Awebo - Discord alternative by Loris Cro (VP of community at Zig)

Awebo - Discord alternative by Loris Cro (VP of community at Zig)

[chooky]

Loris Cro (VP of community at Zig) and active Zig community members have been getting sick of the direction Discord is moving. They've started building their own lightweight alternative, Awebo.

https://codeberg.org/awebo-chat/awebo

I've been following the development and it's come a long way in a short amount of time.

Interested to hear others' thoughts on this. I'm curious why people don't just move to IRC or XMPP. Perhaps it's because of VC, "channels", or better moderation tools which make communities easier to manage?

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https://bbs.copland.systems/forumpost/dfd768e962

Re: Awebo - Discord alternative by Loris Cro (VP of community at Zig)

[Sneeed]

What a name

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https://bbs.copland.systems/forumpost/3ef1695bd7

Re: Awebo - Discord alternative by Loris Cro (VP of community at Zig)

[cashmere]

irc was never user friendly same goes to xmpp. though xmpp is the foundation for whatsapp to this day. they just made it proprietary and closed all incoming connections.

with that being said, it looks like a very cool project though. i am interested how it will compete with matrix and xmpp. discord is hard without any backing by vc.

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https://bbs.copland.systems/forumpost/ae5799c347

Re: Awebo - Discord alternative by Loris Cro (VP of community at Zig)

[joshuablais]

Looks pretty dope. End of the day, I agree with you in that I have to ask what gap it fills though. When you have XMPP/Matrix (less advised), and IRC, these community softwares seem a bit less appealing.

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https://bbs.copland.systems/forumpost/bd634fc14e

Re: Awebo - Discord alternative by Loris Cro (VP of community at Zig)

[mattken]

Andrew Kelley had referenced this in a recent talk at SSW 2026, and I was intrigued from the start. Glad to see that development is moving right along.

In regards to the question: I think people want something that is pretty close to what they know, and IRC or XMPP don't really fit that bill.
Matrix is a bit more normie-friendly, but that also comes with downsides (mainly more pressure from governments to comply with chat control guidelines).

If you want voice chat within a more private community, use Mumble or XMPP's call feature.

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https://bbs.copland.systems/forumpost/d86e311821

Re: Awebo - Discord alternative by Loris Cro (VP of community at Zig)

[cashmere]

back when i used to selfhost my own matrix instance, i tried to convert my normie friends over to matrix and they always failed. til this day i can not have a proper phone call over matrix with someone i used to work with because my homeserver doesn't support the new matrix call whatsoever. we always go to jitsi and somehow there we can automagically talk.

xmpp would be a really viable option if the current clients were not that cryptic and would not have this 1337 hacker vibes. for android you have conversations.im which is really dope but besides that the options are not good

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https://bbs.copland.systems/forumpost/c2250a5b50