Mattermost is probably an easier self-hosted Discord alternative.

For $2/month you can spin up an instance on Pikapods, based on their community edition. If you want advanced features (available in enterprise editions) you'll need to figure out how to re-enable them by un-feature-flag-gate-ing the source code and recompiling (and at that point move hosting), or work it into the plugin system (which gives you tons of power)

It's not federated though

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snerbles 3 days ago | parent [-]

Mattermost always struck me as more of a Slack alternative. Though the line between the two was always a big blur.

> It's not federated though

This is a big one for my server - our community has a handful of active "visitors" from other homeservers and the experience is pretty seamless.

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pcthrowaway 3 days ago | parent [-]

OK, I've investigated Matrix enough to suspect it's not going to work for the things I've been using Mattermost for, but I'm curious to hear what your stack is (client and server software)?

It sounds like, if Matrix worked seamlessly (which is not the experience of... anyone(?)... in this recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 ) it would give us federation and better identity access management (compared to the Mattermost community edition anyway) which would be really nice

It also has video calls built in... also really nice, but people are saying since they migrated from jitsi to their MatrixRTC, setup & admin have been a nightmare.

Element X seems to be the more popular client, though it sounds like, while faster than Element, many features (such as threading) are not yet available, and people have been lamenting the extreme sluggishness of Element

	▲	Arathorn 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It is absolutely possible to have a Matrix deployment that works seamlessly. It's true though that a lot of people are very unhappy at the transition from Element to Element X, hence the recent complaining threads. You can see a response from me as Matrix project lead (and Element CEO) here: https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b5.... Meanwhile, we're working hard at landing both threads and spaces in Element X (they're available behind feature flags already). The only reason people seem to complain about Element Call being hard to set up is that it's new and unfamiliar and doesn't have much docs yet, and VoIP is always a pain from a firewalling perspective. It's a hell of a lot simpler to setup and run than Jitsi, for instance. But if you run it via ESS Community (https://element.io/server-suite/community) or even https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo it should work fine.
	▲	snerbles 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Element X shines with large rooms - think joining rooms with 100+ active users and a lot of events to sync. Using multiple clients is not a problem either, I think I have at least 10 active sessions active with my current account. Element largely "just works" for my users with few grumbles, but that is definitely not the case for a lot of others here. As for my stack, it hasn't changed much since this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34784816