Came across this on the r/selfhosted community. Still very much in the alpha stages, but it’s already got a Docker image you can try out for yourself, or try out the demo server.
Tried it earlier today, couldn’t get the voice/video chat to work right away on my self-hosted setup but the real-time chat was very snappy. Looks promising.
Seems likely, certainly Matrix has some pretty evangelical supporters. I think you nailed it with discord being more useful for mid sized numbers and having a client that handles it pretty well. I’d also add pretty painless onboarding. An OSS offering that matched it’s primary features (and has E2EE) or has a good framework, roadmap and people to get there would come in pretty clutch as discord goes public and starts monetizing everything in sight. A million (or thousands) independent FOSS ‘discords’ in the night would be a sweet sight.
Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.
E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.
Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.
That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs: