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.
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.
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
Yes, our team uses it as a Skype/teams replacement, we pay $20 per month for a server on etke.cc in Germany. Their implementation, however, doesn’t seem to do group videocalls with screensharing, just group voice.
We are not federated because it is just an internal service that we need.
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
Matrix is the canonical fediverse replacement. I’ve also seen recommendations for zulip recently.
