It was recently renamed to Stoat after a cease and desist letter over the name. Link here
I once tried it a year ago when known as Revolt when browsing for Discord alternatives. It wasn’t great then, but it’s improved somewhat since then since then. It’s technically a centralised platform, albeit people can self-host it themselves if they wanted to. It’s fairly well designed and closer to Discord parity than any other alternative I’ve seen (whilst Discord does have some cool stuff, a lot of its excess is completely slop that can be ignored). I’d personally prefer a federated Discord - but we don’t seem to be anywhere close to that soon. “Roomy” for Bluesky is at the very beginning of its development.
I know some people here use Matrix, but it hasn’t really taken off for general usage outside of Instance Meta chats - and I personally find it to be quite a cumbersome and sometimes buggy client that really isn’t designed like Discord.
It’s a bit frustrating that we have a lot of development of Reddit alternatives now via Piefed and Lemmy, but a true Discord alternative a long-way away.
Honestly when Discord finally shits the bed enough that the average gamer leaves it, my group is just planning on going to Steam chat. Since it has all the stuff Discord has and is already integrated into the games we play, it’s the natural choice.
I’m really rooting for it, it has sooo much potential. Biggest seller for me is how lightweight it is compared to Discord.
In its current stage, it’s a difficult switch if you come from Discord. No screenshare is a dealbreaker for me and many.
I have my account, I sometimes use it to talk in big servers, but I’ve had no luck trying to bring friends in. And without friends there’s no much reason to log in daily.
Maybe one day when it gets the good features.
No screen share? It doesn’t even have push to talk or voice activation. All mics always on
Ah, none of my circle really uses that feature so I wasn’t aware of its implementation. It feels like a super basic thing, suprised it’s not on Stoat yet. I can see how that’s also a dealbreaker to some.
I believe it is, but it’s a financial issue currently.
I wish lemmy had a built in instance wide chat, and maybe a global one, miss that about forums
I really liked the customizable UI colors. I found everything to be adequate except two things:
- You need something like discord roles, if you dont have that to sort people into channels its a non-starter
- No video sharing
So none of my friends left discord and I had to go back to using it too.
Edit: I think this was 2 years ago by the way
Oh, it’s come a long way in 2 years. It has roles.
Still no video though
Discord has the roles or tags or whatever, and you can say “only pepple with x role can chat/post/shsre video/post images in this channel”. Its the best part of discord. Stoat didn’t have it back when I tried it as revolt and it made it useless for me.
Ah, it has all of that now. Just not video.
Oh for real? Brb I have a crusade to start up again.
Matrix isn’t as user-friendly as other options, but I’m a big fan and have been using it for a few years now.
It should be noted that Beeper is a technically a Matrix client that is designed around bridging to other networks (including Discord). It is only for text chats though, not voice/video support.
Matrix has its uses but I don’t really see it as a Discord alternative at all.
Yeah, it lacks user-friendliness, which makes it unapproachable to a certain extend. This deters wider adoption and makes it more difficult to sell the idea to friends, family, etc.
We need bots that connect your Stoat (hate that name) to your Discord account, so you can still message the people who refuse to leave.
That’s how Facebook stole users from MySpace back in the day™.
Iirc discord is making it deliberately hard to bridge stuff.
Well I don’t think Stoat will ever have a realistic chance of usurping Discord, but this is more to people on here who presumably don’t use Discord (for the reasons that they don’t use Reddit) if they’ve heard of it.
I don’t think Stoat will ever have a realistic chance of usurping Discord
Agreed. My comment is for the many users who would leave but can’t because “all my friends are here”.
We wouldn’t have this problem if Discord and Stoat were federated (I know it’s not on their roadmap).
So the next best thing is bridge bots.
yep i use it. the public servers aren’t nearly as active as discord, unless you’re in a server with a discord bridge. but i mostly use it for this one small server of close friends anyways.
it’s definitely a work in progress, more like a beta than a finished product, but I’m willing to stick with it as it develops.
I cheer for it as an alternative, but I personally won’t be using it because everything it is advertising as to having, is and has already been done.
What attracts me the most to alternatives, is having that one thing or two things that completely stand out. If its just going to market it self as the ‘open source’ version of something while more or less having majority of the features of the thing it aspires to separate itself from, then I’m reluctant.
This is not a feature as such, but I’d argue that their Server Discovery tools being technically open to any server (unlike Discord) make it a valuable option for people wanting to make new chat communities as compared to Discord where you’re forced to rely on sites like Disboard to attain any server visibility unless you roll in with a large audience sourced from elsewhere.
But yeah, in terms of features - they are playing catchup first beyond they can innovate any little quirks that Discord doesn’t and won’t have.
I have used it. Don’t really know anyone on it and haven’t found any communities to join. I’m rooting for it though.
Well currently community discovery within the app is on ice due to a lack of support team managing it (whoever did it just left) so the only way communities within it will grow meaningfully would be through communities set up that source their userbases externally.
I tried using it , but most of my friends didnt stick to it. I been looking for alternatives to discord once the age verification comes.
I gave it a try when discord announced ads. Found it 1:1 to Discord, loved it. Couldn’t get anyone else I know to use it so I had to give up.
