XMPP
XMPP (aka Jabber) is the community-owned standard for real-time federated messaging.
JoinJabber.org admin support chat
This is more of a Slack clone. Promising project, but the "enterprise" focus is a bit off-putting. In addition compatibility with other XMPP clients isn't great due to some design decisions they made.
This is slick! Looks pretty polished. I'm interested to figure out how they enable channel creation and management. I'm assuming this is just listing all the channels on the server and the instance doesn't federate?
I'm also always curious when there is an open source product like this that has a free self hosted version that they say is user capped at 20 users. How? Is that just an arbitrarily string of code inserted someone that can be easily stripped out? I see some forks so could be.
I personally think Movim is the best option for now. It doesn't aim to be a direct Discord clone, but it has a lot of the features Discord users would expect, except for the "spaces" (guilds) feature. But you can have A/V calls in groups with screen-sharing and so on, so functionality wise it isn't that far off. They are also currently thinking about turning the current community blogs into something more like Discord forums, but that is still in the planning phase.
There isn't one.
I recently spent a few weeks looking for exaclty that and I had no look.
I've looked into XMPP, Matrix and other FOSS self hosted options. There isn't anything out there offering the exact features as discord.
Disclaimer: I don't use discord and never will. But I do game frequently with a few close friends. I have bothered them so much asking them to try a few options.
Basically their requirements were:
- support for desktop (linux and windows)
- support for mobile (android)
- voice channels where you can see who's online before joining
- means to bundle several "channels" in a group (discord spaces)
My friends complained a lot about XMPP android apps, they mentioned the options available felt unfinished and looked ugly. I understand that's just an opinion but that is important for some people. Edit: spelling
The closest thing we've found is matrix, which is what we are using. But there really is only one client that works on the desktop/webapp, which is element. For android the only one available is schildichat next (spelling probably wrong). Matrix is also very tricky because not all server implementations support audio/video. The ability of seeing who's online before joining isn't available yet.
Matrix still lacks in many other things discord has to offer. I haven't been able to get stickers working, for instance. Not a dealbreaker for my friends but others may think differently.
I am not advocating for Matrix. It is very cumbersome because it depends on having the exact server and client that works. But it is what we are using.
I've been digging into thos heavily regarding XMPP. Good news is there is some backend development going on that will enable this, bad news is its going to take a bit of time and then the clients will have to adopt or be developed. Maybe I will try out vibecoding it, lol.
That's nice to hear! I would love to see XMPP get the love it deserves.
XOWS has the front end aesthetic down
https://github.com/iquercorb/xows?tab=readme-ov-file
and so does prose.org
neither have actual subchannel/spaces functions across multiple domains though. Hopefully easy enough to patch in with new spaces protocol when it becomes available?
pardon the typos
Closest thing would be movim (mov.im), but note that Discord itself is several things wrapped into a frontend.