A Discord Alternative – Echoed

38 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by acley
(echoed.gg)

59 Comments

dymk

10 hours ago

Front page says 150MB RAM, About page says 90MB.

Whole site is full of LLM-isms (em-dashes, stilted 'X. Y. Z. <Summary>.' constructions).

It's so boring. It says "We put one prompt worth of effort into our landing page". Just like all the others.

"No ads · No tracking · No ID verification · Free forever" - why would anyone believe this for a closed source application that, presumably, you want to monetize? Servers and developers aren't free, unless it's open source and/or self hosted.

soundworlds

11 hours ago

While it's great to have alternatives, I suspect a lot us are really only interested in forkable open alternatives (like Matrix / Element), as most concerns about Discord are tied with it being a private company.

As far as I can tell, Echoed is also closed the same way Discord is?

LorenDB

11 hours ago

Why do all the Discord alternative apps try to 1:1 clone Discord's UI? Half of my dislike of Discord stems from its UI.

theturtletalks

10 hours ago

Have you tried Chatto[0]? Seems to be an open-source Slack and Discord alternative with a nice UI.

0. https://github.com/chattocorp/chatto

axus

10 hours ago

The screenshot looks identical to Discord?

therealpygon

7 hours ago

No! You see, it has text and a version at the top. That makes it new, fresh, and completely different. Some would even say superior.

hmokiguess

10 hours ago

Damn this is gorgeous. That said, how can one try something if no one is there? I can sway my team to move it, but not my audience. Discord still owns the market as a medium to reach an audience.

arikrahman

10 hours ago

Looks like a cool project, thanks for the reference. Have been relying on Dorion up to this point.

tekchip

11 hours ago

So much this. Discord UI was for simple voice and text chat. Over time it's had so many other things shoe horned in its now a royal kludge.

nelsonfigueroa

10 hours ago

I guess because there's people like me that like the UI (aside from all the Nitro bloat at least)

Sohcahtoa82

11 hours ago

I'm always surprised to hear people hate Discord's UI. I think it's fine.

The only thing I was probably change is adding the ability to bookmark specific channels so I can switch to them in a single click no matter what channel I'm currently looking at.

Gigachad

10 hours ago

It's fine as a kind of replacement for forums, but I don't like it at all for chat and community. I find Discord admins always tend to create 5 trillion channels which each get about one message per week. And then whine when you haven't sorted your messages in to the most relevant channels.

The vast majority of chats would be be better off in a standard group chat UI with no channels.

virgil_disgr4ce

10 hours ago

Yeah; I get the impression that people saying this really mean "I hate the stupid upsells." Which is fine, I do too. But I guess on HN there's more clout to claiming it's the UI that's the problem?

saintfire

10 hours ago

Nah, everyone I know isn't a fan of discord's UI.

I stand to gain nothing and I don't even think it's popular sentiment.

For a new user it's completely alien. Trying to get a coworker to try discord for the first time is a nightmare.

It tries to solve so much in such a condensed bar on the side. Why are DM listed "as" a server. I hate the notification system for transient server joins. I have no opinion of the channel system. Why can't you read discord threads of a public discord without joining the server and accepting the posting rules? They're trying to emulate forums but it's a huge PITA to just read (in a RO state, even).

Idk lots of complaints, network effect is a bitch.

hmokiguess

10 hours ago

Totally, I suspect a lot of people who preach discord here use it for fun and hobby, like some book club or small community.

Try using it at scale, for channeling communities, engaging with users, bots, marketing, and for work with streaming, video, rooms, voice rooms, moderation, etc.

There is an entire universe, even large businesses, built just around navigating Discord for good and for worse.

Turn it into a protocol.

LorenDB

10 hours ago

Well, I do hate the stupid upsells, but the entire Discord UI just feels... off. I can't really place a finger on it, but I just don't like it. (Maybe there is a bit of a UX nag causing these feelings as well? I'm not sure.)

jamesfinlayson

8 hours ago

I log into Discord maybe once a fortnight to check what's going, and every time I land in a channel, it shows me the newest handful of messages, and I need to scroll back endlessly to get back to where I actually left off.

charcircuit

11 hours ago

Because it reduces the switching cost because users don't have to learn a new interface. Discord has shown that its UI is at least capable of being used by hundreds of millions of users so it is not a bad starting point.

hmokiguess

10 hours ago

That's exactly it. A lot of users are likely emotionally attached and trapped to their Nitro garbage and feel like they "invested" far into the cult by now. Giving them a way out is important if you want to acquire that market.

virgil_disgr4ce

10 hours ago

Man, the Nitro stuff is garbage, but it's bizarre that you're equating the ENTIRE UI to that. It's really not that obtrusive. I don't like it either but it's like 0.5% of the UI

hmokiguess

10 hours ago

Fair point, opinions are not truth. That said there are lots of mods out there for it with substantial (many millions) of users where their entire reason for existing is taking control of the UI.

What happens to building protocols? I am totally against being a slave to PaaS.

hmokiguess

11 hours ago

Please please please someone take over discord and their use base. Their nitro and ads is the most toxic nonsense stuff I have ever had the displeasure to work with.

I am in a niche market with both new gen workers and customers and discord is a really important medium to engage and connect with them. My soul dies every time I am there dealing with all sorts of psychological traps and baits to more spending coupled with the incessant advertising.

I don't even care anymore who wins that market, just get me out of it.

adzm

10 hours ago

There is so little advertising on discord that I find it hilarious you are so upset about a few notifications here and there about nitro and other aesthetic perks which are basically entirely optional

hresvelgr

10 hours ago

There are 3rd party ads in Discord now, and they are probably going to expand as an ad platform. I think this is what the parent comment was upset about.

edit: grammar

hmokiguess

10 hours ago

That too, I have to be on Nitro because of work. (Managing communities, streaming resolution, etc), and the level of ads triple after being a customer. Even worse if you need to blend in like adopting some of the customization since the cult goes deep.

To be fair, I put myself there and I voluntarily work with those audiences. I am aware I don't belong to the same level they do, and I'm ok with that. I just wish I could customize it my way too. In my view, if this was a protocol rather than a PaaS locked-in system, like IRC for example, we all would be winning.

hmokiguess

10 hours ago

A few notifications here and there? I'm not sure I can agree with you. It's a daily persistent thing that there is no way to disable and the constant dark patterns.

I believe I am not alone with things like https://betterdiscord.app/ having more than 56M downloads (and that being just one of the custom mods)

xboxnolifes

8 hours ago

I'm actually confused about what you mean with "daily persistent thing". I see a discord popup on start about a new feature or ad for some collaboration maybe once a month. Most days it just starts and brings me to the last server I was in.

hmokiguess

8 hours ago

Three things I can't remove from the UI that often have intrusive popups at random placed directly under "Friends":

1. Nitro Home 2. Shop 3. Quests

And hovering on users often brings up upsell.

xboxnolifes

6 hours ago

Interesting, I almost never see any of that stuff when I use discord, but I realize that's because I almost never use DMs.

axus

10 hours ago

Charging for perks and user self-expression seems a lot healthier than what we see in app stores and websites.

This is all pre-IPO, it's sure to get worse; hopefully one of the Discord alternatives will have caught on by then.

The big line they've crossed is collecting identification; much thanks to HN for linking to the bypass that worked for a day.

Ekaros

10 hours ago

I have never seen true need to get Nitro. Missing on some things but if someone wants to pay for it let them.

Big question is how else would they make money? Monetise hosting "servers" directly? Would they have even gotten community if they did that?

hmokiguess

10 hours ago

Do you have or use Discord for work? E.g. streaming, many calls, etc. Only nitro lets you do those.

Ekaros

10 hours ago

Thankfully my company uses Teams. So I don't need Discord for that. As non-nitro uses it works fine for text chat.

esseph

9 hours ago

> Thankfully my company uses Teams.

Wwooooooowwwww I never thought I'd read that or even a similar statement in my entire life!

nickthegreek

10 hours ago

> Please please please someone take over discord and their use base

This is one area where I can not muster the optimism to think that would improve the situation. You need someone else to somehow unseat them somehow.. they’re entrenched in this space so deeply though.

bitmasher9

11 hours ago

Is there anyone there I want to talk to? You need to demonstrate that before I create a login, otherwise there is too much friction for me.

The iOS storefront is also far behind your website in quality and attention to detail.

Edit: please accept this in the spirit of some quick feedback from one maker to another

kennywinker

3 hours ago

What a weird and entitled position. This is a product for people who create or manage communities, not people who demand to be shown there is already a community there

apetresc

10 hours ago

How on earth do you expect them to show you whether there's anyone there you want to talk to?

bitmasher9

10 hours ago

I have a lot of chatting applications that all demonstrated that to me. The most common way was having another party indicate the app as a communication option

Cider9986

10 hours ago

https://fluxer.app seems to be the best alternative so far, by a mile. Gained a bunch of users during some controversy too.

blooalien

9 hours ago

Someone else here also mentioned Chatto [0] which seems far easier to self-host than Fluxer, though both appear to be quite similar to Discord in overall functionality. I've played with Chatto a bit and it seems surprisingly solid overall thus far.

[0]: https://github.com/chattocorp/chatto

hatthew

10 hours ago

Is this P2P, or hosted on proprietary servers? How is it funded? I don't like ads and I like free things, but "no ads, free forever" doesn't make me confident in its long term stability.

acley

11 hours ago

We have been online for more than 1.5 years. Back when we started, we didn't see Discord alternatives popping up left and right, so we created our own. Nowadays, there are like 10 of them popping up every single day, most of those are below par and completely usable. If you like to try out a new one you can give us a try no stress haha bye

altilunium

10 hours ago

Cool. I would like to try it, but it will probably take a considerable amount of time to convince my circle of friends to migrate to this platform en masse.

Is there a catalog of public, Echoed-based groups / communities that anyone can freely join? I'd like to explore the platform's full range of features before trying to persuade others to make the switch.

Varelion

11 hours ago

Sorry, where is the source code? For any trust to be built OS should be a prime feature at this point in the game.

muwtyhg

10 hours ago

Why do companies like this continue to promise "No Ads Ever"? How do they plan enough money to support their service? Video sharing is incredibly expensive, even Discord is unlikely profitable between their advertising campaigns and server boosting revenue.

It's not self-hosted, they are going to have to make money at some point to support the effort.

s0ss

10 hours ago

Are clients and server FOSS? If so, advertise that. Personally, I’m not interested in another platform that isn’t.

anon7000

9 hours ago

No one’s squads give 2 shits what language their app is written in. The LLMisms are so annoying to read and tell me nothing genuine about what it’d be like to use it.

Madmallard

10 hours ago

Not open source

Not interested

bellowsgulch

10 hours ago

I'm just ready for something new, personally. I don't really like Discord's vibe of paying for avatar skins? Gross. And paying for custom emojis? Super gross. Yuck.

ludston

10 hours ago

Congratulations, I'm sure it was a monumental effort to build this. Good luck with marketing and all that.

jonstaab

10 hours ago

xkcd 927 but instead of another standard, another vibe-coded discord clone.

I say this as someone building a discord clone (https://flotilla.social)

kennywinker

10 hours ago

I see no point in switching from one closed-source platform to another closed-source platform.

Apreche

10 hours ago

If it’s not open source and self-hostable, it’s a non-starter. Not switching to another closed platform just for it to die. I’m tired of switching. Whatever I switch to next must be able to last the rest of my life expectancy.

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

fishgoesblub

10 hours ago

Yet another Discord alternative whose effort could've been put into an XMPP client.

pavo-etc

9 hours ago

I've been dealing with this exact problem this week. For being such an established protocol with such strong servers, the open source clients available are shockingly undercooked.

I've been playing around with using XMPP as the communication layer for some agents, but the popular client apps (converse.js on web, conversations.im on android) have such little polish.

I've had to fork them to make them pleasant to use at all, this feels like it should be a solved problem.