KylaMKV

(any/all pronouns)

Discord's Enshitification

Discord's been getting shittier for years, and it only took age verification for people to realize that. The amount of people looking up Discord alternatives is insane.

(Link, Sorry for the low resolution, I'm writing this on a crappy Chromebook :p)

So with everyone making YouTube video's and blog posts cashing in on the situation posting about what's the best alternative, I figured I'd voice my experience with them. This isn't gonna be an in-depth explanation, and I'm only writing it because I have an hour of sitting in study hall at school. Of course, there's no perfect clone of discord but without the bad stuff. Discord has a LOT of features. Here's the thing's that I thought were the most important to me, in order from most to least important:

  1. Chat messages: My main way of communication. I usually don't call someone unless I need to.
  2. File upload with image rendering. I send pictures a LOT, usually just random memes and shitposts, but it's still extremely important to me
  3. Group chat support: All of my friends need to be able to talk to each other at the same time, in the same place.
  4. Voice Call: When I do need to call someone though, it's nice to do it in the same app.

So, here are the contenders:

1. Fluxer

This is the best one I found, and probably the one I'll use when discord inevitably dies. It has all of the features I mentioned, and looks extremely similar to discord. However, it is an EXTREMELY new project. Most of it's documentation(especially in self hosting) is not written yet, they don't yet have a public mobile app, and I think they stole some of the icons from discord, though I have no proof. Nevertheless, it's the one with the most potential in my opinion. It has most of the features. It even has discord nitro, called "Plutonium" that costs $4.99 USD/month.

2. Matrix

F**K S**T F**K F**K S**T F**K---

So, I have a long history with Matrix, and it(along with my own stupidity) actually broke my whole server and I pretty much had to restart from scratch(I promise I'll write a post sometime). This is definitely the most feature complete, but Matrix is actually just a protocol. The go-to platform for using the matrix protocol is Element. I believe Element is close, if not feature-parity with discord, and has other stuff too. However, I don't personally like element. Something feels off about them and conspiracy theorists are saying something about it being linked to isreal spyware or something..? idk, look it up urself. I wanted to self host it and it didn't work so I'm not using it.

3. Stoat(formally Revolt)

This one I've known about for a LONG time. It was really the first one that people used to think of when they wanted to leave discord. However, despite it existing for a while, it's no where near feature-parity with discord, ESPECIALLY on the mobile app. Only within a couple years were you even able to send friend requests on it(I tried to find exactly when they added it but my 2 minutes of degooging didn't find a patch note or anything). It's just progressing so slowly that I don't think I could use it right now. Though, maybe in the future.