With the recent news about discord asking for face or ID scan, what other alternatives are there that we can recommend to our less tech-savvy friends?
I’ve been using Matrix for over a decade. It has its problems with stability, but it’s getting better over time, especially with the newer Matrix 2.0 and Element X clients.
- Open source (clients and server)
- Federated
- Self hostable
- Optional E2EE for rooms, and I believe by default for PMs/DMs, along with forward secrecy
- Integration and bridging with other services, although it’s not as seamless as I would like
- Has group calling/VC, but I don’t use that enough to judge how good it is. Should also be able to integrate with Jitsi Meet as an alternative.
- Supports Spaces similar to Discord “servers”, but not as seamless as Discord. Each room (equivalent to a Discord channel) is its own separate thing.
If an alternative isn’t open source and doesn’t support federation and E2EE, I wouldn’t even consider it.
Is there still the issue with metadata not being E2EE?
Yes. if that matters to you https://simplex.chat/ or cwtch
Wow, both of these seem really cool. I think I will swap out Signal for one of them. From what I can see, these aren’t really meant to be Discord replacements though? ( missing text channels and voice/video channels)