Simple 1:1 audio stream is easy.

Groups, screen sharing, noise canceling, NAT traversal, mobile apps, and all those extra features people have come to expect are hard.

It's easy. Mumble. Or the thing you used probably still works.

But you see, people never actually seek a discord alternative. They want a discord alternative that includes all the features in one app that is also federated, AND end to end encrypted, and each one makes things vastly more technically challenging and resource intensive and then you want them together.

A little secret: Matrix is much, much easier to host if you disable encryption and federation. Federation to many servers is the main performance killer, and "failed to decrypt message" will all disappear if you disable encryption.

This has big XKCD Energy. It almost feels like an exact recreation of the comic but with tech:

Try mumble if you just need voice. Just fire up a docker container and open a tcp and a udp port. The settings are under-documented so things like auth are tough to set up.

If you go with anything using livekit (stoat/revolt , lasuite meet), voice is not very hard per se (just a bunch of udp ports required).

It's video that will get your CPU to its knees

I ran mumble for years, insanely easy setup.

It’s not! Use SonoBus; it’s dead simple, and superior to Discord. It’s far lower latency, with customizable filters, peer-to-peer; and totally free.

Now if you want emojis and video and rambling channels and stuff, you will have to go elsewhere.

Don’t forget about teamspeak!

I have a Jitsi server hosted through a docker container that was pretty easy, and ties into Rocket Chat. Jitsi does voice and video, Rocket Chat does chat.

It's not, but the people who are asking are often not tech-savvy, and any amount of self-hosting will be hard for them

Nothing is stopping it, it's just not particularly convenient because it's designed around the limitations of the phone system.

SIP could handle it all if you wanted though.

VDO Ninja is really nice. My friend self hosts it, and it didn’t seem that hard.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

[Thread #88 for this comm, first seen 13th Feb 2026, 05:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Not a good discord replacement but setting up nextcloud talk (simple p2p voice chat) and then the high performance backend (better supports video/voice calls between 3+ people) was relatively easy. We use it among my family now to have group calls instead of relying on facebook messenger.

Since no one has mentioned it yet -

If you haven't tried setting Synapse up with the ansible playbook you should. It's almost push-button and has 1:1 voice calls by default. Setting up group voice from there is a bit challenging, but the playbook has a section for it as well if you're willing to try.

Edit: cookbook - > playbook