Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix, or are you using something else entirely?
Fluxer is a better Discord alternative than Matrix and XMPP.
That said, XMPP is more private. Matrix is worse than everything else.
fluxer can be a better alternative, but right now is isn’t
i can barely use it due to server issues and selfhosting is not an option at the moment
not trying to dismiss fluxer, just making it clear to anyone trying to use it in its current state
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. It is however pretty stable, and could be used while user’s wait for those additional features.
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
can’t be, you need to setup your enc keys beforehand
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.
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.
I’ve personally not had terribly good experiences with Matrix. I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly, it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to, requiring both parties to regularly need to re-send messages until they finally unencrypted properly. This made it a real ball-ache to use, as you could send a message, and then hours later have someone else say they can’t read it. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata it spreads around.
XMPP on the other hand has always been snappy and fast, and I much prefer the clients available for it. It’s currently the most promising federated option, IMHO, with Movim being the most promising client as a Discord replacement.
It’s still missing some essential Discord-like features, such as groups of rooms in a server and drop-in voice rooms, but both features are being actively worked on, and a funding campaign was started to accelerate development.
But what it can do already is:
- Excellent text chats, including with very good optional encryption
- Group voice/video calls with screensharing (must use a chromium based browser to screenshare an app’s audio)
- A neat integrated blogging feature for communities & individuals
- a built-in paint program to draw stuff to input into the chat
- Full working and proven federation thanks to the XMPP back-end
stop the disinformation, thanks
https://lemmy.ca/comment/21700498deleted by creator
Xmpp. Looks less polished, but works better, and isn’t mostly controlled by the ex-Amdocs Matrix Foundation.
Bullshit community lol
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 and 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 to fulfill the video call part, 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.
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.
- Fluxer
- Slightly sus vibes
- Lacks self hosting instructions
- Media is non-permanent, which is I guess fair to keep infra costs down, but its unsuitable for my groups media usage habits.
- Looks promising, but I’ve not actually tried it given the lack of self hosting instructions.
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.
EDIT: Forgot Fluxer. Added.
- 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.
- 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
Which ones are federated?
Movim.eu seems to be. Rocketchat also claims to federate via matrix
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.
I’m not too sure, I didn’t look terribly deeply on that front since that’s not something my group uses often, and its difficult to test on my own. That said, I believe Matrix does have some level of voice chat support, though AFAIK its more similar to Skype’s calls than Discord’s drop-in/drop-out voice channels. No idea about XMPP though.
- Stoat
The problem is that “Discord” means something else for almost anyone and there is no alternative that 100% covers all the usecases.
For many public chats, IRC with a modern server and client is perfectly suitable, and for my private gaming sessions Mumble is as voice chat is doing fine even though friends are complaining that they can’t just use it in a browser.
For general IM stuff XMPP is best, but I guess few people use Discord for that. Matrix is in general slow and clunky, no real point of using that except if you are forced to because some very specific FOSS projects insist on using it.
P.S.: I mostly use IRC through a XMPP gateway.
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.
maybe the phone number requirement on signal? that would be a dealbreaker if any of them didn’t have one
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.
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.
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.
I also prefer xmpp, which I find more stable and easier to set up and maintain.
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.
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.
