this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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I really wish there was a good competitor to Discord. I have not found one that has the same screen sharing feature. Revolt (now Stoat) gets close but lacks the screen sharing - something me and my friends use a lot. They are adding this soon so hopefully it is good
Now more than ever people will have to choose between privacy and comfort. And not to be a dick, but now more than ever, people choosing comfort are fucking over people who choose privacy.
I know that person he is me.
Uhm, yeah, it's a chat app, not a screen-sharing app.
Yeah no, sometimes you need screen sharing in the "chatting app"
A lot of university clubs are on Discord, and my cyber club does tutorials and labs on the weekends where the leader screen-shares. It's nice because you can see the video in real time and ask questions whenever, rather than watching a pre-recorded video and having to hope you have no issues while following along.
I mean, this is literally why Zoom blew up so much during COVID. Real-time learning works more than asynchronous learning for a lot of people.
Screen-sharing is part of chat apps nowadays. You're fully within your rights to stay on IRC and pretend that featureful chat is not the norm these days, but that doesn't mean society is going to move to IRC with you. Like it or not, encrypted chat apps have to become even more usable for the average person for adoption to go up. This reminds me of how all the old Linux-heads insisted that gaming was for children and that Linux didn't need gaming. Suddenly now that Linux has gaming, adoption is going way up - what a coincidence.
Edit: Also for the record, I have a tech-savvy friend who refuses to move to Signal until there are custom emoji reactions, of all things. You can definitely direct your ire towards these people, but the reality is some people have a certain comfort target, and convincing them to settle for less is often harder than improving the app itself.
Revolt (Stoat?) is alright, but good luck getting people to join there lol, Discord is the only thing people are willing to join
I don't know why people keep saying this. You either pay for a service, or you get a company extracting as much data as they can from you for advertiser or VC money. Servers and bandwidth cost money
Telegram is profitable through semi-pushing some cryptocurrency and selling premium. Various free-to-play games are profitable through the sale of optional content.
There are alternatives in offering delayed or optional monetary costs.
Matrix, XMPP, GNU-Jami & SimpleX
None of those come close to the features Discord has.
What do you use other than text and voice chat. Forums exist but thats weird.
Matrix or Jitsi with Lemmy or any popular forum software would be my suggestion. More secure and private but require some technical knowledge.
Matrix is an absolutely pale imitation of Discord.
Yes it is very upsetting that the most popular chat platform in the Western world is in league with Sauron, but Matrix as a replacement is a glorified ICQ client that regularly yells at you that your device is untrusted now and there's no hope of fixing it, you loser.
Yeah Matrix is horrible, I don't think it will ever catch on
I used Element and it was also an overcomplicated and cluttered UI. They should've just straight copied Discord like ReVolt/Stoat did
It's Matrix.
We don't need another competitor. We need more people using the federated option.
Same thing with alternatives to windows. We already have it, but people are too stupid to use it.