Why would you use Olm/Megolm for your chat protocol? Even Matrix doesn't want to be using it anymore (they're in theory planning a transition to IETF MLS, last I checked). Group E2E is incredibly hard to get right, not just because of the underlying cryptographic constructions, but because all the metadata and signaling that rides on top of and alongside the group encrypted messaging layer also influences key distribution.
If you're literally just doing a front end to Matrix, I get why you have to use the current Matrix protocol. But if you're doing something that isn't Matrix, you should avoid Olm.
Is anyone tracking all these open source Discord clones? I ask because I have seen about a dozen of them advertised by Youtube influencers. New chat clients seem to be showing up almost daily. I think it would be interesting to have a table that shows features, OS/phone support, E2EE, federation, scale how many clients per server per resources, etc...
As bob1029 said, making apps is easy especially now but getting friend groups to move is the real challenge so I think a column in the table should include a score for how easy it is to import Discord server history, chat history, invite friends and so on. I think there would have to be next to no friction or risks. If self hosted then backups would have to be encrypted and automated so that the servers can be treated as mostly ephemeral. Operating and maintaining Discord takes a rather large team so these open source alternatives would have to be able to show they have automated most tasks in a secure and fault tolerant manor that is hard to get wrong.
Cloning discord is easy. Convincing everyone in a particular circle to move to a new solution is the challenge. You have to force a partition in the social network unless everyone in your group is happy to run both applications side by side (they won't be).
I was there when teamspeak was forced out by the demands of the group. There was no fighting it. My individual ideological preferences cannot defeat those of a collective. These people just want to play games. They don't want to take up arms in my weird nerd battle against COTS software, closed platforms or buggy applications.
I've been exploring Chatto as a self-hosted chat UI in my homelab for interfacing with durable agents and it works pretty well so far, although the API is (by the author's own admission) not fully stable yet.
Yes I am running it now, it is pretty nice though custom, not related to the original developer, mobile application, have few annoying problems. I.e. it does not allow you to connect to your own server right away. It does not have notifications working on stable version. I had to ask an agent to do some changes first before it was usable.
On the other hand Strafe does not have it at all, so it is not really a competition.
Another Discord alternative that still lacks an iOS app. I personally don’t mind but if I am to switch my entire friend group to an alternative, native apps on mobile is a fundamental requirement.
And "discord" means "disagreement", "lack of harmony", "arguments" in English. Even weirder name for a chat application in an even more commonly used language.
"Slack" associates pretty strongly with "slack off" (get no work done) too, so that one's also strange.
I figured Slack referred to slack in task time estimation i.e. the amount of extra time allowed in a task. Collaborating on Slack would count towards that time.
The only explanation I can offer for “Slack” is that its founders and top brass have been adherents of the “parody religion” Church of the SubGenius, and have successfully interposed themselves into the everyday business machinations of a wide swath of Western businesses.
Meanwhile, “Discord” wouldn’t surprise me if it were a product of the Discordians themselves, a similarly disorganized “parody religion”.
I read it directly from the founder and former CEO, who included a screenshot from November 2012, about 9 months before the August 2013 release, of him using that acronym as a code name. https://xxcancel.com/stewart/status/780906639301812225
Can you elaborate on why E2E encryption is not "appropriate for childrens' messaging"? Does this imply that we should be able to surveil what children say to each other, or..?
yes, because most HNers are already old so none of that applies to them, thus it's either no internet, no phone or you have to have all kinds of spyware watching what your kids (right up until 18) do 24/7
I bet everyone would've loved to live like that when they were younger. right?
I had no clue videogames were for kids, silly me. I'd better uninstall Steam right now, and move to Microsoft Teams to talk to my friends while I'm at it.
Children shouldn't be using the internet unsupervised.
Games are also played by adults.
Discord is just a communication platform that isn't inherently tied to gaming.
Not to claim that Discord has like copyright over their layout, but do you not anticipate eventually running into problems with them due to using pretty much the same layout/visuals verbatim? It is to the point where one could easily be visually mistaken for the other unless a much closer look is taken
That's silly. Neither is Discord the only one with that layout (Slack and even things like Gajim have similar layouts) nor would/should it count as something that cannot be copied.
The fact that Apple back in the early iOS days thought it invented desktop icons is still absolutely ridiculous.
Why would you use Olm/Megolm for your chat protocol? Even Matrix doesn't want to be using it anymore (they're in theory planning a transition to IETF MLS, last I checked). Group E2E is incredibly hard to get right, not just because of the underlying cryptographic constructions, but because all the metadata and signaling that rides on top of and alongside the group encrypted messaging layer also influences key distribution.
If you're literally just doing a front end to Matrix, I get why you have to use the current Matrix protocol. But if you're doing something that isn't Matrix, you should avoid Olm.
Is anyone tracking all these open source Discord clones? I ask because I have seen about a dozen of them advertised by Youtube influencers. New chat clients seem to be showing up almost daily. I think it would be interesting to have a table that shows features, OS/phone support, E2EE, federation, scale how many clients per server per resources, etc...
As bob1029 said, making apps is easy especially now but getting friend groups to move is the real challenge so I think a column in the table should include a score for how easy it is to import Discord server history, chat history, invite friends and so on. I think there would have to be next to no friction or risks. If self hosted then backups would have to be encrypted and automated so that the servers can be treated as mostly ephemeral. Operating and maintaining Discord takes a rather large team so these open source alternatives would have to be able to show they have automated most tasks in a secure and fault tolerant manor that is hard to get wrong.
Cloning discord is easy. Convincing everyone in a particular circle to move to a new solution is the challenge. You have to force a partition in the social network unless everyone in your group is happy to run both applications side by side (they won't be).
I was there when teamspeak was forced out by the demands of the group. There was no fighting it. My individual ideological preferences cannot defeat those of a collective. These people just want to play games. They don't want to take up arms in my weird nerd battle against COTS software, closed platforms or buggy applications.
Previous alternatives for discord never included video, so they were no alternatives. So: great to see this!
Nitpick: the bottom row on the front page shows a discord link, but not their own strafe link. I hope they can add this because of dogfooding.
I also want to highlight Chatto here: https://chatto.run/ Very lightweight and self-hostable. Not e2ee, though.
Another one is Stoat (formerly Revolt): https://stoat.chat/
Fluxer is another one (self-hostable, not e2ee afaik): https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer
I've been exploring Chatto as a self-hosted chat UI in my homelab for interfacing with durable agents and it works pretty well so far, although the API is (by the author's own admission) not fully stable yet.
Yes I am running it now, it is pretty nice though custom, not related to the original developer, mobile application, have few annoying problems. I.e. it does not allow you to connect to your own server right away. It does not have notifications working on stable version. I had to ask an agent to do some changes first before it was usable.
On the other hand Strafe does not have it at all, so it is not really a competition.
https://github.com/StrafeChat
There’s a GitHub but it was all the way at the bottom of the page behind a tiny icon in a group of other socials. At least on mobile it was.
Another Discord alternative that still lacks an iOS app. I personally don’t mind but if I am to switch my entire friend group to an alternative, native apps on mobile is a fundamental requirement.
Links to docs, resources, GitHub is non existent. Also no screenshots. Waste of time.
What site were you looking at? All those things are on the page.
Great project, glad to see something like this!
Also all links under the resources heading are broken.
Claims to be done right, vibecoded bs from last week that can't even get the links on their page right, who cares
No reaction emojis?
Means "punishment" in german, weird name.
And "discord" means "disagreement", "lack of harmony", "arguments" in English. Even weirder name for a chat application in an even more commonly used language.
"Slack" associates pretty strongly with "slack off" (get no work done) too, so that one's also strange.
I think "Zulip" has the best naming of all these.
Zulip definitely is the worst naming if you don't go off of what the name means literally
slack and discord are very good household names, same with twitter (rip) and google etc.
nobody's gonna say "hop on Zulip"
Discord is on brand for many of the "discussions" on there.
What does Zulip mean?
I figured Slack referred to slack in task time estimation i.e. the amount of extra time allowed in a task. Collaborating on Slack would count towards that time.
The only explanation I can offer for “Slack” is that its founders and top brass have been adherents of the “parody religion” Church of the SubGenius, and have successfully interposed themselves into the everyday business machinations of a wide swath of Western businesses.
Meanwhile, “Discord” wouldn’t surprise me if it were a product of the Discordians themselves, a similarly disorganized “parody religion”.
Also see: Slackware.
I always preferred Discordianism over CofSG, but both were cool.
Slack is also allowance in budgets (time, finance, materials) to allow for unplanned pressures, demands or constraints.
Slack stands for Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge. Prior to that, it was going to be "linefeed".
Did you read that on the English Wikipedia or something? Have you ever heard of "backronyms"?
I read it directly from the founder and former CEO, who included a screenshot from November 2012, about 9 months before the August 2013 release, of him using that acronym as a code name. https://xxcancel.com/stewart/status/780906639301812225
"Discord becomes strife cause that means kinda the same thing, strife becomes strafe cause that's a gamer term"
is the completely german-less train-of-thought I could imagine leading to this name
Building strafe.chat and expecting people to not expect it’s a D/s chat app is hilarious.
Also “strafe on your desktop”. Plus this is obviously entirely vibecoded.
Horrible idea, Discord is an app for videogames, which means it's an app for kids.
E2E is just not appropriate for handling childrens' messaging.
Can you elaborate on why E2E encryption is not "appropriate for childrens' messaging"? Does this imply that we should be able to surveil what children say to each other, or..?
yes, because most HNers are already old so none of that applies to them, thus it's either no internet, no phone or you have to have all kinds of spyware watching what your kids (right up until 18) do 24/7
I bet everyone would've loved to live like that when they were younger. right?
E2E or not, as a parent you can always surveil it on-device. Or just don't give the damn phone at all.
I had no clue videogames were for kids, silly me. I'd better uninstall Steam right now, and move to Microsoft Teams to talk to my friends while I'm at it.
Games aren't just for kids. Furthermore, children also have a right to privacy and should be protected, especially from the big tech companies.
> Discord is an app for videogames
Children shouldn't be using the internet unsupervised. Games are also played by adults. Discord is just a communication platform that isn't inherently tied to gaming.
This post genuinely made me laugh in anticipation of the replies it'd trigger, have an upvote friend
Not to claim that Discord has like copyright over their layout, but do you not anticipate eventually running into problems with them due to using pretty much the same layout/visuals verbatim? It is to the point where one could easily be visually mistaken for the other unless a much closer look is taken
Incase anyone is wondering, there is a screenshot here: https://github.com/StrafeChat
That's silly. Neither is Discord the only one with that layout (Slack and even things like Gajim have similar layouts) nor would/should it count as something that cannot be copied.
The fact that Apple back in the early iOS days thought it invented desktop icons is still absolutely ridiculous.
> The fact that Apple back in the early iOS days thought it invented desktop icons is still absolutely ridiculous.
That wasn’t a thing.