Does anyone here use anything other than Discord for chatting? What exactly and how much?
“use” is the key word here, I’m interested in actual usage, not just the names of alternatives that I already know
Boosts are welcome. Thanks for answering
I replaced Discord with Fluxer and use it for all my gaming groups. Several hours per session weekly.
I’d love to use Fluxer, sadly I haven’t had luck with getting any of my friends to switch over yet.
Since I’m the GM of said pen & paper groups I didn’t give them any other choice but to move to Fluxer. ^^
Same. People just love to sit in the boiling pot.
Then they aren’t your friends.
Signal mostly, my circles know I’m chronically offline and thus not on big social platforms. The folks who don’t move to signal know my number and text/call me as needed which isn’t often or super sensitive because the rest of the conversation usually happens in person ¯\(ツ)/¯
ETA: I also have a couple contacts on Simplex, at their behest not mine. Not a fan of the voice/video quality to be honest but it’s fairly secure at least
I use this niche software called Lemmy, idk about you guys tho
I’m on IRC some of the time, mostly Libera. I’ve run and used a self-hosted nextcloud chat server a little, and have fooled with Jami and Jitsi Meet. At my old work we used Slack. At another one, Hipchat. I’ve never used Discord.
Oh hi fellow libera user
I don’t talk to people. People are stupid. And seeing as I’m part of the people demographic, I admit that I, too, am stupid. So don’t talk to me. /jk
Signal and Matrix, never used Discord though
XMPP
Gajim for Linux and Windows, Monocles on Android. There’s an iOS client that’s pretty good too.
Conversations app for Android : )
My college has a mandatory server that you choose your roles for every semester to enter your course chat, where you get your homework and reminders of assignments.
That sounds nightmarish.
I think its honestly a lawsuit waiting to happen. They make us use our full legal name. Someone is going to get stalked or a professor is going to start getting fresh with a student.
when i was uni they forced us to use some obscure social media specifcally for college students, people barely could connect that way. when there was still other forums around, and Y/answers.
Matrix, Signal, Nextcloud Talk
Deleted discord when they started rolling out third party AI age verification if someone reported you and round the same time they were doing other shady shit.
- zoom, voice and always video
- messenger, voice and 50-50 video, usually with Portal TV Unit (every day it still works is a blessing). Call hand-off between Portal , phone and desktop mid-call are really well-done, so my wife’s mother can easily switch to her phone, take the call up the stairs to her office and show me the thing on the cam that is messing up (usually printer lights) and then take the call back down to the living room and portal.
- teams as ordered, voice, and video VERY rarely
- gChat briefly when it’s important enough to suffer the UX and connection glitches, voice and accidental video
- zello if people have it and the situation is dynamic
- mumble if people can find it
No value in discord for me.
Skype was eventually quite usable, despite increasingly wrong-headed UI fuckery. It started and ran a call nicely, and supported cross-device chat really well. I miss it.
I’m still hoping we can re-flash the gorgeous PortalTV hardware into something more usable in today’s versatile world or find something like it (easy setup, voice calling if LLM API for voice commands, rock-solid reliability, no fucking subscriptions).
I use Matrix with a group of friends that I persuaded to move from Discord. We still use Discord’s voice chat, but now that Matrix is starting to have something similar, I might try to get them to use Matrix for that too. So, the usage here is just general groupchat-like stuff.
I’m also in the process of moving the student council I’m in from Discord to Matrix. Once that’s up and running, it’ll cover groupchats, coordinating and announcing events, channels/rooms for various courses, and discussing/organising the various things the student council does.
I’ve never really been a major chat user. I think that non-real-time forum-style systems like Usenet, Reddit, or the Threadiverse tend to lead to more interesting interaction.
The chat system that I’ve probably used the most has been phone group text messaging, with IRC or XMPP group chats coming in after that. One place I worked used AIM for a while, and people would use that to coordinate stuff or do water-cooler talk.
If I were going to pick one to use, it’d probably be XMPP, assuming that I could get everyone else to use it. Federated, variety of good native clients for different platforms, support for E2E encryption.
We use signal with my family and my friends. But we are not actually spending much time together chatting, we rather coordinate meetups or video calls.
IRC and Matrix here. Through a self hosted ZNC and a self hosted Matrix instance with bridges.
Telegram was growing the last time family/friends were looking for a change, so I have my tiny group there. It’s actually pretty good for our needs.
https://mony.world/ which uses federated Harmony - essentially a federated Discord clone - has been spun up. Feel free to seek alternative instances, I only know of that one.
