Honestly, I’ve been trying to find a good alternative to Discord for a while. Matrix is promising. But I tried self hosting it a few times and there were too many technical gotchas specifically in my environment (combination of Cloudflare tunnel and Traefik).
I haven’t checked on the progress of Matrix 2.0 in a while but once that is stable I’ll give it another shot. The eternal problem after that is convincing a critical mass of friends to join you. Most of my friends have decent moral compasses and they still don’t understand why I have not touched Reddit since July.
I did this for the dumbest of reasons, but I’ve been testing Guilded for a week now. My friends and I bought each other discord nitro for a few months over Xmas and when it ran out we were bummed. But we all agree nitro is not worth it unless discord is a part of your income stream like a Streamer or somekind of media relation for a company that hosts a discord for feedback and engagement.
Found someone mentioning guilded randomly on a lemmy comment. Turns out you get higher quality voice, large amounts of emoji and a few features not in discord. Currently no soundboard or stickers. Haven’t tested a stream yet, but I don’t think you are limited there either by default like discord.
Is it the discord killer? Probably not. The discord killer will be the IPO or company that buys them and has to actually make a profit on the platform. Once people get ads in their chat, some will bail. But for now, I think we are in an era of jumping from “growth phase” platform to “growth phase” platform. If data privacy isn’t your primary concern, doing this lets you enjoy features for mainly free until a platform has to monetize.
Advantage of moving on services like discord is it’s feasible for some of us. I have a small group of friends we use discord for and get together to game. So as long as I make a good use case and we like the new platform, jumping to guilded will be similar to when we jumped from mumble to discord.