XMPP, by a landslide.

Stoat is probably the best competitor, although it shot itself in the leg by changing its name recently. It's also missing video and screen sharing last time I checked, and the audio functionality barely works. Matrix is utter chaos as far as organization goes. When you join a Discord community, chats are clearly laid out and separate from private messages or group chats. When you join a Matrix community, you must individually choose extra group chats to join, and they are often indistinguishable from things happening outside that community. It's messy. And we haven't even gotten to video or voice. XMPP makes Matrix look organized and feature-complete. Good luck corralling a group of people onto that platform and figuring out disparate servers and disparate apps... I wouldn't recommend it. Basically, I don't think the open source space has an answer to this, and I don't think they can come up with one anytime soon.

Stoat is the best option imo

Stoat

Matrix is great as long as you know how to use it and keep it organized. It's Element client used to mix contacts and group chats but that's better now on web/desktop and on mobile you just need to add group chats to favorites and select the space you want to limit your browsing to (or use FluffyChat on mobile). There's also Zulip, which is actually closer to Slack. If you're on PC, use Discord as a gaming VoIP chat and you're already using Steam I'd tell you to take a peek at Steam's voice settings and either use that or disable Steam's overlay if you don't like it for whatever reason. In my experience Steam's chat performs much better than Discord but can be trickier to configure for some. XMPP has an experimental XEP for group spaces too, but who knows if it'll be ready soon or used in apps for all major platforms.

Damn, no Jitsi or Mattermost talk? Instead people are bringing up non-battle tested projects?

So many indie games and open-source projects (ironic right?) use Discord. It's ridiculous.

Genuinely grateful.

Simplex is a project made by a very weird dude who's very weird about his politics, and they are jumping headfirst into cryptocurrency and NFTs. I would have said it looked like a promising project a couple of years ago, but no longer. (From a technical standpoint, it's also just a messaging app with groups. At that point, you might as well use Signal or Delta as a backup)

I'll take delta chat thanks

Strange, I used an alias with them years ago and nothing ever gets sent to it.

Some accpunts require you to type stuff, and on linux if you added a repo youll have to type to remove it. Might go faster with a toy so you can have both hands free.

It would probably be easy to break with a fake ID but people are iffy about those methods and refuse to speak about the existence of them.

neither face scan, ID nor age restricted servers can fix that. the bad guys can even make a server specifically for kids to get them on there while most adults, who could have noticed coincidentally, would then use an adult server and can't notice any more.

Yea, because no one can fake their way in. Keep on licking the boots of the people who want to abuse you...

Are you suggesting that Discord didn't have any technical means to detect and ban that activity before? And that having face scans of some users not only gives them that ability, but it's the most reasonable and sensible way to achieve it?

How do you expect age verification to stop the pedophile rings?

Wow it's like no one has heard of Fake IDs. Despite the fact that Facebook moms would finger wag you for suggesting their existence, they are not a real barrier. Especially for actual criminals.