daskye

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 :)

This is a very early beta project and half the functionality is buggy

Yes I did mention you need your phone number to register

It's actually revolt.chat

Maaybe but it's not got any way to have an encrypted DM and the development is also pretty slow. The devs don't seem interested much in supporting the self hosting aspect of it either.

Mumble is great for voice calls! I use it for that, but it's not amazing for chatting, which is what I use Signal or Matrix for

I meant my post

I know this isn't DeGoogle but let's be honest, Discord is just as bad at this point.

True but pinterest needs to ban AI

@theblips@lemm.ee True though, it is not effective? We are talking right now in a non-profit area of the internet achieved through open source contributions and community participation :)

I'd say that's a pretty nice, effective thing that has been accomplished

@Libb@jlai.lu Well to be honest, there was a time on the internet that felt like people produced content which was not driven in any way by profit. This content was purely made to socialise with other people who spent a lot of time using the internet.

I think the internet has a lot of potential for being a place for growing ourselves individually and socially, instead of being somewhere toxic or profit driven. That's what I mean by productive: growing ourselves and growing community. Also growing these things without some form of profiting company looming over it.

That's how I view something like the fediverse, or how I view personal blogs like your own blog for example.

Or, should we consume more content that is conducive to being social? What type of content would that be?