What's the better platform that everyone should leave to? I looked into Stoat the other day but its obvious they aren't currently equipped to handle the influx of traffic they're getting, and a lot of dev work still needs to be done.
Matrix would be my own, personal suggestion as well. I didn't name names in my original comment because I didn't want anyone to feel pigeonholed into something, the most important thing right now is simply getting yourselves safe if you need to. But yes, if you want a suggestion, Matrix is probably the best idea for all the reasons above. Plus, you are free to use any Matrix supported client, I admit pickings are a little slim in terms of variety on the front of clients atm, there are a few but they are functionally largely identical currently. But hopefully that will change in time, faster if the standard gets more popular.
There's like a million options for text only chats. The reason discord is popular is that it has voice and video calls, screen sharing, and text chat. Most people don't want to need 3 or 4 different programs with 3 or 4 different accounts to use those features.
That is the appeal of discord, and there are very few options that offer a similar, seamless experience. It is (moving towards was) the "right tool for the job" for all of those features, all in a single tool.
What's the better platform that everyone should leave to? I looked into Stoat the other day but its obvious they aren't currently equipped to handle the influx of traffic they're getting, and a lot of dev work still needs to be done.
Matrix. Federated and self hostable, open source, supports encryption
Matrix would be my own, personal suggestion as well. I didn't name names in my original comment because I didn't want anyone to feel pigeonholed into something, the most important thing right now is simply getting yourselves safe if you need to. But yes, if you want a suggestion, Matrix is probably the best idea for all the reasons above. Plus, you are free to use any Matrix supported client, I admit pickings are a little slim in terms of variety on the front of clients atm, there are a few but they are functionally largely identical currently. But hopefully that will change in time, faster if the standard gets more popular.
I switched to Matrix (Element client). Works fine but I have my eyes also on Movim (XMPP) https://movim.eu/
You can stream video and voice over IRC?
That's like half the reason people use discord.
There's like a million options for text only chats. The reason discord is popular is that it has voice and video calls, screen sharing, and text chat. Most people don't want to need 3 or 4 different programs with 3 or 4 different accounts to use those features.
That is the appeal of discord, and there are very few options that offer a similar, seamless experience. It is (moving towards was) the "right tool for the job" for all of those features, all in a single tool.