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 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).