I personally don’t have the technical knowledge, time, or energy to take on something like this — but I was curious:

Since Matrix, XMPP, etc. already support most (if not all) of the features that Discord offers — text, voice, video, threads, bots, roles, federation, etc. — would it theoretically be possible to just replicate Discord’s UI and UX and build it on top of the Matrix or XMPP protocol instead of starting from scratch?

I mean, sure, there’d be some challenges with existing third-party clients, like

Matrix:

Element X,

Nheko,

Cinny,

FluffyChat,

XMPP:

Aparté

AstraChat XMPP Client

aTalk

Beagle IM

Bruno

Chat-O-Matic

Chatty

Conversations

Cheogram Android

but if developers and users agreed to focus on a stack — say, Matrix, XMPP, or both — couldn’t there a “Discord-like” ecosystem of compatible apps and communities?

Basically: could an open-source “Discord alternative” be built using Matrix or XMPP as the backend rather than trying to reinvent the wheel?

What are the technical or social barriers to doing that?

  • pedz@lemmy.ca
    3·
    7 hours ago

    I know it’s not what your asking but I never used Discord because it’s proprietary and, my friends and I stayed on IRC.

    Now IRC is usually just text but we wanted something a bit more modern so we settled for The Lounge. It’s a web IRC client that can display and host videos and images. It can also keep some of the channels history. It brings some modernity to IRC, as we can paste images directly onto a channel.

    There’s another similar client called Convos. Apparently it can also do video/voice chat but I never tried.

    So I’m not sure we’d switch to an XMPP based protocol, as IRC web clients pretty much just already works for us instead of Discord.