With the recent news about discord asking for face or ID scan, what other alternatives are there that we can recommend to our less tech-savvy friends?
We’ve been using Element (Matrix) for our household group chats and it has worked perfectly. That said, I do have a whole ass IT professional in-house to set up a dedicated server so I cannot speak to ease and such.
I think most people don’t want to self host though. I can’t speak to the ease of signing up and using the available public servers.
In terms of functionality as a chat program it’s great.
The only similar enough one that’s also free is matrix. At least what I’ve found so far.
https://sharedown.kaffekod.nu/05c3716c-05fd-46f0-a90d-efdc6ee8c8a4 link will work for about a week.
I’m considering IRC and teamspeak3 instead
Does Matrix do voice yet? If not, it’s not a discord alternative - it’s an IRC alternative
As far as I understand it, they kind of do but you need to install a third party app and use it through the Element interface. But I don’t know for sure.
I have updated the list: https://sharedown.kaffekod.nu/05c3716c-05fd-46f0-a90d-efdc6ee8c8a4
I want to say Stoat… However I’m struggling to even create an account… And I have much more patience than my less-savvy friends.
If like me, you care less about servers and the “social media” aspect, and are just searching for group messaging, voice/video chat with screen-sharing capabilities, then Signal Desktop will suffice. That is what I’m preparing to suggest. You can now also sign up without a phone number which is a bonus.
That should work fine, at least until Stoat matures. As a bonus, doubles down as a replacement to Whatsapp: two birds, one stone.
Matrix is the canonical fediverse replacement. I’ve also seen recommendations for zulip recently.
