I like xmpp, but it is not a discord alternative. It is a WhatsApp / Signal / iMessage alternative.
It doesn't have 80% of discord features, I use discord a lot and I don't have a single group chat.
Matrix / Element is a way better alternative feature wise.
The main complaints about Matrix I've heard though are about behind the scenes stuff rather than features, which the video touches on:
But there are some reasons why I think XMPP is superior. In Matrix, when you join a room, your server downloads and stores the entire history of that room. If someone on a federated server posts illegal content in a room you're in, your server is now hosting it, and you are liable. Whereas in XMPP, messages are relayed in real time. Group chat, MU history stays on your server hosting that room. So your server only stores messages for your users which means that no content caching there is no content caching from other servers. This is a fundamental architectural difference which makes the XMPP protocol better in my opinion.
Personally I don't know that much about it but I briefly looked into what it would take to write a client for Matrix a few years ago and it seemed pretty daunting to work with. Maybe it would be possible to write software that implements more Discord features on top of XMPP to have something that works more smoothly.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TCP | Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| UDP | User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| XMPP | Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
[Thread #120 for this comm, first seen 26th Feb 2026, 20:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
What's Lemmy's opinion on Fluxer?
I think generally more positive than negative, but hesitant. There are so many different competing apps and discord copies that have risen and fallen, it's hard to really get attached to any that have little movement in fighting the network effect.
Seeing it already has the beginnings of enshitification with freemium features, while federation is "in development", particularly in communities like lemmy the question become why pick this over something that already exists and is an open standard?
Like looking at the "plutonium" page, it's clear they want to copy the features of discord nitro, and if we are to fight the network effect fight with the energy of discord's recent fuck up, I would rather land on XMPP or Matrix, if I have any push.
I love it and use it daily. Once it becomes stable, gets a docker container and documents the self-hosting flow, it will rule the universe.
You're not bothered by the plutonium stuff? Would you still host it if the plutonium features were still there in the self hosted version? (as in your self hosted instance paying them for plutonium on your servers)
I was under the impression that plutonium on my server would be controlled by me. Say, if I wanted to give it away, I could. At least, that's what I've read.
That there's no shortage of wheels being reinvented, and that it takes insights developed over decades to be relevant in this field. To avoid.
I've seen this posted several times and this is the second time I've tried to access their self-hosting docs and get a 404. Where's everyone going for installation instructions?
Googling I got their docs and a github for running through docker, the docs which are empty, and the docker that has the help of claude code.
I try to not poo poo folks working on projects too much, but like why am I here over XMPP or Matrix?
Because the people make the platform, and not the functions, and for lots of people you need a lower entry barrier, and the entry barrier for both of those is a good bit higher than fluxer.
Don't get me wrong, if matrix was a bit more convenient (easier to understand and to use like you would discord, and less bugs of which there are still a wide range of), I'd 100% advocate for it. But I can only tell my friends to use something if it's convenient enough that they will genuinely avoid a degraded experience.
My only resistance to leaving discord is that it’s where 99% of my gaming communities are. There’s no way I’m convincing hundreds of people to move off to something I self host, or to self host themselves. It’s just not feasible.
I'm already self-hosting a XMPP and a Matrix server, just in case. A shame that most of the group chats I've found there are about free software, assorted geekery, but not much of what I'd usually find on Discord - hopefully that changes in a few years.
Plant the first seed and create those groups.
I want something that works like Discord for my gaming group (~120 people) and is self-hostable with a single „docker-compose up -d“.
But I started looking regularly for alternatives, and we will get there :)
It's not quite as simple as a single docker compose, but the Element Server Suite for hosting a matrix home server (synapse) was fairly simple to get working.
What was your secret to get it working? I've been trying to get it running for 2 weeks following the official guide. I'm able to create an admin user via the CLI, but when I try to go to any of the subdomains I've created, I either get a 404 or the TLS handshake fails to complete. The people behind ESS are very clear that they do not offer any support and I haven't been able to find an answer to this problem anywhere.
Ok, so that sounds like either a DNS issue or a reverse proxy issue. Did you configure your domain/subdomains to point to the public IP address of where you're setting things up? Are you using the reverse proxy in the guide or do you already have a reverse proxy and you're adding ESS domains to it? Did you configure port forwarding on your router?
I have had issues with accessing my locally hosted services via domain name while on the same network. My router doesn't like to route internal traffic back to its own WAN port. Can you access it from something on a different network (cellular data)?
Sorry for the delayed response, things have been wildly busy for me.
I did configure my domains as instructed, and they do resolve to the expected IP address. I don't have an already existing reverse proxy, so I was just following along with what the guide was telling me to do. That said, this may be the issue, because I don't recall seeing any specific set up for the included reverse proxy and I've been through that guide 3 times. I haven't configured port forwarding on my router since I'm using a Hetzner VPS for this, but I did make sure to open up the required ports on the firewall.
Alright that gives me a good idea what your working with.
I am running it along side some other projects, so I already had a reverse proxy set up, so I didn't look closely at the other parts of the guide in that section.
If you want to be able to use this server for other hosting in the future, you may want to set up a reverse proxy. I can give some advice about that if you're interested!
In your case, if the only thing you ever want to host on this box is Matrix, you don't need a reverse proxy. You should be able to do the steps here and it should result in a working deployment.
It looks like that should give you a tls.yaml file, which you need to include when issuing the helm command to deploy everything. This one:
helm upgrade --install --namespace "ess" ess oci://ghcr.io/element-hq/ess-helm/matrix-stack -f ~/ess-config-values/hostnames.yaml <optional additional values files to pass> --wait
You need to make sure that in the section, you include:
-f ~/ess-config-values/tls.yaml
So your command would be this, if you have no additional yaml files, and if you do, simply put "-f path/to/file" at the end, right before the "--wait":
helm upgrade --install --namespace "ess" ess oci://ghcr.io/element-hq/ess-helm/matrix-stack -f ~/ess-config-values/hostnames.yaml -f ~/ess-config-values/tls.yaml --wait
Thanks for your help! It's very much appreciated. I was thinking I might want to use this VPS for an occasional OwnCast stream and as a SyncThing target, so it sounds like I'll need a reverse proxy. Any recommendations on something relatively easy to use? I've seen people mention ngnix, traefik, caddy and a few others, but I'm not sure which would integrate nicely with ESS. Also, I appreciate the heads up about the helm commands. Definitely important info to have!
You're welcome!
I use https://nginxproxymanager.com/ for my reverse proxy. It doesn't exactly integrate with ESS, but it's not super challenging to set up proxy hosts for the domains (you can specify multiple domain names in one Proxy Host if they all point to the same host/port).
I find it nice because I can manage it via a web portal, but it's on my home LAN. Depending on how you access your VPS this might be less convenient than using one of the other options, but I don't have much experience with the others.
I set up Let's Encrypt certs to automatically renew for the Matrix domains, pointed them all at the ESS host server and port, and then enabled Websockets Support. That last bit is critical, or things will simply not work correctly, especially calls.
XMPP doesn’t seem to be well supported in terms of Windows clients
XMPP kinda sucks
Yeah. It sucks that the protocol works and everyone can use it. It's the worst.
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