this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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I don't really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing... Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.
Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.
I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.
Agreed. I think the fact that discord kind of does all the things is what made it attractive. But it’s not GOOD at the forum aspect, and it has its flaws for the other use cases as well.
Although there is some kind of fun with "real time chatting" on a forum. Back then, It kind of became that way when it got heated. It's like a turn based game where all the players take their moves and execute at the same time lol
So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
I also want this suite of things. I stream movies to friends, share games I'm playing...
These are core features to me now in a robust chat client
By reducing a complex topic down to one score that has "features" as only one of many factors, so that "openness" and "safety" push it to the top.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. There's almost no platform that has all of them so you have to zoom out and look at more of the general purpose. The Discord "servers" I've used NEVER used anything but text chat.
I understand that but even the text chat is a different experience than what Discourse offers. Even people who only used Discord for text chat and want a replacement for that would be better on IRC.
It’s not the text chat they’re referring to. An annoying amount of open so it be projects use Discord as a replacement for forums specifically.
I'm aware but I don't think this was the issue Ulrich was speaking of. If they were, I don't think it was well conveyed.
Yeah, clearly everyone loves IRC, that's why no one uses Discord /s
I honestly think the vast majority of people on Discord don't know what IRC is, and therefore don't have an opinion of it. However, I didn't mean to suggest IRC as the best alternative anyway.
I haven't used IRC since I had to "accquire" fan sub anime in the 00's.
Okay so they know what Discord is, but they don't know what IRC is, despite it being 20 years older. What does that tell you?
I'm currently logged in to IRC and haven't opened discord in weeks.
LOL I can't wait to hear what you think that means.
IRC isn't really a replacement either. Discord supports rich multimedia embedding and the servers preserve history (by default anyway).
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can't even tell the difference.
I'll keep you company in the minority, since that's what I want too
Live chat is all I ever use but you never know
~~I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?~~
I'm thinking of something else, I think.
You're thinking of Guilded.
Looks like Roblox forced everyone using Guilded to suddenly have a Roblox account in 2024, and then Guilder officially shut down about 2 months ago (end of 2025).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilded
I would bet on the screen sharing not being that big of a requirement for most people. Voice and text chats though? Yeah, that's the minimum.
A lot of people I know regularly use screen sharing through discord or opentalk. Both for work/productivity and while gaming (watching each other, helping, sharing what people are up to etc).
To get people to switch it sadly should support all features: text, voice, video and sending files/images/gifs/videos.
It's tough.
Sure, a lot of people use it, because it exists. How many of those people would actually say it's a requirement to be built into it though? There's plenty of other options for screen sharing they could use. I don't know though. Maybe a lot of people actually do consider it a critical feature. I doubt it though. I've used it a few times with my group, but it's only ever a "do you want to see this?" It's just a bonus, not a requirement.
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
I love that Discourse is open. I hate that it's just horrendous from a usability perspective. Flarum is much better than that, in my opinion, while being way more flexible. Examples:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/
https://orionfeedback.org/
I find discourse perfectly usable.
Cool 👍️
Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It's not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year
Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)
Discourse isnt free
And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service
This is misinformation.
You can self host it, for free.
That doesn't seem to be communicated very clearly on the website, though I could always be missing something.
It also doesn't seem like the average Discord user is the target audience. The website is for sysadmins, and the goal seems to be selling a Slack/Teams alternative to a business or government organization.
Jitsi, simplex, mumble, matrix, lemmy.