this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
32 points (94.4% liked)
deGoogle
400 readers
56 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm sorry, but signal is absolutely not discord replacement. It covers maybe a third of what discord does well. It's a features issue.
Revolt is the closest in terms of ui and function, with matrix being slightly closer than signal in terms of working the way a discord user might expect, but still not as close as revolt.
Heck, teamspeak and mumble both have android apps, and would likely be better than signal specifically for gaming and casual chats. Since desktop signal can be iffy, at least those options cover three out of four platforms (no idea if there's iOS/mac apps or not). Disclaimer is that I've never used either on Linux, just know that they have options for it.
Hi! This post I made was to give some people the pros and cons of alternative chatting applications.
Personally, me and quite a few of my friends have a Discord server we chat on with many different channels and their respective topics. We also have Discord bots and voice channels. We recently did an experiment as a server to try branching out to various different alternative chat applications like Matrix, Signal, XMPP, and we even tried Revolt at some point.
We found that, even though Signal doesn't have feature parity, that's the chatting application that we all gravitated to. Some gravitated more to Matrix, which has more feature parity with Discord, but I guess we ended up not really needing all of the features that Discord offers to achieve what we wanted (a community of people who like talking to eachother). We went from a Discord server with many channels, voice channels, and bots, to a single group chat that is now feeling refreshingly active.
So when I list it here as an alternative, keep in mind that for many people, it can be if a community thinks they like it.
Either way, the point of my graphic that I made was to give people some perspective on the landscape of chatting applications that might fit their needs if they currently use Discord. For a lot of users and communities, Signal might, which is why I included it.
I personally also use Mumble to talk to my friends alongside Signal/Matrix. Mumble is great for voice chat, and since I self host it, it's not as prone to being down in a way that I can't investigate and fix. I totally recommend it for voice chats.
And finally, I find the Signal app perfectly serviceable and fits my needs :)