Discord Discourse
Posted: October 26, 2026
Hello, all! It has once again been quite a while since I've last written anything here. Much has happened, some of which I might enumerate on in future posts, but for today, I want to talk about something that matters a lot to me.
You might've noticed a lot of alternatives to the instant messenger known as Discord springing up recently, as a result of their global age-verification policies, gambling adverts, and general decline in quality. Now, I have always had my problems with Discord, and I've tried getting away from it before (to no avail), but presently it feels like there's finally enough impetus to get more normal people to start considering other options.
Unfortunately, it seems that most of these other options suck.
Many of them have sprung up as a result of this present discontent, hoping to replicate the experience 1-to-1 and cash in on Discord's continued decline as a platform. As individual platforms, I do not believe that they hold good prospects as long-term solutions for the following reasons.
- Most of them are for-profit entities and will be subject to the forces of capital all the same. Enshittification or death awaits them.
- There are lots of them now trying to fill no particular niche, they're all just "discord but less bad", which means that they are competing for all the people who are trying to ditch discord and thus are more likely to meet the latter fate in the previous point.
- A few of them are self-hostable but none of these new alternatives are federated. That means while you can certainly create your own instance of whatever the fuck you're using, it won't connect to a broader network and you'll be limited in communication to those just on your server. This makes these services highly dependent on the continued operation of whatever company started it, which as per the last 2 points is most likely not going to stick around for very long.
Note: There is definitely more I could add to the above, but I have been trying to write this post on and off for months now and I just need to get it out.
Anyways, with all this talk of what doesn't make a good platform, you might be wondering:
Where do we go from here?
My answer? Matrix.
First of all, Matrix is an established platform. It has been around for over a decade and is being utilized by many governments and international organizations for their internal communications, so it's safe to say that it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
It is also built as an open protocol, one in which decentralization is not some far off item on a roadmap, or something that is merely paid lip service (looks at BlueSky), but central to how the platform functions. There exists a wide variety of client and server softwares, all developed independently of Element and the Matrix Foundation. In the event of a total collapse of both of these organizations, we would be in a much better place to maintain our existing communities, fork everything and carry on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be uncritical here, as Matrix definitely still has its issues. Dealing with encryption keys not syncing is something you're just going to have to deal with from time to time. Most clients genuinely suck as discord replacements too, and I was hesitant to recommend any of them to my friends until now.
Enter Sable, a Matrix client with a Discord-like look-and-feel, sharing more features with it than many other clients. Sable started out as a fork of another client called Cinny (my former favorite) and has since been rewritten from the ground up in Rust, both for better performance and to rid themselves of having to deal with AI-generated code contributions, which they had previously tolerated.
Having tested it out, it is definitely not perfect, but it is pretty fucking great so far, and worlds better as a discord replacement than anything I've ever used before. As far as Matrix clients go, it is rock-solid, and will definitely be my go-to recommendation from here on out.
How do I get on Matrix?
You might be asking yourself this question by now. Or not. But if you are, here's what you need to know:
- You must choose a homeserver. This will be the server that hosts your account. You will
still be able to talk to people on other servers, just like how you can email people
using different service providers, so don't worry about not being able to chat with any
friends who are elsewhere. I recommend taking a look at
this list of public servers.
Find one with a good set of rules and join up. Or, if you're particularly savvy, you can try
hosting your own!
- If you're a personal friend of mine, you are welcome to an account on my homeserver on osp.gay, just shoot me a message and I'll get you a registration link.
- You also must choose a client software. This might not be something you're used to on Discord, as you aren't really meant to have a choice over there, but you do here! As I stated above, my recommendation is for you to use Sable on all of your devices. However, you're free to poke around here and try some other ones out, if you feel like it.
Closing thoughts
Getting away from Discord is something that almost everyone I know wants to do. Nonetheless, this is a tall order, as it's hard to even attempt to leave a platform where many of your friends reside. However, short of overthrowing capitalism, the best we can do is to be the change, to start the hard process of building communities in places that we control.
Until next time.