Post

I wish matrix was more stable. It does work if people are willing to put up with a bit of jank, though!

Patrick Perini

@pcperini.com

I think a stronger alternative would crop up quickly if an exodus occurred/was likely. But, yeah. Ugh.

Yeah, FOSS gets exponentially better the bigger any given community gets (eg: blender, godot). Discord just seems to be unfathomably entrenched at the moment, despite the blatant enshittification on their way to an IPO.

Grath

@grath.org

Last time Discord was flirting with AI, Matrix + Jitsi seemed like it was the closest to a viable alternative to Discord (excluding "move to another free-ish commercial service for 1-5 years until they enshittify" or "pay $$$$$$$ for Slack") and that was gonna be a looooot of jank

10/1/26, 4:28 am0 reposts10 likes

I believe matrix has their own VOIP at this point, but I believe only element has implemented it haha

Yugge

@yugge.bsky.social

@zeitgeistmistress.northsky.social

They use livekit with a matrix layer to handle room presence, calling it MatrixRTC. I believe nheko and fluffychat also have support for it. But yes, in general I think matrix has a big issue of element basically implementing features and then forcing matrix to adopt them because it is in use.

Nina

Stoat is probably the closest alternative in terms of UI and functionality.

@zeitgeistmistress.northsky.social

I've been keeping my eye on stoat (I enjoy the new name haha) but it still feels pretty half baked and their progress doesn't appear as significant as matrix at this point. Not to mention the matrix protocol is a very solid baseline to compete with. Looking forward to their E2EE though!

Nina

That's fair! I feel like they're doing different things. Matrix is focused on security and privacy and Stoat is more of a "discord, but it's not shady"

Lmao, yeah that feels pretty accurate. Matrix has existed for a while before it as a discord alternative became something to think about. (Groups are only recently starting to get wider implementation) And the way clients handle groups is still super janky too, so still probably a good way to go xD

Grath

@grath.org

@zeitgeistmistress.northsky.social

Last I saw (albeit this was back when they were Revolt) they didn't support screen sharing yet, and the main Discord community I'm in does scheduled screen shared events three or four times a week plus ad-hoc additional events.

Nina

Yup yup, it still doesn't have all the features, though iirc they're working on adding screen sharing.

Grath

@grath.org