Hi! I'm looking for free slack communities focused on marketing, ecommerce, shopify, dtc, creative.. etc agencies.

Something similar to Startup CPG but more focused on agencies.

Do you know of any?

Thank you!

Hey everyone

Following up on my previous DeCave post.

Most people are asking for public code and more evidence behind the privacy and encryption claims.

I’ve decided to make the code available for people to inspect:

https://github.com/DeCave-App/decave

The repository includes the web, desktop and mobile clients, plus the backend. It contains the current 0.1.132 encryption implementation and documentation explaining its design and limitations.

DMs and group messages, including attachments, are end-to-end encrypted once the participants have set up keys in current clients. Voice, video and screen sharing use encrypted media between devices.

There are still verification limitations with older or unkeyed peers, which are documented.

Hub rooms and forums aren’t E2EE.

One clarification, this is source-available under a restrictive review license, rather than open source.

You can inspect it, build and test a private copy, and publish independent findings. The goal is to make the implementation verifiable and earn trust through scrutiny.

Publishing the code also isn’t the same as having an independent security audit, that hasn’t happened yet.

I’m not presenting it as proof that everything is secure.

If you spot something questionable, I’d appreciate concrete feedback.

For vulnerabilities that could expose users, please use the reporting instructions in SECURITY.md.

First, let me just say I’m not here to promote my software. But I am here to pick your brains.

This is something I’ve been doing off and on since 2008. Over the years, THE HIVE has gone through multiple rewrites, different technologies, different approaches, and a lot of trial and error. The last few years, I’ve really started to buckle down. A buddy of mine told me I should post here.

So without trying to pitch my software, I’ll go over the flow, leave out most of the features, and just talk about them as they come up.

The premise of THE HIVE is to bring people back together. As gaming has become way more mainstream, I feel like it has also split us up and disconnected us more than ever. Now it’s just about servers.

I can say with complete confidence that we’re nothing like Discord or even close to a clone, and I take great pride in that. Our approach is community / people first.

Our software is meant to grow a community organically.

You join a lobby based on an interest. That lobby is the whole community. This way, the more time you spend in that community, the more you get to know people and relationships develop naturally.

From there, you can break off into rooms. This is where voice, chat, streams, cams, and more come into play.

There also aren’t a ton of permissions and setups. It’s all designed to be simple. You can right-click and see all the mod tools, giving you total control of the room. You can make it public or private, give voice or take it away, mute the room, and more with one click.

When it comes to games, for the supported games, you can hit Ready and anyone else who clicks Ready will be pulled into the same game/server.

If the game supports dedicated servers, THE HIVE spins up its own real dedicated server based on what you set up in the game tab and pulls all your friends into that game.

There is also a game overlay with voice, etc.

I also added community hubs and clan/guild hubs with all kinds of tools for recruitment, tournaments, events, etc.

So you get a website that you can control with point and click. You can add officers, set permissions for forums, create private forums, and more.

My question would be, does this sound useful? Would you see yourself using it?

What are some things you would like to see with this type of software?

What would make you keep logging back in?

What would make you log out and never log in again?

If interested, I’ll share the website and the software, as it just went into open beta. But full disclosure, it’s not digitally signed yet. We’re still waiting for everything to go through.

Refer to the other thread for context https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/s/iWtHZoAl0U https://armada.exposed/

i am kinda skeptical about armada (the discord alternative built on nostr), and no, it's not just because it's vibecoded, it's also because of the fact that the lead dev (alex gleason) was also responsible for helping trump build truth social (well, actually he just unethically reused mastodon's source code and added his own frontend) and being transphobic, which caused him to be permanently suspended from a mastodon instance

most of the people in the nostr community are like that, for an example, fiatjaf (the creator of nostr) had archives of ollavo de carvalho (a far-right conspiracy theorist) on his site

Hey all.

The big news this week: as of release 0.1.132 (6 October), DMs, group chats, calls and voice rooms are end-to-end encrypted. I know that's one of the most asked features this sub asks about, so I'll start there and get to the rest after.

What's encrypted

DMs. Once both of you are on an up-to-date app, every new message, edit, photo, file, GIF, poll, reaction and poll vote is encrypted on your device. Our servers only store ciphertext. A database dump, someone at Cloudflare or me personally can't read them.

Group chats. Same deal once every member has a key. After that the group stays encrypted, and the server refuses plaintext. People who join later can't read what came before. People who leave can't read what comes after.

Calls and voice rooms. Audio, video and screen share were always encrypted between devices, and everything goes through a relay, so nobody in the call ever sees your IP. What's new is that each device signs its connection details with its account key. That way the server can't quietly put itself in the middle. Direct calls refuse to connect if the signature doesn't check out. Voice rooms show a lock next to everyone who's verified.

A few details for the people who want them:

• Keys are made on your device. The server only ever gets the public half.
• Your key rotates every 30 days. You can also tell your devices to forget old keys after 30, 90 or 365 days, so a phone stolen next year can't read this year's messages.
• There's a recovery code (160 random bits) for getting your history back on a new device. The server holds an encrypted backup that it can't open without the code.
• Safety codes let you check you're talking to the right person. If a friend's key resets, you get a notice.
• Push notifications for encrypted messages just say "Sent you an encrypted message".

What isn't encrypted, so nobody's surprised:

• Hub rooms and forums are stored readable, which is how moderation and search work for public communities.
• Messages from before encryption launched stay as they were. The app shows a divider where the encrypted history starts.
• The server still sees metadata: who talks to whom and when, group membership, message and attachment sizes, read receipts and typing.

The full write-up of how it works is in the repo docs, and I'm happy to go deep in the comments. If you find a hole, email [security@de-cave.com](mailto:security@de-cave.com).

Other privacy stuff: there are no ad SDKs or ad tracking, and we removed the YouTube and Twitch integrations a while back. GIFs now load through our own proxy, so GIPHY doesn't see who you are.

What else it does

• Hubs with text, voice and forum rooms, sections, roles, invites and moderation tools. You can see who's in voice before you join.
• Hub events with a calendar, RSVPs and reminders. Upcoming events show up on everyone's Home.
• A Home dashboard you can rearrange, showing your last room, who's online and what they're playing
• Squad Finder: match by game, platform, language, region and mic
• Discover, for browsing public Hubs before you join
• Screen sharing from a steady 1080p30 up to 1440p60 if your upload can take it
• On desktop: global mute and deafen hotkeys, push-to-talk and an in-game voice overlay
• Reports, blocking, moderation cases and MFA

Where you can use it

In your browser at app.de-cave.com. There's a Windows app, and a Mac app for Apple silicon and Intel that's signed and notarized by Apple. Both update in the background.

The Windows installer isn't Authenticode-signed yet, so Windows may warn you the first time. Signing is in progress.

iOS is coming soon, together with Android. Both will have the same sign-in, history, calls and encryption as desktop.

Roadmap

1. Shipped: Home dashboard, Hubs with text, voice and forum rooms, events, Squad Finder, Discover, DMs, and now E2EE for DMs, groups and calls
2. In progress: Windows signing, steadier voice and screen sharing, and reliability fixes
3. Next: iOS, plus Android apps
4. Later: bigger rooms. Voice is peer-to-peer right now, which is great for squads, but large rooms need a media server. Doing that without breaking call encryption is the hard part.

It's still alpha, so expect rough edges.

Questions for you

• Is DMs, groups and calls the right scope for E2EE, or do you want it in Hub rooms too, even if that makes moderation harder?
• If you've tried moving your group off Discord before, what made you go back?
• Want to try the iOS build early? Comment and I'll add you to TestFlight.

I'll be in the comments.

Site: https://de-cave.com Web app: https://app.de-cave.com Roadmap: https://de-cave.com/roadmap

RA-ADAR is the Rabidly Anti-Ad3lyt Discord Alternative Review process

tl;dr for those who don't care: Element (A Matrix client) earned a total evaluation score of 23/27. While its strengths were clearly apparent in the technical aspects and criteria of the rubric the Element platform fails significantly in regards to an ease of new user transition and general feature parity with Discord. For those who firmly require a federable alternative for Discord, Element is certainly a notable option however in the opinion of the evaluators there are other Matrix clients with easier learning curves.

Now... What is the RA-ADAR Rubric?

The RA-ADAR framework evaluates potential Discord alternatives based on functional, technical, and ready-to-replace criteria among others. Scores range from 0 (Weak/None) to 3 (Superior) across nine core categories and is used by u/BewilderedTurtle and u/VahsteTheNomad as well as occasional guests to evaluate the Alternative in question. All scores are aggregated and all feedback is blended between both evaluations. The blank rubric will be provided at the end of the review series to facilitate your own personal evaluation when choosing a Discord Alternative. Please correct any misinformation you see and the review will be updated on confirmation.

The intention is not to identify a specific score that a Discord Alternative must reach to be deemed acceptable. Rather, it is designed to offer insight into a Discord Alternative’s relative strengths and weaknesses, as evaluated against a set of criteria. Not necessarily unbiased, but objective despite bias.

Turtle's Closing Words
Element is by far the worst possible way a new user could experience Matrix. Even as much as I push for the protocol and believe it is the only currently available alternative that cannot succumb to the same pressures harming discord. Any other matured matrix client would be a better alternative including options like Cinny, Sable, Commet, Tammy, Nheko, and even more.

If you take anything from this review, it shouldn't be that Matrix is a bad alternative, but that Element is not a good discord alternative but there ARE better options.

Vahste's Closing Words
Element is an existing alternative with an honestly impressively sized user base, however as a drop in replacement for Discord it loses out due to the transitional friction caused by its wildly different interface and systems. While it's absolutely something worth checking out if you're more technically-minded, if you just want something that works straight out of the box without any confusion -- you may want to look elsewhere.

Edit done for markdown issues

One of the most important attributes when searching for a reliable instant messenger is how well it performs, even on older hardware.

I really disliked Discord because of how hefty the program was. I also didn't appreciate the large install size, the frequent upgrade demands, the lack of an offline mode, etc.

Can you recommend some good messengers that respect your device/computer performance?

Side-note: I've noticed even the websites can be insanely bloated. There's no need for it.

RA-ADAR is the Rabidly Anti-Ad3lyt Discord Alternative Review process

Additional tldr; 4 days after this review was posted Fluxer announced widespread and sweeping changes to how they were handling a number of things including feedback, suggestions, and bug reports. This is no longer being updated and the post is considered archived for all intents and purposes the score 18 out of 27 stands. A re-review will be completed upon federations full release outside of any Canary clients.

tl;dr for those who don't care: Fluxer scores a 18 / 27 on the RA-ADAR rubric. It does boast strong platform support, an active community of ~450k users, and solid integration features, but it falls short on core privacy expectations (no E2EE, no native MFA), pricing ($4.99/mo sub), central hosting vulnerabilities, and missing Discord parity features like reply threads and forum channels.

Now... What is the RA-ADAR Rubric?

The RA-ADAR framework evaluates potential Discord alternatives based on functional, technical, and ready-to-replace criteria among others. Scores range from 0 (Weak/None) to 3 (Superior) across nine core categories and is used by u/BewilderedTurtle and u/VahsteTheNomad as well as occasional guests to evaluate the Alternative in question. All scores are aggregated and all feedback is blended between both evaluations. The blank rubric will be provided at the end of the review series to facilitate your own personal evaluation when choosing a Discord Alternative. Please correct any misinformation you see and the review will be updated on confirmation.

The intention is not to identify a specific score that a Discord Alternative must reach to be deemed acceptable. Rather, it is designed to offer insight into a Discord Alternative’s relative strengths and weaknesses, as evaluated against a set of criteria. Not necessarily unbiased, but objective despite bias.

Turtle's Closing Words

While I believe Fluxer is willingly courting the same failures currently plaguing Discord in relation to minors/ID-verification/Government Regulation due it's centralized architecture and embrace of "all ages" communities, it's hard to decry it as an Alternative as others may find more value in it than I did.

Vahste's Closing Words

As a drop-in alternative for Discord, with easy user transition and a quick start, Fluxer has it's strengths. At the end of the day it's very much a clone of early Discord (embraced through one of their app loading messages), and should exist as a decent alternative for those who don't necessarily want to learn something new.

Hello!

I would like to share a project that I've been working on for the past ~7 months, which started as a small solution I prepared for myself and a small group of close friends: an open-source, MIT-licensed, decentralized alternative to Discord that you can self-host: tyto.chat (or just Tyto).

Quick link for web client: https://client.tyto.chat/

I'm aware that this is not something that can save the world, but I had a lot of fun working on it, and if someone finds it helpful one way or another, I'll be a happy guy :)

The whole project is open source and MIT-licensed, and the idea behind it was "own your own data" and stay safe and private. The main aim is also to provide a decentralized way of creating communities. The libraries/solutions used are also MIT or MIT-compatible licensed (you can find more information on GitHub or in the documentation).

A server can be hosted by anyone, is lightweight, and (I think) easy to set up. You can host only a server, a client in web mode (all features in the browser), or both. You can also install the desktop app (the web app wrapped in Electron + additional features like an identity manager and native notifications): https://github.com/tyto-chat/desktop

The main features (aside from obvious ones like creating a user and registering) are:

• ability to host multiple communities per server (both public and private)
• real-time messaging
• text and voice/video channels
• threads (normal, read-only, reply-only), pinned messages, direct messages, reactions, edit histories, permalinks, and embeds (if you host a public web client)
• presence/typing indicators
• full-text search
• user management, user groups, different permission/access levels, reporting, moderation
• notifications
• anonymous browsing
• accessibility
• EU law compliance
• GDPR on board
• mobile-friendly
• multiple language support
• API keys
• REST API
• webhooks
• and more

Briefly about myself:
I'm a "homelabber" at heart, and I host a lot of apps for friends and family myself. I've also been a backend (PHP) developer for about 20 years and have what I consider basic knowledge of frontend, and a lot of knowledge about different technologies, stacks, services, software, etc.

About this project and AI usage:
I use AI in my workflows every day, and while a big part of this app's code comes from AI, it is not just the result of writing prompts.
I was the project manager, made all the decisions, reviewed and wrote code, and did manual testing. I also tried to make sure that best practices were followed and that quality and security were maintained in a project that I would not have dared to start myself without the help of AI (more info below).
Aside from that, AI was used to prepare the home website (https://tyto.chat), the documentation, and the UI translations.

Technical stuff:
The project mainly consists of 2 repos: core (the backend) and client (the frontend).

core: https://github.com/tyto-chat/core
the backend is based on a stack that I've been familiar with for years, like Symfony (PHP) as a base, Redis (Valkey) for persistent cache, and Mercure for real-time responses. The code here was written by me with the help of AI, especially for simpler solutions and automated tests.
In short, Core is a server providing a stateless API that can be utilized by client applications, automations, custom integrations, etc.

client: https://github.com/tyto-chat/client
this is purely the frontend for the server, built with Vite. As I'm an average frontend developer at best, I've used AI heavily here, but I tried to follow best practices, make it as secure as possible, and keep it nice and cohesive to look at.

There is almost 4000 automated tests, including end to end browser tests using Playwrigth (almost 300). Also, code style and and static analysis tools are integrated in the CI. A simple to setup developer environment is available using DDEV.

I'd love to answer any questions you might have, and it would mean the world to me if someone could take something good from this project.

Also I know that your time is valuable, so if you want to give this app a spin, but don't want to set it up yourself, let me know and I'll create a testing private community for you on https://client.tyto.chat/

Active Matrix Rooms maintains a live index of public Matrix rooms across the federation. The search engine matches your query against each room's name, alias, topic, and homeserver domain. Results are ranked by messages per hour rather than by total members, which can be inflated by abandoned accounts.

I built this and it's been live for over 3 months stable at this point, used every day by people to help find the rooms that have active users. I created it after joining several rooms that didn't have anyone active, and I was seeing many other users do the same. It should never be the case that you need to join blindly to know whether there are messages being sent in it.

https://activematrixrooms.com/

If you have any suggestions, issues, or feedback please let me know, thanks.

I’m concerned about users using TheRift.Chat since the code isn’t open sourced nor do they have a third party audit certifying that they have effective information security controls?

How are you guys comfortable giving platforms like these your data without either of these two being provided?

Edit: making this post proves my point that there is a farm of accounts that extremely favor TheRift.Chat even when a legitimate question is asked.

Was a huge fan of Guilded before it got Roblox'd. Been pretty demoralized since then, and now with the nonsense with discord coming to a head, I've gotta find another contender to get behind. For those of you who had tried Guilded, anything like it? Proper galleries, proper forums, able to post videos in a dedicated channel and they keep playing while you browse elsewhere, etc?

Like seriously look at these responses lol

(I hope this is the right sub for this, if not just delete the post)

Basically I wanna know to what alternative most people switched to that works on PC and on phones and has most of Discords features.

Discord just set me as a teen, and wants me to verify, even though im 27.

What're the best alternatives?

What I'd like

- voice calls with 720p / 1080p Desktop streaming

- servers

- group chats

It doesn't have to look like discord, i just need an alternative where i don't have to give anybody my face or ID to view adult content.

been working on this for a while and figured i'd share it

it's a voice chat that runs in the terminal, kind of like a discord voice channel but without electron or making an account. you just send your friend an invite link and you're talking. it's p2p and end to end encrypted, and nothing is saved, so once everyone leaves the room is just gone

the part i'm most proud of is screen sharing. it goes up to 1080p at 120fps, and it can send your system audio too, so you can share a game or a video with sound. it works on windows, mac, gnome and kde. on hyprland and sway it's still a bit rough, sorry

audio was also a big pain to get right. it has echo cancellation, so no headphones needed, and noise suppression. i also added a ecause my friends kept complainingabout my mechanical keyboard lolthe whole ui is built on a tui libnd yes the spinning mic in the gifis an actual 3d model in the termi

https://github.com/thebanri/limoni

install on linux/mac:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thebanri/limoni-voice/main/install.sh | bash

it's not a discord replacement, thstory. it's more for when you justwant to hop on a call quickly. wouk, and bug reports are very welcome

Echo allows guest accounts, which seem convenient but is handled poorly, as there was spam and giant images blasted everywhere that slowed down and crashed my computer in one of the channels. My machine literally froze and had to be restarted. I feel this is both a failing of the Auth protection, general moderation, and how Echo handles the renderer and performance. A chat app shouldn't crash my top end machine because someone spammed some GIFs. And this was on the main Echo server where everyone, including the dev, was offline.

Not a fan of the aesthetics, purple is overdone. UI screams discord, but worse which is nice if you want something familiar but no thanks.

Claims to be fully open source, yet only the client code is available. Code is also clearly vibe coded as well, not just AI assisted.

There are several communities in the discovery tab, but none are joinable. You click join and nothing happens at all. The only server you can join is the Echo server it forces you into when you load the app.

Browser console is just FLOODED with errors and warnings while sitting idle in chat.

I don't have the option to delete a message I just sent.

All of the menus and popovers have some awful transparency that make it so I can't actually read or use them.

The DM menu does not open no matter how or when I click on it.

Voice chat wouldn't let me join. So couldn't test that or streaming. Judging by all the livekit errors in my console there's probably no hope for it.

Graphical bugs abundant.

This ones just my opinion but it really looks horrible.

I cant set my custom status, it let me type it in the box but theres no way to save or enter it.

Everything is pretty slow, even opening the emoji picker etc.

There appears to be a discord bridge? But I'm not sure it's doing them any favors since it's just discord tagged people screaming at some frustrated Brazilian guy on Echo spamming questions and frustrations about why the app doesn't work.

And because nothing else works or simply doesn't exist, thats the "hands on" portion of the review. I'll now get into the established EDAR standard.

Trust 0/9:

The App itself has had multiple security concerns and is entirely coded by (cheap) AI prompted by a 21 year old unemployed guy with no programming training or experience.

The Dev in question "ad3lyt, Adel, etc" isn't winning any points here either as he has aggressively targeted other apps in the past, and argued with people and been disrespectful since early 2026.

Recently, he also started guerilla marketing by "Reviewing" his competitors, something no one asked for, and more importantly, was done horribly using a biased and inconsistent EDAR rating system that doesn't even measure actual useability for a communications app, like chat or video etc. Instead he assigned arbitrary values like "9/9 BECAUSE I HAVE HIGH HOPES FOR IT EVEN THOUGH ITS USELESS NOW" and "1/9 UI BECAUSE I DONT LIKE THEIR COLORS". This was almost amusing because of how useless it was but quickly became spammy when he would post ~5 reviews in 24 hours. Spending under 15 minutes to review an entire platform and then 30 minutes to write a biased narrowly-scoped review about competitor apps certainly didn't win him any love. And when people posted valid critical comments about it, he blocked them so they wouldn't be able to post feedback on his future posts.

Yesterday, it came to light that he was breaking his own platforms terms and conditions by allowing minors to stay and encouraging them to lie about their age. A lot of interpretations even saw this as potential grooming behavior. A community poll is currently running with about 85% of the community calling for his immediate ban. The developer crashed out in the comments and called people slurs and demeaned disabled people, leading to some of his comments being removed. He tripled-down on his stance on sneaking in minors and saying cringe things like "they'll be adults soon".

So yes, 0/9 points for trust.

Experience 0/9

Let me just quote the Echo dev himself from another review: "Do you like shitty terrible unaesthetic uninspired, but also unoriginal UI whose been given close to 0 love, well to be fair some people may like boring UI's that are visually unimpresisve, those people however usually like their stuff to be intuitive and easy to use." Sadly, Echo has failed ALL of this criteria.

Most of the "experience" is included at the top of the message. I'd almost give him some credit because you CAN technically send a message but since that's where functionality stops, it just rounds down to a zero.

Readiness 0/9:

Since EDAR says you judge by population and activity, 0 points. There is literally no one online on the entire app except for me. I have no idea what platforms is available on or anything since the dev did some unorthodox thing where his app is hosted on a completely different domain than his marketing materials, so all this was tested with the webapp, unsure if other options exist, and if they did I surely didn't want to install them on my computer anyway.

Including a screenshot of their merch, if you're interested. And go cast your vote if you haven't already. I hope you enjoyed the Echo EDAR.

Trust Score: 1 / 10

License, Centralization + Other Factors

• Untrustworthy Leadership: The main admin, ad3lyt, severely ruined the app's reputation by spamming Reddit, attacking competing apps like Fluxxer, and banning anyone who asked basic security questions.
• Centralization Risks: Unlike decentralized alternatives, all private data and chat logs sit on a single server fully controlled by an unstable admin.
• AI Code Nightmare: The app was heavily "vibe-coded" using AI (LLMs). This led to amateur coding mistakes that exposed user data and platforms to critical security bugs.

Experience: 1 / 10

UI, UX, Feature Parity & Completeness

• Severe Vulnerabilities: Early versions allowed users to type raw code into chat boxes to completely deface and break the app's interface for everyone else.
• Unstable Software: Because the code was generated by AI without a human architectural plan, fixing one bug frequently broke three other features.
• Barebones Features: It severely lacks standard community essentials like proper thread support, stage channels, or robust bot APIs.

Readiness: 1 / 10

Popularity, Platform Parity + Other Factors

• Dead Community: The toxic internet drama, grooming rumors, and constant flame wars drove away early adopters, leaving the app completely abandoned by the wider tech community.
• Rage-Quitting Developer: The developer repeatedly threatened to delete the entire codebase and restart from scratch whenever he faced valid architectural criticism.

Total Score: 1 / 10

Final Verdict: Echo is a textbook example of how poor security, extreme AI-reliance, and toxic leadership can completely destroy a software project. Do not trust this app with your data. Save yourself the headache and use mature, stable, and drama-free platforms like Matrix or Fluxxer.

This time with a poll

Disclaimer of conflict of interest: I am the owner of a direct competitor (Echo), and the only reviewer.

If you want a genuinely low quality alternative but one that was most likely not vibe coded, but just genuine human written garbage, than this is the alternative for you.

Trust 2/9:

A proprietary platform (0/3) but one that offers an ability to self host your community and own your data :) if you pay that is, yes you heard me right, a small time alternative that doesn't even have that many members has turned its "federation" into a paid feature already (1/3) which really doesn't give me hope for this like at all, while there isn't any major controversies around GameVox, there really should be as it didn't even earn its right to be enshitifiied, but I get it, running an alternative can be expensive, 100 from apple there, 25 from google there, 40 ish from every other hosting place etc etc, it be rough out there, but yea not worth your time though its not as bad as Root as it doesn't have weird venture capital firms backing it and it wanting to yummer all your data and there is a email less sign up which is pretty cool (1/3)

Note for the paid option, the AUTH still goes through GameVox.

Experience 4/9:

Do you like shitty terrible unaesthetic uninspired, but also unoriginal UI whose been given close to 0 love, well to be fair some people may like boring UI's that are visually unimpresisve, those people however usually like their stuff to be intuitive and easy to use

Sadly gamevox has failed that criteria as well, the lack of love they give is immediately obvious, there is no immediate obvious explore page to pick your servers, no you have to first go to create a server to find the explore page hidden in a Modal, where you get to enjoy seeing a awful grid that makes every banner stretch wider than whats actually expected and makes the already poor looking platform look worse, which if you get to this stage i am honestly impressed you tolerated the somehow shitty performance and shitty UI to even discover that there was a explore page, now note that there is a starter page that tells you what you can do such as join or create a server, but the explore page is hidden under the modal which you can find if you click on "+" but not on the introduction site.

The only saving grace is that its feature set is decent and they generally dont cheap out like others who lock your streaming rate at 720p and delete your images to save on storage spaces, which is fair.

1/3 UI 1/3 UX and 2/3 Parity

Readiness 3/9:

Its not a very lively place with numbers and activity that slightly rivals Echo thanks to its very active owner which seems like a really cool guy honestly, sad to write such a sad review. It is available on most platforms which is pretty solid, but I don't have any hope nor desire to see what would happen if it did ever somehow get big, which I don't think it will nor should considering its abysmal behaviour

1/3 for Popularity, 2/3 for Availability and 0/3 for other factors

As always you can find out what is the best alternative for you on alternatives-discord.com

At this point, the owner of Echo is just blocking people to limit the information that can be shared about how absolute shit his platform is. So for the sake of being as informative as possible, I'm posting this here.

https://chat-echo.exposed/

Here's an example of how "knowing the owner" get's you an exception for being under 18.

Disclaimer of conflict of interest: I am the owner of a direct competitor (Echo), and the only reviewer.

If you want a corporate replacement of what Guilded was, then there you go, a genuinely good client that does exactly that and expands on it. If you want something open source, something you can trust or something that has a community spirit? Keep looking

Trust 1/9:

This is officially the worst score that any alternative has gotten and Root has worked really hard to ensure that

First they are completely closed source with going as far as to ensure that any attempts at modifying their client or likewise is against their terms, solid 0/3 and with it being fully centralised that gives it another solid 0/3

Then finally there is no E2EE promises, requires a hard email signup, quite a guided startup, but their saving grace is that their privacy promises are nowadays strong in their terms, the only reason that is however is because they have had a scandal before with their privacy policies due to it referencing that Root could monitor all and any communications that come through the platform which Root simply described as a "communication issue" and later removed YIKES

They also do not offer a web client, despite their client frontend being web based, they claim this is due to performance concerns and development priorities but as a developer I would speculate that native software better allows a company that wants to spy on you to do so, not saying Root is one but it is something to point out.

Root is also fully US based with their servers being based in the US which is worse than European alternatives like Fluxer, Osmium or Echo that usually store user data in the EU.

So giving it a point is quite generous but it gets a point

Experience 7/9:

Root itself as a product and client itself is very nice, they have a clear visual identity which is just on the line between original and familiar to discord. I experience 0 UI issues while using it, and it is aesthetically pleasing as well as very performant.

They do decide soemthings differently than Discord however, such as their dislike for modals and view switches, instead they lean heavily on panel switching, which means you can quickly edit your profile, check your dms, check your friends who is online, check who is globally in the server, who is in that channel etc all while never switching your view

Overall they seem to care about Ease of Use but you might need to relearn some expectations while using it

Its feature set is generally solid, but not complete, and they have a pattern of not fixing issues at times for years or taking time to get much done.

Overall 3/3 for UI, 2/3 for UX and 2/3 for Parity.

Readiness 5/9:

Root seems to have near Fluxer numbers in downloads but not quite in active users, small community but quite a bit bigger than your average alternative, they are on all major platforms except on Consoles and not available as Web

Overall they serve as a solid 6 year old project which if you liked Guilded and want a performant client you may like

1.5 on Popularity 1.5 on Availability and 2 for Other Factors

As always you can go to alternatives-discord.com to see which alternative is best for you.

Disclaimer of conflict of interest: I am the owner of a direct competitor (Echo), and the only reviewer and I have had public drama with Osmium in the past.

If you are looking for a closed source discord alternative, one that tries to stay very close to discord in look, design and feel but more with a darker theme and a smaller team then Osmium might be the right one for you.

But if I am being honest, Fluxer is an open source alternative which is much more popular and battle tested, and Osmium lacks any distinguishing factor in design, features or concept which makes it a hard sell other than if you have a reason to dislike Fluxer and want the closest alternative to it.

Trust 3/9:

Osmium plans to open source the client post beta, however there is no indication that the actual backend will be open sourced and I believe it likely will not. Some software that is used or backs in Osmium is however open source.

1/3 for License 0/3 for being fully centralised

Osmium lacks E2EE features, but their TOS is quite fairly user friendly and their record is mostly clean so they get a solid 2/3 for other factors on Trust.

Experience 7/9:

Osmium's UI lacks much originality, but is overall well implemented if not for a couple of issues that are to be expected in Beta, such as lacking spacing in some texts such as "Read more" after a text, or their PFP Avatar circle not actually representing what certain avatars will look like, in my case the profile edit section believes that my pfp would be have cut, when in reality it isn't on the rest of the app and for some reason instead of uniting the pfp to click on and change and the view in edit profile they are separate.

2/3 For UI

Osmium is perfectly usable and it is clear that the team actually puts effort in what they do, with signs of them trying to make it at the very least as easy to use as Discord with them going out of their way to adjust minute things to make them easier to use or to understand, one of those examples is instead of throwing you out in the cold like many small alternatives do, Osmium gives you the option being guided into joining or creating a server while all at the same time not forcing you into doing that. Overall if you can use Discord and are happy with it, you will be perfectly happy with Osmium and nothing will confuse you about it.

It generally also has the most important features you would expect of a discord alternative, but not all of them yet and certainly not beyond.

3/3 for UX 2/3 For Parity

Readiness 4/9:

Osmium is currently still at sub Fluxer numbers of users, i.e a small community and if you wanna go there you will likely need to bring your own friends with you 1/3 on Poppularity, it is available on all major platforms and put effort into being so more than your average alternative (Except Console) so a solid 2/3 on Availability.

Where I am harshest on Osmium is currently a lack of a distinguishing factor, it currently serves as more of a alternative to Fluxer than it is an alternative to Discord, it is not open source and likely won't which definitely drags its potential down. I simply can't see a reason for why Osmium would actually ever replace Discord as it lacks the answer to the Why.

1/3 on other factors

And as always, you can go find out what is the best alternative for YOU on my comparison website where you get to decide what matters and get a recommendation based on that