Came across this on the r/selfhosted community. Still very much in the alpha stages, but it’s already got a Docker image you can try out for yourself, or try out the demo server.
Tried it earlier today, couldn’t get the voice/video chat to work right away on my self-hosted setup but the real-time chat was very snappy. Looks promising.
Why use this over Matrix?
Drop-in voice channels are a requirement for a discord alternative, Matrix does not have them. AFAIK you still need to call an entire channel to start a voice chat.
The user experience for matrix is absolutely dog shit. Anyone who says otherwise is huffing copium.
I have been setting up matrix servers and testing every desktop and mobile client. I cannot present this to my discord group as an alternative.
As much as I want to love matrix, it is a huuuuge pain to set up & maintain.
Not really, been running Synapse for 5ish years and I barely spend any time on it. Once you configure it then it just works
With voice/video or just text?
Both, but since last year I’m using Element’s public voice/video server instead, works fine for me and less to maintain ;)