There seems to be a serious lack of a Discord equivalent fediverse platform unlike other social media alternatives. Most of the closest options are either too overwhelming in UI/UX for majority of people coming from Discord, missing deal-breaking features like video calling or are not federated.

Could it due to some technical limitation of the ActivityPub protocol? I skimmed through its documentation and I get the impression that content may not be accommodating of instant messaging without unconventional modifications. It would also be troublesome to federate massive bunch of messages across (physical) servers in real time.

If it were truly possible to create a Discord alternative, what would it take to make it compatible with the fediverse while also ensuring it feels functional and intuitive for migrating users and not pose too much of a resource drain for self hosters?

Edit: Modified title to clarify post talking about ActivityPub in particular

  • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    13 hours ago

    It’s totally possible to make a true 1-1 competitor to Discord but no one has done it yet.

    Nextcloud Talk is probably the closest thing with federation. But Nextcloud is notoriously complicated to host. And for some reason super unpopular outside of Europe.

    Stoat (formerly Revolt) is very close, both in functionality and UI. But is not federated (and has no plans to) and for some reason not very popular. Also doesn’t come with the wealth of configuration and moderation tools that Discord does.

    Matrix works but it’s super slow, bug-ridden, and complicated to use.

    Zulip is similar but I’ve used it fairly extensively and still have no idea WTF is happening. Also not federated.

    Of course there’s always IRC and whatever other ancient comms tools that still work fine but are very dated and lack functionality.