.

Discord's single sign on is convenient. But the list's point was any central platform is a risk.

[Bender]

being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people

Personally I would never want to join that noise. If an IRC channel has more than 50 people I tend to avoid it unless it is a technical channel that may have some knowledgeable people. If I want to reach millions of people I will find a way to join the conversation of an influencer on their podcast but hopefully such a need never comes to pass for me.

[zelphirkalt]

1 million users? I have not seen a single one of such servers, let alone joined such a server.

[atoav]

IMO most Discord channels I have to use could be better replaced by a traditional web forum. Then at least could you find the knowledge in there using a web search.

[unethical_ban]

Nothing open source and self hostable will be a "platform" then. Being dependent on a central platform/identity server is the way they control you and increase the friction of leaving.

I think the client side could still be a "platform" like pidgin, allowing login and simultaneous participatiin in multiple servers, without needing to be fully centralized.

What disappoints me about this list is the lack of consideration for video calls and screenshare.