Stoat is probably the best competitor, although it shot itself in the leg by changing its name recently. It’s also missing video and screen sharing last time I checked, and the audio functionality barely works.
Matrix is utter chaos as far as organization goes. When you join a Discord community, chats are clearly laid out and separate from private messages or group chats. When you join a Matrix community, you must individually choose extra group chats to join, and they are often indistinguishable from things happening outside that community. It’s messy. And we haven’t even gotten to video or voice.
XMPP makes Matrix look organized and feature-complete. Good luck corralling a group of people onto that platform and figuring out disparate servers and disparate apps… I wouldn’t recommend it.
Basically, I don’t think the open source space has an answer to this, and I don’t think they can come up with one anytime soon.
I don’t think any client can fix the lag in matrix. For example, a room with high traffic but low messages will always be super slow to load messages, because it also has to load state events. (And Matrix communities used as an alternative to a Discord server will be generating a lot of that “join” and “leave” room traffic.)
I found this out the hard way when I tried out the Commet client.
I also think the way a lot of people use discord needs to not be a chat in a chat client. It needs to be the ‘discuss’ page on a fucking wiki and i swear putting that shit on chat has lost us collectively a decade of knowledge.
I agree with you, especially when it comes to tech stuff. But those people are only one group - and Discord actually does a better job filling the needs of other groups (thanks to its marriage of streaming and messaging technology) that alternative apps can’t really compete with.
Matrix is great as long as you know how to use it and keep it organized. It’s Element client used to mix contacts and group chats but that’s better now on web/desktop and on mobile you just need to add group chats to favorites and select the space you want to limit your browsing to (or use FluffyChat on mobile).
There’s also Zulip, which is actually closer to Slack.
If you’re on PC, use Discord as a gaming VoIP chat and you’re already using Steam I’d tell you to take a peek at Steam’s voice settings and either use that or disable Steam’s overlay if you don’t like it for whatever reason. In my experience Steam’s chat performs much better than Discord but can be trickier to configure for some.
XMPP has an experimental XEP for group spaces too, but who knows if it’ll be ready soon or used in apps for all major platforms.
Gross. Ok, who’s the next best competitor? Matrix?
XMPP, by a landslide.
Are there any clients or servers that support group voice/video cals?
Movim has the best support, but I think Dino also has support
Stoat is probably the best competitor, although it shot itself in the leg by changing its name recently. It’s also missing video and screen sharing last time I checked, and the audio functionality barely works.
Matrix is utter chaos as far as organization goes. When you join a Discord community, chats are clearly laid out and separate from private messages or group chats. When you join a Matrix community, you must individually choose extra group chats to join, and they are often indistinguishable from things happening outside that community. It’s messy. And we haven’t even gotten to video or voice.
XMPP makes Matrix look organized and feature-complete. Good luck corralling a group of people onto that platform and figuring out disparate servers and disparate apps… I wouldn’t recommend it.
Basically, I don’t think the open source space has an answer to this, and I don’t think they can come up with one anytime soon.
Matrix works fine, and is getting better. Element is not the best client for it.
Xmpp is good if you’re not stupid.
I don’t think any client can fix the lag in matrix. For example, a room with high traffic but low messages will always be super slow to load messages, because it also has to load state events. (And Matrix communities used as an alternative to a Discord server will be generating a lot of that “join” and “leave” room traffic.)
I found this out the hard way when I tried out the Commet client.
I also think the way a lot of people use discord needs to not be a chat in a chat client. It needs to be the ‘discuss’ page on a fucking wiki and i swear putting that shit on chat has lost us collectively a decade of knowledge.
I agree with you, especially when it comes to tech stuff. But those people are only one group - and Discord actually does a better job filling the needs of other groups (thanks to its marriage of streaming and messaging technology) that alternative apps can’t really compete with.
Put a fucking irc window in the fucking page for questions.
The shit i have seen put on discord is staggering.
Spaces work pretty well if your client handles them
Stoat is the best option imo
Stoat
Matrix is great as long as you know how to use it and keep it organized. It’s Element client used to mix contacts and group chats but that’s better now on web/desktop and on mobile you just need to add group chats to favorites and select the space you want to limit your browsing to (or use FluffyChat on mobile).
There’s also Zulip, which is actually closer to Slack.
If you’re on PC, use Discord as a gaming VoIP chat and you’re already using Steam I’d tell you to take a peek at Steam’s voice settings and either use that or disable Steam’s overlay if you don’t like it for whatever reason. In my experience Steam’s chat performs much better than Discord but can be trickier to configure for some.
XMPP has an experimental XEP for group spaces too, but who knows if it’ll be ready soon or used in apps for all major platforms.
Damn, no Jitsi or Mattermost talk? Instead people are bringing up non-battle tested projects?
Matrix, at least for group chats, does use integrated jitsi