I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
It’s definitely going to be one of these two. Matrix and XMPP are just too much for casual users, and there’s no one client for either of them which supports all of Discord’s core features.
Out of those two, Fluxer feels like the better choice right now, but I do wish they’d take a stronger stance against LLMs. Stoat feels clunkier, buggier, and feels like it’s getting left behind.