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.
I’ve been getting by just fine with a combination of Telegram and Element.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IP Internet Protocol VPN Virtual Private Network XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.
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What I’m upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums? Hell, even a subreddit would at least have been scrapable. If there’s a mass migration away from Discord then all that information just gets lost. Example that Lemmings might care about - CachyOS has a forum, but I’ve seen the vast majority of troubleshooting and user input made on their Discord channel.
Old fashioned forums are old fashioned. Circular logic but there’s a lot holding them back.
- Create a new account for every single niche forum? No thanks. We need a federated solution.
- Lemmy/Piefed/etc is almost there
- Antiquated restrictions (e.g. Log in to view images)
- Antiquated UI - People want emojis, reactions, rich media, etc
- PHP paid the bills once upon a time but now it’s hard to get anyone excited to make big new features for forum software
- Create a new account for every single niche forum? No thanks. We need a federated solution.
What I’m upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums?
Rather than paying for hosting and operational costs that goes with a forum, social media and the desire for immediacy happened as Yahoo created Groups, then Facebook followed suit with their own.
What I’m upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord.
omg, you guys are almost there. you’re so close, I can feel it.
so…why is the information locked behind a corporate entity?
Because people prefer convenience to privacy and accessibility, I guess? If there was an easy way to scrape/crawl discord data I would be hoarding everything I could to repost on lemmy or something but AFAIK there are no easily automated ways to access it.
and that’s no accident. it’s by design.
creating a community is neat, but many are started irresponsibly. they don’t take into consideration how to move if things “change”.
people just willingly and blindly trust corporate suppliers because they do “so much stuff”. not a care in the world as day by day their dependency grows.
As a Giant Bomb fan, it’s somewhat renewed interest in forums over there from the operators and users. Discord was always a bad forum anyway, but it was great for immediately being able to have a conversation with people to find answers to problems.
Seeing Teamspeak outlive Discord just keeps making me laugh.
“outlive” Discord is quite the exaggeration. Let’s not pretend that we’re not a vocal minority here, and that Discord will keep trucking just fine.
Even if the age verification wasn’t a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually. So it’s not going anywhere for now, but I’m pretty sure the investors will want their money back sooner or later.
Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn’t mean Discord is dying.
Now I’m just waiting for Ventrilo and the All Seeing Eye to come back… Maybe one day I’ll be able to play CoD1 mp and have weekly scrims again : (
Don’t know if you are interested in COD UO but we have biweekly pugs every Tuesday and Sunday evening. I think the cod1 scene is pretty much like us. CoD2 seems to be the active community with a running league with like 9 teams or so.
Trying to build the community up on these old games
I’d def jam UO but I’m down under and playing with ~250 ping is too shit for cod :( thanks for the invite tho, hf in ur games <3
Edit: I did see this recently, could be useful for you: https://gamedate.org/
@aeronmelon @ampersandrew crazy world isn’t it?
What’s wrong with team speak? It was a good service circa 2006. And I don’t see how it is significantly less valuable to the “gaming” community. I know it isn’t as feature rich and discord has evolved a lot from its “gamer” origins. I see it used for all kinds of community’s as a catch all system. I guess that is good, but I don’t get much value from it being a centralized point of community building.
Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.
I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.
It’s disgusting yeah. I try to avoid projects where Discord is their only news and/or support outlet.
Imo the biggest problem with Teamspeak is that it still requires an active connection to the server at all time… So unless your computer is on with the app opened 24/7 you may miss messages. That may or may not be an issue, but you may miss messages that your friends send to the group when you aren’t actively online.
Frankly the UI of TeamSpeak is ageing as well, and there is value in for instance being able to simply attach a screenshot directly in a Discord chat without having to upload it to some external service.
Check out the Teamspeak6 beta. I don’t know about offline messages but it addresses all your other complaints. I moved to it from Mumble somewhat recently and have been very happy with it.
They have acknowledged the offline messaging part. It does work in group chats and has E2EE there, but I think it’s something they are going to look into for servers. It’s closed source, so we are at the mercy of their few developers and cannot help. While I do trust them more than Discord, I would rather have an open solution, like Stoat/Fluxer, take off instead.
I am so pissed that Element or any other Matrix app does not support push to talk OR a minimum noise gate. If it did it would clearly get tons of new users, it would be pretty much no question which plattform to replace discord with
Whilst that’s one of the few things that bugs me with element, let’s not pretend that a lack of PTT or noise gate is the reason for everybody not switching to matrix.
Maybe not, but it would probably grow immensly. The exodus from discord is pretty significant, and matrix is mentioned again and again. It does not have to be that many more users in % from Discord to make matrix a lot more popular than it is today
I have tried XMPP, Matrix and now I’ve settled on Mumble.
Me and my fellows mostly just need a voice room or a couple to sit in, and Mumble does that best out of these three, in my opinion.
I recommend giving Mumble a try as it is super easy to set up and use. Users don’t need to even create accounts to join servers.
Mumble was the primary choice for EVE Online groups.
You can literally have thousands of users on the same server.
In EVE, during big fleet fights (like 1000+ people on the same “team”), you can have a hierarchy of fleet commanders/wing commanders/squad leaders where voice travels down the chain of command, but not up.
Also the certificate based security with ACLs is just unmatched. You can set it up exactly how you want.
Also easy to integrate with, which is important for something like EVE.
I second this. My gaming group probably won’t leave discord for the foreseeable future but Mumble is probably where we’d go if we did. IMO all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does, when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at their scale.
I don’t want federation. I don’t want it to scale to infinite concurrent users. What I want is something simple I can plonk on a crusty old laptop running Proxmox or a Raspberry pi for a few friends.
Even on a crusty old laptop you can easily serve hundreds of users with Mumble
IDK, said laptop is from 2010.
Limiting factor will probably be network - if you hook it up with cable, it should be fine
I’ve got a Mumble server running on a little Linux container in my home lab.
Easy to set up and configure, very stable. Nothing special, it does what it is supposed to do, be a low latency, stable voip system, and it does great.
In order for people to connect to it you have to give them your home IP right? The mumble server’s IP is your home IP?
Yes, like with everything else you self host.
You could also use some paid service like Cloudflare if you want to hide it for some reason.
But generally people are overly protective of their home IP. What’s the danger? DDoS?
People know my physical address but my house hasn’t been burned down yet…
Afaik you’d have to open a port and port forward for that to work, and you’d have to update every time your ip changes, unless you have a domain linked to it. There’s lots of other configurations, too: VPN/tailscale or equivalent onto your home network, a vps, reverse proxy, etc. I’ve yet to decide how to access from outside my home. Still tinkering locally, but mumble would be fun to try one day.
I just use my (static) IP directly with port forwards on my router.
Sure, I get hundreds of login attempts every day, but that’s just life on the internet. Just secure your stuff and you’re fine.
Mumble is nice, but it hasn’t changed much since the time people explicitly moved away from it to Discord, so why would they go back it it now?
Mumble isn’t requiring you to submit your ID.
Probably nothing has really changed. And I am not claiming it to be a Discord killer, as it really only does the voice rooms well.
But I am recommending it if you and your friends just need a voice room or two (as me and my friends do).
Pretty surprised to not see mumble mentioned. It’s mostly a voice chat replacement. But the low latency chat works so damn well and easy to self host.
Fluxer is of particular interest to the folks here at AN. We’ve talked a bit about exploring it once they finish work on federation.
That’s a primary focus of the app after stability. The dev was able to hire on a co-developer, so hoping to see the project accelerate
It comes down to Fluxer and Stoat. Or just Stoat if you dislike Fluxer’s AI-assisted development.
One thing is clear, both are currently working great and are the closest thing to Discord’s core features.
It’s definitely going to be one of these two. Matrix and XMPP are just too much for casual users, and there’s no one client for either of them which supports all of Discord’s core features.
Out of those two, Fluxer feels like the better choice right now, but I do wish they’d take a stronger stance against LLMs. Stoat feels clunkier, buggier, and feels like it’s getting left behind.
I feel like comet has all of discords features, no?
Element supports all of discords core features.
Last I checked it doesn’t keep channels in a server organized and always sorts by recent activity. I may be mistaken but I don’t believe it supported screenshare audio yet either
These are core features? For me core feature is channels, audio/video call and screen share and element can do all of that.
Damn it this is the first I’m hearing about Fluxer’s AI development.
Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?
Are you talking about self hosting for fluxer? They explicitly state in their documentation they don’t want people using the current version because they’re doing a rewrite, so you should wait.
Yes, Fluxer’s self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn’t self hosted enough for my needs. It’s cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.
Honestly if you’re that worried about it, I’d just wait and not use anything. Instead of wasting time trying to find a product that probably won’t get better, you can wait and get Fluxer when they make it ready.
Or you could pull stoat and modify the code yourself.
I’ve had the most people switch over to element (a full 2 people plus myself)
I hope we get encrypted hosting sites that can help people do easy automated setups. A bunch of people want something that is just create a server and go. I know several discord admins that aren’t really hardware and self hosting literate.
I like the alternatives, but they mean nothing without being federated.
For me it’s federation and encryption. Yeah obviously, if I’m in a public space then encryption means fuck all, but for messages between me and close friends I want encryption.
I agree with the public spaces. Just put https and we’re good.
The worst part of Matrix is needing to copy recovery key onto each new device or install, or else you will lose access to all your messages in public servers. Its been discouraging and I rarely use Matrix because of this inconvenience, but I really want to – but it’s too exhausting and time consuming. And I lose track of conversations if I lost the key, which isn’t practical if I’m working on something and getting help.
https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger is an XMPP client by the ejabberd people that seems aimed at being a Discord alternative. I think it is intended to support voice and screen sharing eventually, though it looks like they want to focus on getting text chat worked out for the time being.
For XMPP, the Movim client is currently the best option as a discord alternative.
It has group voice and video calls, screensharing w/audio (need a chromium browser to share the audio for now), and just added discord-like channels with rooms (though it’s not as smooth as Discord). The Dev plans to implement drop-in voice rooms at some point as well.
They’ve got xep-0503 on the roadmap, so it’s not there yet, but is for sure something worth keeping an eye on.
Xmpp already survived Google divesting from it, so I’m more inclined to believe it has real staying power compared to all these new apps partially written by ai or with problematic security policies.
I hear Snikket makes it really easy to host XMPP (aka Jabber).
Yes, but it isn’t a Discord replacement, but rather a WhatsApp replacement.
https://movim.eu/ is xmpp based and might be more suitable as a Discord replacement, but to be honest it isn’t quite there yet if you are looking mainly for a voice chat app.
Hmmmm voice chat eh?
Well then it’s time to recommend Mumble!
But then it’s not chat anymore. Or screenshare.
There are many good tools that solve individual issues. But Discord solved many of these issues in one tool, and that also has its charme.
That’s precisely why they have to be resisted and/or we have to look for alternatives that Do One Thing Well. Among many other issues, the networking effect issue with EverythingApps is quite double-faceted in that, because they do everything, their “weight” not only acts as gilded cages to prevent people from leaving, but also to prevent developers, working on their spare time, from developing something that can be reasonably understood as an “alternative” (because the alternative has to also Do Everything).
It’s basically playing a loser game to lose, see eg.: Mozilla always at best playing catch-up to Google, or why we can’t seem to move from BloatedWebWithReact to something like Gopher (or even make a proper Gopher 2.0).
All that said, I feel like XMPP and Matterbridge are approaching this from the right perspective. Just implement a global communication protocol and leave to platform makers (or platform users) the task of bridging from and to whatever directions they want.
The project I posted here yesterday focuses on providing text, voice and screen share. My goal is to provide an easy to host tool for those three things. Check it out if it’s just those you want in a single package.
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