The Discord situation, and the shortcomings of FOSS alternatives

2026-02-17

Halfway through the month already, huh?

Thank you again to everyone who reads and comments, either through my guestbook or email. I know I put off responding ;_;

The Discord situation

So, Discord.

If you haven't already heard, they are planning to roll out age verification worldwide to all users under a new "teen by default" assumption, which is some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard. A thousand other people have probably already talked about this so I won't really get into it, but wow. I think the most interesting part of this is that now people are looking at alternatives to Discord en masse, however... there aren't really any good alternatives that replace exactly what Discord does.

I actually use Matrix (through Element on Windows, Nheko on Linux, and Fluffychat on mobile) as my primary and preferred communication for 1-on-1 chats, though I still use Discord for the following things:

Voice chat; VC through Matrix is extremely hit or miss depending on your client, and overall I think it just kind of blows. Discord on the other hand does this extremely well, for both group and DM calls
Keeping up with a few local servers, ie. for the arcade I go to and the J-core rave group
Talking with people who are not using Matrix

As as result, I am disappointed in the direction Discord is going, but it also doesn't affect me too much because the people I talk to the most are already available on Matrix, or through other platforms like Steam chat (which I used to use a lot years ago, so I wouldn't be mad if I had to go back to it). This all being said... Matrix is garbage. I hate Matrix, dude.

And so, what this really is is a great opportunity for me to complain about open source chat protocols. My favourite!

Matrix

I've seen Matrix/Element touted as a possible alternative, and I've gotta say I disagree (though I suppose it is possible).

I have self-hosted Matrix on and off since 2020, and it is hot garbage, albeit usable. Their flagship server software, Synapse, is extremely resource intensive to the point of it being unusable for large rooms. This was my initial experience with self-hosting back in 2020:

I’ve been looking into setting up the Matrix chat protocol on a VPS recently and tbh, it has not gone well.

Their server option, Synapse, has extremely shit documentation for setup and configuration. The official docs are poor, and looking up guides online just gave me conflicting information. I did end up finding success with matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, but Synapse ended up being way too CPU intensive for accessing larger rooms. Like, deadass trying to access an 1000 user room (the read-only #homeowners:matrix.org which is for Synapse release announcements/updates) ended up crashing my server.

Anyway, the company behind Matrix and its Discord clone client, Riot, offers managed hosting so I decided to give it a try as it does have a free trial. And, it turns out… their “small host” which costs 10$USD and is limited to 5 users has the same limitations as my VPS did. Woooo.

And really, the performance has not gotten any better. I think in 2023 or 2024 I started self-hosting Synapse again until fairly recently, and yeah, it still sucks. Some of the alternative server options that aren't Synapse do seem promising, but they all have weird quirks (iirc I think it was mainly bot weirdness) that haven't made them appealing for general usage for me. Maybe things are better now with Conduit and Dendrite these days, but I haven't actually given them a try yet.

However, I will note that while self-hosting is a pain, using someone else's server is generally okay (unless it crashes or the owner takes it down...). It can still be slow in larger rooms or have various issues, but I currently use tchncs.de as my homeserver and it's pretty alright, though I should probably make another alt at some point.

Anwyay, I currently actually have a vendetta against the Matrix Foundation. Recently on Bluesky someone retweeted a post from them titled Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification, and it really made me feel nothing but resentment and disillusionment towards the whole project. What do you mean they are using this as an opportunity to promote premium paid Matrix.org accounts...??

It bothers me to no end that while acknowledging that users can use whatever homeserver they like, they fail to make finding alternative servers any easier, as the only things they promote on their site are their own offerings as well as other paid hosts, which have descriptions that seem to indicate that they are possibly sponsors of some sort.

Matrix has long been criticised for the absolute mass of people just using the core homeserver (akin to mastodon.social), but at least Mastodon has the Join Mastodon site providing alternatives. This list of alternatives homeservers does exist, but there's nothing on the matrix.org official site nor the Element site -- likely because they seem to be aiming to please corporate users these days by pushing business plans and professional usage.

It was interesting to note this in the blog post:

However, the reality is that the team at Element who originally created Matrix have had to focus on providing deployments for the public sector (see here or here) to be able to pay developers working on Matrix.

And it makes me realise, who is Matrix even for anymore? While there are still hobbyists working on clients and alternative servers, the main "foundation" behind it is preoccupied with government contracts. Even if Matrix was a good alternative to Discord, I don't think it would be staying one for much longer.

XMPP

Anyway, in light of all that, I regret bringing my friends to Matrix instead of XMPP years ago. Hindsight is 20/20, but yeowch. XMPP is a much harder sell, though, and is absolutely not a Discord replacement unless just used for DMs or small group chats.

XMPP is... odd. I've tried hosting XMPP a few time now, and it's a lot more mature in addition to being much more lightweight. The main issue I always have with it is a lack of feature cohesion between servers due to the large variety of XEPs (for those not familiar, think of them as feature modules, with some examples being support for avatars, encryption, and/or file uploads) -- while there is a general accepted level of compliance expected for each server, there is no actual requirement of compliance. This can lead to a very weird, fragmented ecosystem, where you have some servers that support some features, while others just don't. And then some clients support certain features, but not all, so may or may not even have access to certain features depending on what client you're using. Fun!

There are things out there that aim to change that though, like Snikket -- I think I tested out their package once, and it was pretty decent, aiming to provide a simple, compliant, all-in-one XMPP server package. I like that vision.

However, even if I get working hosting, the issue I always have is that I never have anyone to talk to XMPP... I already convinced some people I know to use Matrix, there's no way I'm convincing them to move again. And I don't mean this in a "guys add me on XMPP way!!" because really, I barely talk to anyone and I am very selective with my social circle. I'm the kind of person who you add on an app, you send me a message, and then I never respond LOL. I have a "lurker" type personality and I don't do well in conversations...

Other alternatives?

I think the main thing people want out of a Discord competitor is a replacement for servers/guilds. For some godforsaken reason, people seem to want to be in group chats with hundreds or thousands of strangers, and I don't think that experience is capable of being replicated on any other chat app. Huge Discord servers pretty much replaced dedicated forums and discussion boards, and so to me, I think those are the only real logical alternatives. I doubt a return to those is likely, though.

So, all that being said, I don't even what a good alternative is, if there are good alternatives. Maybe something new will come up, but to be quite honest, I think everyone is just going to skip the age verification and keep using Discord, just with the "teen by default" stuff enabled. Adult content will likely move elsewhere, as always, or I think it'll just become completely unrestricted and unlabelled (look at Tumblr), thus making the default experience even worse. But so it goes.

Side note: Japanese learning

As of writing I have currently have a 17 day streak in Anki. Yayy!! I have also taken to watching Japanese children's YT videos for some really basic concepts and words -- Phalanx questions my methods, but really, as someone who cannot read or write, I currently have more in common with a clueless 3 year old on an iPad than anyone else.

When I listen to JP songs now (particularly Aqours songs, which usually aren't too complex or hard to understand), I feel that I'm started to get more of an understanding of what is being said through knowing more common words and becoming more familiar with how sentences are structured. However, I definitely still need to pick up the damned grammar book sooner than later so I can get a proper understanding of how verbs are conjugated and whatnot.

When I was in school, I was one of those losers who willingly took extra French classes in addition to Latin, and overall I think I've always enjoyed language learning (though I did not stick with French or Latin past high school). I've always felt I picked up grammar fairly quickly -- I think one of the big things that fucks with people learning any langauge is that they get too hung up on looking for direct English comparisons and translations -- though I think the part that always screwed over was when I was presented with new words I didn't know the meaning of, or didn't know in the moment when I needed to use them. Obviously expanding your vocabulary comes with time and exposure, but god is that process painful. I hate not being able to just know or figure out something -_-

That being said, I haven't started on any sort of full immersion yet -- ideally, I'd like to be one of those people who uses their apps in software in Japanese, though I'm hoping to get a decent grasp on kana before I dive straight in LOL. That part's easy at least, but it's hard for me to focus and learn a lot at once, so I'm just taking my time... I also haven't practiced any writing yet o_O but at the very least, I have pretty much all the time in the world.

Whenever I start to feel better about my minimal skills, I'm hoping to start tackling some of the Digimon anime and games in Japanese. For once, I'm glad it started as a shonen franchise bc if it's aimed at elementary schoolers, I'll probably have a much easier time understanding it than if it was seinen or aimed more at adults. In particular, once I have a better understanding of reading, I'm hoping to tackle Digimon Story Super Xros Wars; it's the only Story game I haven't played due to it never being translated into English.