Question: Is there a Self Hosted Discord like app?

It's funny you mention the VC funding. As far as I can tell, it's only made it worse. Discord would have done great if they just kept expectations low. Instead, they're now expected to create massive returns. That must come at the cost of consumers. I hope consumers get tired of it and leave, or someone else comes offering the simple service Discord used to provide.

Is it worth preserving though?

Call them cretins all you want, Discord in a great piece of software and very powerful. The usability is better than most others.

Can confirm, I host Matrix (homeserver synapse) and Element. Voice is a pain to get set up but I hear there are other matrix services which will do this for you easier. It's a process though. You can get text chat up in a day, voice is going to be a bit after that, a lot of tinkering.

yes i second matrix. it's different from discord in a lot of ways, but it's still a pretty seamless transition. for anyone who wants to host matrix, i recommend the continuwuity homeserver software. it's much easier to host than synapse and is significantly faster for 99% of use cases

if you're just trying use matrix, i prefer cinny over element for the client. cinny's ui is also very similar to discord's and it handles space/room grouping very intuitively. there's also fluffychat (less feature rich) and schildichat (element fork), among others. however, element is currently the only client which fully supports voice chat

for instances, i recommend choosing something other than matrix.org. right now, matrix is barely decentralized because the vast majority of users choose matrix.org, which isn't great. also matrix.org collects a lot of data and requires more information to register than most servers. some other good public instances are:

• tchncs.de
• unredacted.org
• catgirl.cloud
• calitabby.net

there are also many, many smaller public instances, but it's probably better to choose a relatively big one for moderation reasons. a lot of people think matrix is dead or no one uses it, but there are plenty of active communities if you know where to look

for your friends who refuse to quit discord for some reason, matrix's ecosystem also has lots of bridges. if you're willing to self host, i recommend out of your element. the only caveat is that it doesn't support e2ee rooms

Not bad is a good description. It’s not fun to use compared to other chat software.

Most of the possible contenders lack video calls and some also other needs mentioned by the OP. Nextcloud Talk has them all

Excellent summary

Voice chat works out of the box with Matrix.

It uses WebRTC and tries to do P2P connections. Note that this leaks your IP to the other caller and vice versa, but it's also quite fast as you can establish a direct connection.

If P2P fails it will try to fallback to your configured TURN server and use that one for relaying.

However not every instance has one (as TURN servers are usually not that modern and straight forward...) and if this is the case it will fallback to Matrix's global TURN servers.

XMPP is also still a thing and IMO much easier to host (at least ejabberd is). Look into Movim, which looks quite nice as a discord replacement on top of XMPP.

Setting up Element Call on my instance was difficult on its own, I understand why Synapse doesn’t come with it out of the box, essentially you spin up Matrix’s JWT service for authenticating clients and it if approved forwards the connection to the Livekit ports which must be opened on your firewall (ie port forwarded), otherwise people will not be able to connect to calls.

Big PITA and in my experience, on my home network, can conflict with games with VOIP chats so don’t follow the default 50000:55000 port range Livekit recommends or you’ll run into issues like I did, each person consumes 2 ports so adjust the range to your need.

Edit: I don’t suggest running Element Call standalone, it has issues of its own, once you get Livekit and JWT running and follow This guide you should have your element call support in Synapse now, pro-tip for those running synapse behind docker and get confused on the whole ./well-known part of the documentation you can edit your ./well-known in your homeserver.yaml file like such:

serve_server_wellknown: true

extra_well_known_client_content:
  optional: client
  "org.matrix.msc4143.rtc_foci": [
      {
          "type": "livekit",
          "livekit_service_url": "https://livekit-jwt.your.domain/"
      }
  ]

I couldn't figure out how to sign up for matrix server. Maybe there are peer tube videos.

https://matrix-construct.github.io/tuwunel/deploying/docker.html?highlight=voice#voice-communication

tuwunel seems to have some docker guides for how to set up voice & docker.

Have you Trier ESS?

Just a fair warning in reply to this that the self-hosted version of Stoat doesn't currently have voice chat. It's an open issue that's currently paused until they can finish their rework.

If you have the skill for it, it seems like you can patch work the existing voice chat back in, but it's not part of their initial setup and there's no instructions on how to do so properly

Honestly the name choice adds difficulty in getting friends to take it seriously. Why did they pick "stoat"

Is there a significant benefit over matrix?

Where is the documentation for self-hosting it?

has anyone tried their iOS client? from their description it seems like it's less mature than the android version, kinda concerning as my friend group has some iphone users.

To create an invite you:

# drop into mongo shell
docker compose exec database mongosh

# create the invite
use revolt
db.invites.insertOne({ _id: "enter_an_invite_code_here" })

That's pretty jank.

Also - I'm getting pretty fed-up with self-hosting documentation that assumes very specific environments and goes into detailed configuration for that environment. Don't tell me how to setup a server and how to enable/configure SSH and setup UFW as part of setting up your software. Just tell me how to setup your software and what ports it uses.

Wait, requiring a face scan of everyone?? I know they started doing that as an age verification thing for some people, but everyone?

Bummer that it doesn't have voice chat yet in the self hosted version. Hopefully soon - I would probably switch if they had that.

Ventrillo.

Dammit, son, makin' me feel old now

What's that you say? IRC?

Ventrilo was awful, having huge delay. Also no persistent chat.

TeamSpeak is proprietary and required a license for more than 8 users iirc. Chat might have been persistent?

Mumble was/is king in terms of voice chat. Open source, fully featured, strong certificate based security, best latency. It's used as backend in many big games, too. No persistent chat, though.

We used IRC for chat and Mumble for voice like 10 years ago when I played Eve Online. Works great!

Teamspeak still requires a license above a small user size, but has multiple clients that can accomodate different target audicences. The TS3 client still looks like it did back in the windows 7 days and the TS5 client is just copying discords homework (Not a clue what happend to 4 and I believe 6 is under development). Both use the same server backend and database structure so both work with one server and different user expirences.

Mumble is still the gold standard for handling large user bases (there is a reason big EvE Online alliances use mumble). It will take longer to set up, the configuration is handled by the server, not through authorized user accounts like TS.

You se knowledgeable on this, so I hope you'll allow me to ask this.

I don't know anything about Discord, but I selfhost the Mattermost chat system for my family. They, too, are narrowing the free tier.

Can Matrix replace Mattermost for a family? Several separate "rooms" for various topics, plus 1-to-1 chats.

may i ask which homeserver and client you use? it seems like synapse and element is not the best choice especially for small number of people.

E2EE group chats on matrix seems to be a huge problem still. I look forward to their MLS implementation. Hopefully that fixes a lot of these UX issues.

Jitsi is great as a Skype/Zoom replacement. It's not a 'room' on a server, but voice and video chats are stable and fast.

Not a bad recommendation, but I disagree.

Rocket chat is just as heavy (in fact, it federates to Matrix), uses MongoDB, and has steadily pulled features behind a paywall for years. To me, if I'm hosting the service on my own machines and I'm not using their live support, the idea of paying for the privilege of using it is absurd.

Matrix has come a long way, including integrated voice and video chats.

Matrix is pretty lightweight if you use something like Conduit or its spinoffs for a homeserver instead of Synapse, which is very heavy.

Zulip is great… on a PC. On mobile is a totally different thing, and not in a good way. 😕

It's a shame, zulip doesn't have e2ee. not even DMs. but they seem to be working towards federation of some sort? there are no good/perfect solutions out there.

Five years ago, a open-source project I worked on moved to Zulip (from Slack) and it was a small hurdle. But after a month, I really like it!

So much that I've pushed a few other open source projects (who lived on Discord).

I was really surprised when I started a new job two years ago and THEY used a self-hosted Zulip. It's everything Im used to on Slack.

Discord has team speak/video sharing, which I don't think Zulip has. But then again, we use something else for video calls.

Yeah, we're using Conversations and it's fine for most things.

Will be self hosting prosidy "sooon"... and it'll all be in-house.

Does XMPP work with group audio calling and video calling?

i also have a mumble server but every once in a while we need streaming. what is your rtmp setup? i am thinking of mediamtx, but am annoyed by having to post the link to the stream every time and everyone needs to resize windows manually to fit all on ome screen.

Dont knock matrix for being slow, it updates just as fast as anyone else's network speed is and it is focused on encryption and security. Given [gestures broadly to everything these days] people moving away from major platforms should really take into account their digital footprint and privacy.

could you recommend a good xmpp setup? i heard good things about snikket, maybe something else too?

Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. WebRTC (like voice/video calling) tends to throw a fit without some sort of TURN functionality. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.

Edit: I looked it up. Cloudflare offers TURN servers, with the first 1000GB for free each month, but then it charges for use after that. But that does mean a server that gets used for video calls more than a few hours per month could end up incurring costs. Because that TURN server would be handling all of the video streaming data, so it will quickly eat that 1000GB limit. It also means true self-hosting is prohibitively difficult, as you’d be tying yourself to an external provider unless you go out of your way to host your own TURN server.

I feel like Matrix has gotten a lot of hate the last year or so. Don't really know why. Perhaps people see it as being misguided.

Element and Element Call, although no streaming audio support on the horizon anytime soon.

Is Stoat not an alternative, it literally copies the UI too

@Kubiac @Vaggumon Man I remember using that like 15 years ago or so at a job. I honestly didn't realize it was still going. cool!

Mind you that they keep paywalling previously free features. Example of them paywalling group calls and their Playbooks feature (v1 - generally available, v2 - in paid plans only): https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/mattermost-v10-changelog.html

RocketChat is pretty easy to setup with docker. I couldn't get it to work in podman after many, many hours of trying despite the documentation saying it does. They have a dedicated podman doc page but I just hit problem after problem after problem. I was trying to do it with the containerized mongo as a PoC though - a lot of problems came from that (mongo connection). Maybe I'll try again with a "real" db server. Root cause seemed to be networking differences between docker and podman.

I found it really odd that your server has to get a registration key from their server... That part weirds me out.