This suggests that the immediate availability of a drop-in replacement today means there is no utility in encouraging that growth.

There are multiple open-source tools that do everything Discord does. There are few-to-none that offer everything Discord does, and certainly none that are centralized, network-effect-capture-ready.

Short term:

* Small group chats with known friends: Signal, whatsapp, IRC, Matrix

* Community chat: Zulip, Rocket.chat

* Community voice: Mumble, Teamspeak

* Video / screen sharing and voice chat: Zoom, BigBlueButton, Jitsi

I've heard about Stoat but haven't read up on it.

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Valodim 3 hours ago | parent [-]

None of those play in the same league as discord for hosting a community, and none of them look in a position to be there in the foreseeable future. It sucks but that's how it is.

	▲	einr 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is how it always is, until suddenly one day it isn't. Linux didn't play in the same league as serious and commercial UNIX systems until one fateful day it killed them all dead forever.
	▲	Cthulhu_ an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That was true for the Twitter alternatives too, and look how fast they grew.