I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned Campfire [1].

It's open source, trivial to self-host, and can support an arbitrary number of rooms and users.

Sure, it doesn't have all of Discord's bells and whistles (for better or worse), but then neither do some of the alternatives mentioned in the article.

[1]: https://once.com/campfire

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presbyterian 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've been on the lookout for Discord alternatives for my friend group for a while, and this is the first one that really looks promising to me. All the others are too expensive (Mattermost, Rocket) or introduce too much friction (IRC, Matrix). This looks like it could work!

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obsidianbases1 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been running a campfire chat with a few hundred users for a couple of years now. It's one of my favorite pieces of software simply because I don't spend any time thinking about it.

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pseudalopex 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could you compare Campfire to alternatives in the article?

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doakes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"After you checkout, we’ll email you a private download link that includes everything you need."

	▲	monooso an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It used to be a paid product, now it's free. There's a clear link to the source code on GitHub [1], so you don't need to go through the "checkout". [1]: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

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Arrowmaster 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From DHHs company for those that matters to.

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rcakebread an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The owner's terrible reputation, no mystery here.

	▲	monooso an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You may of course choose not to use this software because you disagree with the personal politics of one of the creators, DHH. However, the owner (37signals, not DHH) has an excellent reputation for producing high quality web applications since the early 2000s.

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doublerabbit 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is cool. Thanks for the shout.

	▲	doublerabbit 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Works great on a FreeBSD Linux VM. This is seriously cool.