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Alternatives to Discord and Twitch
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Discord alternatives are complicated, because Discord is conceptual bullshit. It started as voice communication, yet became popular for the text communication.
So you won't find a good replacement (unless something new created in particular to mimic discord), because the things it now provides are better handled by seperate applications.
PS: ~~OBS should already work on it's own, without a dedicated webserver on your side. Basically every media program (also browser) should be able to handle streams~~
OBS' WHIP (WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion) support should allow direct connection to web browsers.
(I'll will take a look at it when I'm home)
Dont forget people using discord as a fking replacement for a repo...
wtf?
Pleass tell me you are just talking about discord channels instead of proper issue trackers and not something even more stupid...
Both.
People have locked channels with info instead of a readme in a repo.
And
Channels for opening issues with topics for bug tracking.
For example check nexus mods authors...
Thanks! I just installed OBS - also trying out a few variants from the AUR - but it gave an error saying "couldn't load frontend-tools plugin", didn't recognize/pick up the Steam and/or the game's window, even though I tried the game in various screen modes, and WHIP wasn't in the streaming servers/sources selection section. I did some limited troubleshooting, but gave up, because my friend says they have Steam too. We'll try out Steam's "native" broadcasting function later tonight and see if we're satisfied with that + chat/voice chat through Signal.
Thanks for your time and input! :)
Oh, I assumed you already had setup OBS...
And WHIP is probably unneccessarily complicated anyway.
I was able to stream the output of my V4L2loopback-device (the virtual camera created with OBS' output) to a browser accessing localhost: with Motion without any setup other than creating a single-line config file defining the port...
Yeah, sorry, I was unclear on several parts in the post. Thanks anyways! If Steam's native broadcasting turns out to such, I'll try something else.
There's quite a few Discord alternatives. IMO Stoat and especially Fluxer are pretty discord-like. Fluxer is pretty new and still working out kinks. They support (Stoat) or will support (Fluxer) self-hosting and Fluxer will implement (limited) E2EE. I have heard of other alternatives like Root, TeamSpeak, Mumble but cannot speak to them.
The main trouble with Stoat and Fluxer from what I've seen is that they're both trying too hard to be Discord, while neither of them are quite hitting the mark. They'll be interesting to follow in the future
Teamspeak and Mumble (which I prefer because it's free and open-source... also already vastly superior sound quality years ago when Teamspeak was stil the common option most peope used) are indeed "separate applications" doing only one of the jobs... voice communication in this case.
Boggles my mind that teamspeak has always sounded better than discord, and yet dicksword swallowed TS's market. Something teamspeak handled (haven’t used in ages, cannot say if it still does) was people speaking at the same time.