I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
A “do everything” app is overkill. I am not a fan of many features Discord implemented over time. But the initial offering of having text chat, voice chat, video chat in one app makes sense. It’s just super convenient to switch the communication type depending on what you are currently doing, without having to onboard and switch between tools.
It’s also hard to draw a line, if you want to go “do one thing well”. Mumble also includes text chat, and user management, ACLs, etc. … for text chat one could use IRC, for user management there are IdPs, and so on. XMPP also doesn’t just do “one thing”. The “X” (= extensible) is heavily used and there are extensions for all kinds of things. Some of the big messengers out there are (or were) using XMPP under the hood (just without federation).