The problem is that “Discord” means something else for almost anyone and there is no alternative that 100% covers all the usecases.

For many public chats, IRC with a modern server and client is perfectly suitable, and for my private gaming sessions Mumble is as voice chat is doing fine even though friends are complaining that they can’t just use it in a browser.

For general IM stuff XMPP is best, but I guess few people use Discord for that. Matrix is in general slow and clunky, no real point of using that except if you are forced to because some very specific FOSS projects insist on using it.

P.S.: I mostly use IRC through a XMPP gateway.

I found this article much better: https://wiki.alopex.li/DitchingDiscord

The OP article seems like a promotion for Matrix with only a cursory and not very well informed look at other options.

Also both articles glance over serious recent efforts to modernize IRC, such as https://github.com/ObsidianIRC/ObsidianIRC and https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma which in combination with a Mumble server is also a real Discord alternative.

At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.

I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.

The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.

Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.

That article is 95% uninformed FUD. I really wish people would stop listening to this self proclaimed encryption “expert” that seems only interested in posting badly researched but inflamatory blog posts and then deletes any responses from actual experts from their blog comments.

https://translate.codeberg.org/projects/joinjabber/website/pt_BR/

Would be great to help out. Thanks!

It is for the https://joinjabber.org/ website.

For static sites, yes. To actually protect dynamic sites against AI crawlers, Cloudflare has to do much more than just caching.

And besides that, Cloudflare is a huge single point of failure and highly privacy invasive.

That is a non-sense comment. Where do you even get that from? And the “weird” encryption layer is literally the Signal library.

This will just make them sound more believable when they hallucinate. LLMs can conceptually not be made to not lie, even if all the info they are trained on is 100% accurate.

This is not how things work on the modern web. Did you just wake up from a 20 year coma?

This is actually a feature missing from many browsers. Maybe Discord has a workaround, not sure.

Movim.eu recently added it, but it only works on Chromium based browsers.

https://f-droid.org/packages/se.lublin.mumla is not so bad as a mobile client for Mumble.

https://continuwuity.org/

It’s a fork of a fork or Conduit.

Starting point based on what? Do you plan to use it personally to join many large channels from FOSS projects? If so, you need to plan for a relativrly beefy VPS, like 4 core, 8gb ram, 100gb+ ssd storage.

But for small private chats with no federation a cheap minimum VPS can work.

If you want my personal recommendation I would avoid hosting Matrix. A well federated server is costly to run and not really worth the hassle and a small private chat server with bridges etc can be done equally well or better with XMPP.

As others have already alluded to, Matrix is a bit odd in that regard as it runs a distributed database and the resource requirements depend on how much of the matrix network is mirrored on it. A single power-user can cause huge resource use just by connecting to a lot of federated active rooms. On the other hand a server that is mostly used as a private family chat can run on a modern RasberryPI without much problems.

Synapse or Conduwinity etc. makes little difference in praxis as both need to do the same database merging operations.

They removed a lot of cruft and low quality code from Pleroma and in general it is developing at a nice and steady pace. In addition the developers are not right-wing nut jobs.

Akkoma is better. Look for those.

That must have been a severly misconfigured server then. Normally history is stored on the server and synced on demand via MAM.

Of course with modern e2ee you can’t actually decrypt old history on new devices, but that is an intentional feature with PFS.

Xmpp has no marketing budget and a lot of people just decided it is old and always share bad experiences with it from 15 years ago 🤷

Well, this is kind of work in progress for XMPP and DeltaChat doesn’t support it. But you can for example try out https://movim.eu/ which is a webbased xmpp client (with PWA app) which does support screensharing in small group calls.

Matrix stans mentally block out the many issues it has, so take everything they say with a grain of salt 😅