Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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An alternative would need screen share, just voip is not enough any more.
The problem is that performant screenshare (to multiple users) more or less requires infrastructure. That requires money, and it's impossible to compete on price with services that have the VC-enshitification model.
You can get around this in a few ways, but they're all tradeoffs that are in some way or other worse than discord.
- P2P - sacrifice latency, reliability
- direct multi-stream - sacrifice PC performance and/or bitrate
- paid infrastructure - sacrifice money
I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it's not perfect, but it's simpler and by it's very nature doesn't require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.
Plus, don't forget screen sharing in discord isn't very good as is (720p30) if you're not a paid user.
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If you just need voice comms and basic chat mumble/murmur has worked great for me for ages.
I'm running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I've set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.
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Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.
TeamSpeak exists too
Teamspeak is alright, in fact we use it along with discord for inter-channel Comms. But discord does a lot of stuff that ts doesn't touch
That's a throwback. Let's take it one step further and just get back on Ventrilo and play some DOTA. (For the younger folks who don't get the reference: https://youtu.be/aTJncWndUB8 )
I still have my copy. I cannot believe that song is like, 18 years old now. It was such a staple of my college experience.
I am certainly not one of the younger folks and had never seen that before. That is awesome, thank you for sharing.
Oh man, Basshunter was huge in the chronically-online gamer space in the 2000s. His other songs are pretty good too.
To put it in perspective, the fact that they're gaming on laptops and LCD monitors was an enviable flex when his songs released.
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Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.
Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?
In addition to the replies you got already, discord has screen sharing/streaming. An experience kind of like zoom (I don't use it and dont see the appeal but maybe someone who does can elaborate more. My partner uses this feature sometimes).
I commonly will be in a call with friends, where we all stream the games we are playing independently to each other.
Another use case, one person screen shares YouTube for group watching
And one more, we will often play chess and screen share so others can watch.
This is for a group of 3-10 people typically
A group of friends use this every weekend to play party games (Like jackbox games). One person streams and everyone uses a browser to interact.
If I want to show a friend a new game, I use it as well.
Discord is not even necessarily Electron. I'm running it as Datcord, which is a Firefox based wrapper.
Discord has a searchble chat history, which is what sets it apart from IRC. Everything else can be emulated by modern IRC clients, such as emoji and embedded / unfurling images and link previews.
However imagine the chat history as if you had a bouncer that has 100% uptime and joined all possible chat channels from their creation, along with offering you search and buffer.
If not IRC, either Matrix or XMPP should be capable of this.
I'm fairly sure Discord's popularity was due to aggressive marketing, likely during their venture capital funding rounds. Something which FOSS does not have.
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man I wish mumble had a better interface and a chat function, it could real FOSS competition with Discord, but the lack of a chat feature is holding it back
Started hosting a mumble server for gaming maybe six months ago and have been using it daily. Really happy with it.
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It never made sense to me how popular discord was to begin with.
- persistent IRC style chat rooms
- virtual “servers” to organize said chat rooms, manage privileges, control visibility
- integration with bots for all sorts of things (moderation, user welcome, dice rollers, etc.)
- integration with games/music players/etc (I don’t use it but it’s very popular)
- privacy and moderation controls
- client allows fine grained notification controls
- voice, video, and screen casting simultaneously
- “server” templates: use an existing server config (roles, permissions, rooms, etc.) when creating a new server.
That’s just off the top of my head.
It’s enshittifying, but the value proposition is still hard to beat. I’m really hoping Matrix catches up with the feature set soon.
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@Xanza@lemm.ee Among my friends, it replaced Facebook Messenger, Teamspeak, and Mumble instantly. It was fast and the voice quality was excellent. The appeal in 2017 was obvious. The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.
Don't get me started on the "rewards"...
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Other voice chat programs were crap, discord was significantly better and more consistent. Simple as. It still has features way ahead of other services. The business side is shitty but it works without anyone needing to know anything with no troubleshooting.
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https://spacebar.chat/ looks like it will eventually be good, it looks like it's in its infancy right now though