Came across this on the r/selfhosted community. Still very much in the alpha stages, but it’s already got a Docker image you can try out for yourself, or try out the demo server.
Tried it earlier today, couldn’t get the voice/video chat to work right away on my self-hosted setup but the real-time chat was very snappy. Looks promising.
Totally valid point, especially w.r.t. ease of onboarding for public usecases. Sure would be nice if it functioned (optionally) as a private forum as well. Seems like a lot of commonality there and covers the DM case and the ‘semi-public’ but discord is totally logging everything case. One can hope, but I agree, first things first.