this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.

Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?

Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".

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[–] [email protected] 124 points 2 days ago (4 children)

it's Element/Matrix if we're lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won't be a "platform" you have to leave when it goes corporate.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Sadly I found out yesterday:

Matrix is not a community-based software, it was born [00] in Amdocs [01], a multinational corporation founded in Israel.

https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html

Many were claiming its impossible to get contributions merged as well.

I would be happy to find out this information is wrong or outdated.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Revolt is F/OSS

https://github.com/revoltchat/

It's not just a company with a clone of Discord, all the server back end, etc is open.

[–] [email protected] 86 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:

  1. Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
  2. Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it'll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.

Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I have yet to try revolt, but I thought you could just add stand-alone servers to your client (like idk, mumble). Is a revolt instance a whole separate ecosystem/infrastructure and not just a server entry?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 days ago (2 children)

My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.

That said I've had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I get why Federation can cause issues (most of the time it's moderation related), but why would an extra option be a deal-breaker? Federation can always be disabled on a per-domain basis if you prefer. In fact, I'd argue it's best practice to only allow domains on a case-by-case basis to prevent spam and abuse.

On the converse, you can't enable Federation on a platform that doesn't have it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

They were talking about matrix itself, not a specific option. And I’m not going to lie, having to hand hold your servers federation choices seems like a hassle. At that point why not just use a self hosted, non federated option?

[–] white_nrdy 4 points 1 day ago

I think the point they're making is you can effectively have a self hosted non federated option with Matrix. Just disable federation as a whole (which I'm pretty sure is completely possible. Given companies use matrix for comms, and might not want federation, for similar reasons to what is being discussed here)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?

It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.

[–] JackbyDev 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker.

The federation itself is a deal breaker

Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?

Because the person they're responding to said the lack of the optional feature was a deal breaker for them on a different piece of software.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

I’m might be being dense but… Still: why would an optional feature be a dealbreaker? You just restated, you didn’t address the confusing logic.

[–] JackbyDev 1 points 9 hours ago

Go ask the actual person who said it was a deal breaker for them, I can't explain it more simply than I have.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

but also with request ratelimiting

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That doesn't really change that it's one company hosting it. Unless you're willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren't willing to join each others instances?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I guess the easy solution here to to make it use oauth2 authentication. Then you can just authenticate using one account elsewhere. If fediverse services also at some point become oauth2 providers, then even better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's still not a solution. That entails non unified communication, access, and search. Making it easy to log in to others still doesn't solve easy sharing between others. Also oauth2 is a pain to set up, and many people hosting their own instance aren't going to bother.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sorry but what exactly do you communicate and access between discord servers? Are you talking about PMs which are by default independent of servers?

Unified search could easily be achieved through third party tools at the least, like for IRC. I don't think even discord has unified search between servers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh hey, you're totally right, that's crazy. I use Beeper (hosted matrix setup) to aggregate my chats and I guess I've always been using that to search across all servers without realizing. Fully thought the DM search would also search across servers.

DMs are definitely also another case though - you can't easily DM people on another server if that requires you to log into another server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's true about DM, however DMs are not a core use-case for discord-like services. It's the group/voice chats etc. I could see a workaround like lemmy does, where if you want to DM a user in another server, you might be able to do it through your fediverse instance (i.e. a DM simply has your fediverse instance DM their fediverse instance), but I'm sure there can be more elegant things like. However DMs by themselves are a weird thing by themselves, so much so, that even bluesky had to bolt DMs on-top and outside of their protocol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

I disagree. DMs are most certainly a core use-case. I would argue that it’s a part in parcel feature for any group/voice chat app. DMs have been a standard feature in every major voice/video app, group or otherwise, for over 25 years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

The point of it being a core feature, is that people are not going to Discord for its DM capabilities.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

...theoretically for now

It a centralized server controlled by the devs

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

Host your own then

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nheko provides an interface that is reminiscent of Discord. Fully featured and fast Matrix client.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Thank you for the recommendation. I tried element a while ago and found it lacking. Matrix must be the way forward. Disregarding IRC of course.