I’ve spent the last few days, with some help from others, trying to research viable alternatives to Discord.
Initially I aimed to balance three ideals: Privacy, Autonomy, Convenience.
Privacy - We are able to say whatever we want on the platform without any fear of reprisal of the service’s central administration or irl governments/groups.
Autonomy - We are able to host the service on our server and are able to modify the code of the app if we so please.
Convenience - We are able to enjoy all the comforts we had in discord: web access, custom emojis, channels, roles, voice chat, streaming/screen-sharing, etc.
As I’ve done more research into the topic, I became convinced that total security is impossible to achieve due to the basic nature of such apps and our demands. As long as there is a server that the service runs on, it cannot be completely secure, which means the first ideal becomes unattainable and thus not as important as the others. If you want privacy and security on the internet, exercise the same kind of caution you would with internet viruses: don’t be an idiot. So, if you want to talk about assassinating the president or the sort, just use the super secret chat functionality on Telegram.
Anyway, the list of features we require, absence of which would become a deal-breaker:
- self-hosting - unless the pros heavily out-weigh the cons, the absence of self-hosting is a non-starter (hence why Guilded.gg is not included in the list)
- multi-media sharing (images, videos, gifs, emotes)
- chat rooms
- VOIP - calling, group/conference-calling
- custom emojis - people have grown really accustomed to this method of self-expression
Nice to have:
- Video-calling, video-streaming
- roles, tags
The candidates:
Matrix/Vector/Riot/Element
https://matrix.orgPros
- self-hosted
- modern-looking
- mobile and web access
Cons
- closed source
- poor UX
- default settings unsafe
- experienced a security leak in 2019
- unresponsive devs
- decentralised in name only
The cons originate from a damning security report by some security researchers. It seems that in their pursuit to become as secure and decentralised, they coupled a lot of their services with the central server at matrix.org and vector.im
GitHub - libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org: Privacy research on Matrix.org
Despite all that, if testing proves that the UX has improved since I last tried it, I will put this app on for consideration. As stated before, total security is unattainable. Best we can do is obfuscate as much as we can.
Mattermost
https://mattermost.comI’ve yet to do security research into the app. Posting this report I found for later reading
https://www.icir.org/vern/cs261n/slides/Weihao-Changze-Mattermost.pdf
Pros
- open source
- self-hosted
- mobile and web access
- In-app features:
rooms
teams (roles)
multi-media sharing
custom emoji
app integrations
Cons
Rocket Chat
https://rocket.chatI’ve yet to do security research on this too
Pros
- open source
- self-hosted
- option to not be connected to the central server
- mobile and web access
- In-app features:
channels
private groups
custom emoji
webhooks
app integrations
Cons
Gajim
https://gajim.orgPros
- simple
- Very old school feel
Cons
- Dev is German => basic UX/UI
- Doesn’t seem to be self-hosted
- seems to lack the modern features
Mumble
https://trymumble.comIt’s not the mumble you’re thinking of. The dev is a retard who didn’t do basic research before picking a name. Or was hoping he’d outshine the original. The app function for a while but then died. I guess the dev was way in over his head. We’ve made an attempt to contact him in order to see where he’s at and if it’s possible to obtain the source code for further development.
Pros
- Looks like the perfect discord clone
- promised to be decentralised
Cons
- Defunct
I’ve only had the time to briefly view video reviews of the apps and have yet to test them out myself, so please be patient. I will add my findings to the lists as I test each and every app on the list. I really hope that I will be done by the end of the week and starting Monday we will have a new home. I’d rather take my time to get this right, in order to prevent compounding the problems in the future.
As always, I am open to suggestions. And by suggestions I don’t mean unconstructive bitching.