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Live demo at: https://demo.sharkord.com/
Has working voice chat, screensharing (with audio on Wayland through Firefox + this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pipewire-screenaudio/). Other features are available too but this is what I mostly care about and it's what other alternatives are struggling with from what I saw, Sharkord implements them and it's highly usable already.
Open source, self-host only and no monetary crap from the getgo (no offense Fluxer).
It's not perfect obviously this early on, but this is definitely my choice for the proper Discord alternative.
Matrix is too complex and problematic for anyone ...
I'm not really familiar with all the others.
Stoat appears to be behind and like Fluxer, I think it's trying to become Discord 2.0 in brand image and monetisation which is a no go for me.
Matrix is indeed complex and daunting as you said, add to that it's not as lightweight as Sharkord, which is something I forgot to mention in the post, so hosting costs add up to.
I want to make it clear, as laid out somewhere in their github, Sharkord is not attempting to be a Discord clone, it instead is developed for the specific use case of being a solid, lightweight RTC solution for small groups. Community chatting or being a knowledge base is out of scope, look elsewhere if that's what one is looking for.
There should be a conversation about how people over relied on Discord for far too many uses. It's all the following a forum, knowledge base, gathering for communities, RTC solution, and instant messenging. People have put all their eggs in one basket. A wiser approach would be to use multiple applications for the different use cases, not limiting oneself to just 1 where it all comes down when it fucks up.
And of course, if that's too much work for the average user, then go ahead and get those government IDs ready I guess. Live free or die.
Last edited by Pyrate on 19 Feb 2026 at 7:12 am UTC