Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix, or are you using something else entirely?
I don’t know what people use discord for, honestly. I just call up my friends on signal for the regularly scheduled gaming session and play. All I need is audio.
I don’t understand what people need video or screen sharing for while gaming. Are they playing a game watching each other’s facial reactions or something? And others talk about screen sharing… Are you guys gaming while watching the other person’s screen? I’m puzzled.
Signal can audio and video calls with screen sharing 🤷
Matrix I only use for opensource projects or as a replacement or client for IRC (IRC sucks ass). There was also a time fosdem streamed everything on matrix. It was glorious. I wish more conferences (and fosdem itself) had chatrooms for every talk, rooms for different topics, and a general chat room for everybody. We don’t have to fly and waste fuel to participate in conferences. Not everybody has deep enough pockets to pay 2k for a flight to Sydney and a further 1k for food and lodging there. Or worse, a trip to the US to get fondled by US border patrol and sent to Guantanamo bay for having said “Trump is a dunce”.
Not a huge user of screensharing, but it does come up, and I’d probably miss it if I lost it. Here’s a few recent examples:
- Playing a 1v1 PVP game, such as Elden Ring or Armoured Core, taking turns with 3 players, it’s nice to be able to share POVs so that the waiting player can watch.
- Setting up for a TTRPG, it was nice to share the online character builder to more easily ask for advice on something like “which move should I take?”.
- Playing Valheim, we all died except 1, and he shared his screen so we could guide him to our bodies with the materials to build a portal for us to get back easily.
I’m certainly not sharing my screen all the time, but it comes up fairly often that something happens that you want to show the group when they can’t just look at it with you in-game. It all depends on what kinds of games you’re playing and how large a group you’re playing with.
My gaming friend group is 8 or 9 people. When you want to hang out digitally, you just jump in our discord and see who is currently playing. You jump in the channel, join the conversation. If the others are currently in a match that can’t be hot joined, someone will put on a stream for you, so you can watch and have an easier time joining the conversation.
Sometimes a friend is playing a game that you don’t own or they want to show you. Easily done with a stream. Streaming on Discord is very useful to us.
We use the webcam feature for our Tabletop Roleplaying Sessions.
One “feature” that Discord has that will be missed by our small community: Being able to see who is in a voice call without having to join it.
We have spent the last week exploring alternatives and it looks like we will be using a combination of self hosted matrix and mumble unless self hosted stoat gets voice very soon.
So Mumble for voice chat and Matrix for text chat?
Exactly.
Does your group ever use video calls and/or screen sharing?
I prefered xmpp. But either xmpp or matrix arent discord alternatives
It’s in progress
Wut
That’s a screenshot of the Movim client’s WIP of Discord-like servers w/spaces, which is being rapidly worked on.
Dang that looks really nice, finally a decent decentralized chat client!
In my experience XMPP is easy to set up, lighter on resources, and the clients tend to work well across multiple platforms. We have small private and public groups using it daily with zero complaints.
Matrix tends to be more involved in setting up, and our group ran into issues where some clients weren’t working as smoothly or reliably as we needed for a primary communication platform. We also had a huge problem with traffickers of all sorts joining our rooms to spam their telegram links or CSAM. That hasn’t been a problem after more than a year on XMPP.
When you say traffickers joined your rooms to post spam, how did they find you? Is it like email where they can just try every possible email address at a particular domain or was your room posted publicly on your website or something and that’s how they found you?
The rooms we had issues with were public rooms that were discoverable via Matrix, with a couple of links on the web to direct people to them. The links to the rooms still exist in the same places, but ever since converting them to XMPP links rather than Matrix ones the traffickers have disappeared. I couldn’t tell you if that’s because XMPP is less popular with that crowd or if the tools they’re using to discover and spam them don’t work on XMPP. Either way it was a welcome change.
Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix
Yes* - I haven’t used Discord in a long time as its bloat simply doesn’t interest me, but for communicating with folk:
Matrix, at least for me, is great, but the most capable mobile client Element has many broken or missing features.
Classic, but not X, has:- working calls via STUN/TURN,
- an emoji menu,
- correctly showing chat profile images (X duplicates the most recent one for all chats),
- and the ability to create unencrypted group chats (purely for public memes).
X, but not Classic, has:
- attachment captions,
- HD images,
- markdown support,
- a more modern UI,
- and (when it works) fully encrypted 1-1 and conference calls via Matrix Livekit.
I currently dual-wield the two because neither is enough yet, and most other clients lack call functionality entirely.
XMPP, at least for me, is nearly perfect. It just works and I find the fact that desktop clients still look like AOL Messenger quite charming. However it has:
- very manual encryption key management, meaning even I find trusting a new device daunting let alone any adopters,
- no backward decryption, meaning message history needs to be exported and transferred to a new device,
- plaintext serverside storage for several pieces of data. It’s my server so ownership isn’t a worry, but it’s a massive security risk in the albeit unlikely event of a hack or hijack.
I chose higher encryption and easier adoption between Matrix and XMPP but wish there was a more fulfilling option.
From my digging on alternatives the main contenders are (in no particular order)
- Stoat
- Essentially 1:1 on discords format
- UK based, so its future there is uncertain
- Infrastructure is lacking, was crippled by the initial influx after discord’s announcement.
- Missing some minor UI and UX features, feels unpolished.
- Spacebar
- Reverse engineered discord
- Greatest potential, IMO, but as of a few days ago all it has is potential.
- lacks significant client development, relying on an external client named Fermi, which feels quite amateurish.
- XMPP
- Highly mature, looks very promising, but lacks any kind of guild/nested channel grouping support which makes it unsuitable for my group, so I didn’t look too deep at it.
- Matrix
- IMO the most likely discord successor.
- Minor functional hiccups, that vary from client to client
- Of the clients I tested, Cinny is the most discord like, but I hear commet is closer.
- Nested spaces provides the minimum format equivalence.
One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links, server side channel ordering, and space membership over channel membership. But that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
- XMPP
Highly mature, looks very promising, but lacks any kind of guild/nested channel grouping support which makes it unsuitable for my group, so I didn’t look too deep at it.
No XMPP clients currently have that feature, but the Movim client is actively working on implementing it, and it should be ready in a few weeks. They recently launched a modest funding campaign to accelerate development.
One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links
I think I’ve seen invite links being proposed for Matrix, but I don’t remember the status of that idea, and can’t find a relevant MSC at the moment.
I wonder if this bot would be helpful for now:
https://github.com/dfuchss/matrix-joinlink
https://www2.matrix.org/blog/2024/05/24/this-week-in-matrix-2024-05-24/#matrixjoinlink
Which ones are federated?
I belive just Matrix and XMPP.
Do they have voice chat integration? It’s not a big deal for me, but for a lot apparently it is.
Yes XMPP supports voice. Had for well over a decade, maybe two.
Movim.eu seems to be. Rocketchat also claims to federate via matrix
XMPP knows invite links, there are even servers which support invite pages which list suitable clients one could use for XMPP. Prosody for example has this module you could enable: mod_invites_page
And then there is also Snikket, which is a pre-configured XMPP server suite (running prosody under the hood) with some nice QoL improvements baked in which you can selfhost as well: Snikket Quick Start Selfhost
- Fluxer
- Slightly sus vibes
Can you elaborate on this part?
a chat app that has more feature parity with Discord than any other project, yet:
- was supposedly built over the course of five years but commit history was squashed a couple months ago so there’s no way to verify
- was built entirely by one 22yo who hasn’t yet graduated university
- has confirmed LLM usage
- already has a monetization plan very similar to Discord and has raised 300k in one-time funding on hype alone
all this to say, it’s still an incredibly impressive piece of software, but the sus vibes are warranted
- Fluxer
- Stoat
Why has IRC not been mentioned? The basics of Discords UX is based on it after all.
I suspect many Discord refugees will be looking for an all-in-one app that can do both solid text chat with discord-style servers with many rooms/spaces in them, as well as the ability to seamlessly have voice/video calls with groups of friends, as well as screenshare applications to watch movies together or stream games while chatting.
IRC is only capable of the text chat part, and would require an additional video conferencing app with a separate account, which most would find off-putting after having it all-in-one for over a decade.
And IRC now has web clients that can display inline images, upload them on a channel, preview URLs, push notifications, keep history, and more.
I use The Lounge but there is also Convos and a few others.
Having installed both this week, I much prefer XMPP. I want it as something more like signal/whatsapp just for my immediate family. Some are too young for a phone number, but I want them to join in the fun.
It was a but of messing around getting prosody to work how I want, but I’m really happy with it. It works with my letsencrypt certs. Phone and video calls just work. MySql just works with it. The tricky one was getting it to auth with same credentials as the mail daemon, but I got that going too. It’s seamless now.
Matrix was 90% features I would not use.
Fluxer is a better Discord alternative than Matrix and XMPP.
That said, XMPP is more private. Matrix is worse than everything else.
Fluxer, while promising, is currently too buggy for people to switch to, and still has an unproven back-end that needs to show it can scale up. I am hopeful for it though, as it uses GPL, and the dev plans to implement federation and encryption at some point.
XMPP is rapidly gaining Discord-like features thanks to the Movim client, but it too is not yet a 1:1 replacement.
is movim even encrypted from what i can tell it isnt
Movim has supported OMEMO since 2021 from the looks of it.
not by default tho
A lot of clients don’t have encryption enabled by default since they’ve been around for quite a long time, before this was a primary consideration in web communication standards. In these cases, like with Gajim, it is a simple toggle in the client options. I don’t use it but I assume Movim is similar.
with Gajim, it is a simple toggle in the client options. I don’t use it but I assume Movim is similar.
Can confirm, it’s just a toggle, and then you can click a padlock icon in any chat to send any new messages as encrypted.
can’t be, you need to setup your enc keys beforehand
yeah i hope matrix just fixes things up to make the experience smoother. seems to be taking them forever. it not being on by default is a nonstarter im not going to explain to my non tech friends how to encrypt their messages. this is basically the only real reason why signal is so great, its easy and preset out of the box. simplex seems good too and is making more progress than matrix it seems, idk how many users it can have in one chat though
signal is similar, the moment your friend loses their signal enc key and try to login again they will lose their chat history (same as matrix)
it’s a limitation due to the nature of E2EE
in my case while I care for E2EE, it is not enough to trust signal servers with my metadata and its the same for matrix. XMPP looks like a good balance between owning the server, controlling how to federate and choosing what to encrypt
It is. It offers OMEMO encryption of both chats and video/audio calls. It’s based on Signal’s encryption, but modified to work with a federated/decentralized model.
does it have an android app, or is it all web based
Conversations is my preferred Android client.
Movim only offers a PWA, but there are other native Android XMPP apps, such as Monocles Chat, but it isn’t as advanced as Movim in some ways, as it’s still lacking the ability to make or receive group voice/video calls, nor can it screenshare. It is however able to make 1-on-1 calls, even with Movim users.
This sort of fragmentation is the biggest thing I dislike about XMPP. Although Matrix kind of fucked it up also when they switched mobile to Element X
I agree, it’s an unfortunate downside. But it’s still probably our best option long-term.
At least in XMPP’s case, I think a way of dealing with the fragmentation is to treat Movim as the ‘main’ app, and to encourage any friends willing to leave Discord to just use that, and not mention other options unless you know they’re a bit more tech savvy, and can understand the limitations of the other clients and just think of them as fun little bonuses (until they catch up, anyway). :)
IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound and not driven by buzzword-development.
IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound
I lost track of the technical status of IRC long ago so maybe it can do this too. XMPP at least, can support true E2EE, not just end to server. My mates and I use that for normal chatting, sending our vacation pics around, photos of our kids with their new puppy, things like that.
It’s worked well. Free of big-tech. Hopefully free of snoops and mass surveillance. I’m 100% sure any three letter agency could get in, if one ever cared to hear us prattling on about microbrews. The point is to opt out of the information dragnet, not to be all Jason Bourne.
XMPP has been the cat’s pajamas so far.
Why did you two opt for XMPP rather than Signal Messenger?
When me and my mates set this up, Signal was only available on phones, not desktops. It also required providing a phone number to a central authority, which some of us were not comfortable doing. With XMPP we got the choice of a large number of clients to pick from. Both the server and the clients were lightweight.
I just had a search maybe you can self host a Signal server, but I did not know that at the time. I wanted to self-host. So that was a reason too, but maybe (?) a false reason. The Signal self hosting situation may be murky. My brief search found some claims that the official app does not support using other servers, and you need a customized app to do it. It might be more self host-able in theory than in practice. XMPP had multiple servers to pick from, and lots of clients.
All those things could balance more toward Signal if your priorities are different, tho.
Yeah the self-hosting thing is new, its really clunky and they dont encourage you not to use it. I think (?) they may have even discontinued it.
Its odd to me that Signal is supposedly the gold standard yet it breaks all these privacy 101 rules. Such as requiring you hand over your phone number to a central authority, not really allowing you to self host, and not posting an official app on fdroid. I’ve heard that portions of its official repo are not even open source (though I haven’t verified this for myself). XMPP sounds like the better choice to be honest.
maybe the phone number requirement on signal? that would be a dealbreaker if any of them didn’t have one
It also might be a dealbreaker from a privacy perspective. It’s weird that Signal, which is supposedly the gold standard, has this requirement.
I also prefer xmpp, which I find more stable and easier to set up and maintain.
Xmpp. Looks less polished, but works better, and isn’t mostly controlled by the ex-Amdocs Matrix Foundation.
Matrix, and it’s not even close.
Matrix clients suck, but xmpp ones are way worse.
Given you propose to chose between 2 federated solutions, I assume you want a good robust federation. So it’s easy: XMPP, period.
Anyone who has experienced self-hosting knows Matrix is several times heavier on memory and CPU than XMPP, and that’s one of the reasons 99% of the Matrix users are on 1 server, while I actually dnn’t even know which XMPP server is the largest.:
Matrix feels like fake decentralyzation: it still used in the og server for 99% of the time?
Take this with a grain of salt cause this is just what I’ve heard from a friend who knows a lot more about server hosting than I do, but from what I’ve heard hosting a Matrix homeserver is a potential legal liability unless you’re really selective about who you let on your server cause it stores the entire state of every room a user uses, so all it takes is one friend of a friend to visit a sketchy room where people have shared csam and you could be in trouble.
Assuming this is accurate and not just my friend misunderstanding something or being overly paranoid I could imagine people being very hesitant about hosting their own server rather than just using the default matrix.org server.
This is right. It actually made me wonder how likely it is on xmpp.
Because in public rooms talking about whatever android app all of a sudden you could have some rando come in and drop csam and leave. Then they propagates and Im not sure if the deletion does or not.
Real big issue IMO.
Bullshit community lol
