Someone asked me whether Discord is freely distributed software; indeed Discord mentions “open source” on their website; they have a page “Discord loves open source”[1] where open source projects which use Discord are listed, and Discord nudge users to join “servers”, as if those servers were instances (they aren’t).
Discord isn’t open source. It’s proprietary (Wikipedia is a reasonable source to check the license of a software).
Discord uses the word “server” but that does not mean instance. A “server”, in Discord’ jargon is just a group chat. All the action takes place on Discord’s servers. All the users remain in Discord’s walled-garden.
One of the checks you can do, to understand whether a software is freely distributed is to check whether one can run an instance of that software. That’s the case with Mastodon, for example. You can run your own Mastodon instance, or join the instance of someone else.
Freely distributed alternatives to Discord are: Matrix along with the client Element which support audio, maybe Tox protocol for chatting and voice, Mumble for low-latency voice (only); some people mentioned Mattermost on the web, but based on the feedback I got from some people managing instances of Mattermost, Mattermost is making more and more features proprietary. For chat only, there is also Gitter and IRC.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250201134938if_/https://discord.com/open-source
Tags: discord, open-source, alternatives