this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025

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Is there any fediverse alternative to slack or discord? (lemmy.today)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm working on a project that needs a similar approach to slack or discord. I know about matrix, but the person I'm working with said to be open to use a fediverse alternate when I tell them I didn't want to use slack. I mention matrix and the fediverse as an alternative and they asked me a good fediverse option.

It's needs to be good for team collaboration, easy to set and be able to maintain original images quality.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ask them what they mean by "FediVerse." I don't know of any ActivityPub chat room software; while there could be one, trying to make a real-time interactive chat with AP seems like hammering a square peg into a round hole.

Matrix is probably the best alternative. It's just as federated as Mastodon is. Here's a reasonably brief, fairly accurate layman comparison of the two protocols, although the write up is for an unrelated topic.

If the concern is that the person wants full integration with the many different projects that provide AP integration, then there's at least one Matrix bridge for ActivityPub. Honestly, it seems like a kind of horrible idea ... like, how would an IRC chat room (IRC ~ Matrix ~ Discord ~ Slack) look like in a Lemmy client? It's even a little awkward when Lemmy content shows up in Mastodon, and vice-versa. The more the UX flow diverges, the more weirdness you see in the federation.

What would this even look like? Could you follow a Mastodon account from a chat room? And would that account's toots just randomly show up with no context in the room? Would people responding in Mastodon automatically get sucked into the room, or would the Mastodon user look like they're having a conversation you see only one side of? And would people replying to the person show up in Toots?

Anyway, Matrix is probably the best federated solution for chat, at the moment. You have one account and can join rooms on any server, or connect to any user on any other Matrix server.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

you didn't even mention xmpp

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Unfortunately no-one does. Since Google basically killed it, it gets ignored everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

i don't think that's the reason, there are just too many clients availabe and too many inconsistencies between them. aside from that i don't think there is a really good one for ios and no go to solution for all platforms in general.

but please correct me, if i'm wrong, i'd be really happy if there was an easierway into xmpp especially for non technical users. matrix does a better job at that even if there is the problem with metadata protection.

another reason to mention matrix, but not xmpp is the easier handling of he concept of an audio call room. for this reason i was also surprised ro see IRC mentioned here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I didn't mention a lot of things, for various reasons.

Like GP said, once Google killed XMPP compatibility, it lost a lot of luster, but I was using it long before Google Chat added integration and I mainly remember fighting with it a lot. Maybe it's improved through extensions, but when I left it:

Group chat was weak. It exists, but I've never encountered large, persistent group chats in the wild.
There was no server side message caching; if you weren't online, you couldn't get messages
There was no message syncing. If you used multiple devices, you received messages only on the active one(s?).
Feature support varied wildly between servers, and you were never sure what you could use with any given contact
Encryption support was spotty and an after-thought.

A lot of this isn't relevant to group chats, but the lack of history syncing was a big one, and is also one of my main objections to IRC.

Speaking of IRC, it may be possible that with the right combination of clients and servers you can address these, but IM recent E with IRC it lacks some QOL features, some of which are, for me, minimum requirements.

The history thing. If I go offline and come back, all conversation since I last logged out is unavailable.
It lacks basic support for message editing. There's the s// convention, but it's handled client side (or by a bot), and it's only a convention and not a spec
There's just a lot of creature comfort stuff that's certainly not absolutely necessary, but which makes modern IRC less pleasant to use, and for some teams, deal breakers. Channel level file attachments. Inline images. /react, /reply ... just a bunch of convenience things that are either only supported by some clients and so discouraged, or just not there.

But the main thing is that it's not federated. It may look like it is, but that's only IRC clients letting you connect to multiple servers at the same time. You have to have accounts on each server - there's no ID sharing. If there's any channel message syncing, it's done through bots, and requires collaboration on both servers. OP specifically asked for federated solutions, and IRC isn't.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Currently hosting XMPP:

Group chat appears to be much better now
Server-side caching exists now, at least in ejabberd
Syncing also exists now, see above

As for encryption and feature support, YMMV, https://providers.xmpp.net/ has a list of servers that provide everything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Thanks!!

Do you have, or have you seen, any use of XMPP groups for IRC/Matrix/Discord/Slack like cases? Large, persistent groups that anyone can join without invite (with just an address eg on a web page)?