self-hosting matrix is possible, and after I got it set up, it works fine. That said, push notifications were acting up a lot at first (might have been fixed by an update since that hasn’t been an issue in a while), and it is rather annoying to get your desktop and mobile clients set up to not be annoying about not being verified (iOS apps seem more fiddly with verifying than Android apps in my experience)

Despite my annoyances at first, the Element client really is the best and most mature one out there, and I do recommend it. Don’t bother with any of the other ones; despite what the fluffychat settings want you to think, Element is the only client that can do any kind of audio/video calling, and most of the other clients only have web apps, so there’s no hope for getting push notifications on mobile.

Ultimately it has worked for me, but my demands are three humans in a voice call once a week, no screenshare (use Parsec for that), and occasional text messages.

Spacebar looks great, and is exactly what I want, but it doesn’t look close to production ready yet

Yo dawg, I heard you like Windows, so we put Windows in your Windows so you can use Windows while you use Windows

I have just started using it, but I’m planing to migrate my small Discord group over to Revolt.

If you go to their website revolt.chat it’ll offer a download for desktop or a link to the web app, but they’re basically the same. They’re working on an updated client called Frontend which you can get a beta of from GitHub.

I’m on an iPhone and I used the save to Home Screen function in Safari while in the web app to get an icon for it, and I think it works pretty well! It can even do push notifications, but some weird artifacts of using the web app on mobile mean you’ll only get notifications from mentions in a server or a direct message (or group message).

I’ve got a Matrix server up and running and have tried a couple of different clients, but at the end of the day the Matrix UX isn’t really an alternative to Discord, rather an alternative to Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp or other group message platforms.

The main thing I would point to is that Matrix itself only does text; the Element client uses Jitsi to add in audio/video calls and screensharing, but at least right now, it’s the only Matrix client to integrate voice, video, or screenshare.

My other gripes are just with the user interface, but if you open any of the Matrix mobile apps and compare it to Facebook Messenger and to the Discord mobile app, and you’ll see it really doesn’t look like Discord. I wish I could quantify it better, but Matrix just doesn’t feel like Discord whereas Revolt does.

If anyone is looking for an alternative to discord, please check out revolt.chat The interface and user experience is the closest I’ve seen to discord (miles better than any Matrix client), has functioning voice chat (being rebuilt for more stability) custom server roles, and a functioning youtube music bot called Remix. They’re doing awesome work over there!

Edit: Forgot to mention that it’s also open-source and self-hostable (although not federated)