Hey guys, stop moving on to the next commercial service who will do the exact same thing once they get up to critical mass.
Yes, commercial services are easier to setup. The cost you pay is all of your privacy and your loss of control over the service that you’re building your communities on.
Stop making this same mistake OVER and OVER and OVER.
Take the time to find the IT workers or tech nerds in your community, take donations to rent server space and administer it yourself. Moving from Discord to Teamspeak isn’t an improvement, you’re just selecting the next group of people who will sell you out the moment that it becomes profitable.
Use Free and Open Source solutions, that your community hosts themselves. You have Mumble (https://www.mumble.info/) for voice, XMPP (https://xmpp.org/software/?category=servers) for text chat, Discourse (https://github.com/discourse/discourse) for forums, or even setup a Lemmy instance.
None of these things are difficult to use and the administrative side of things is simple (most are simply pre-made and hardened Docker containers). Even if you don’t want to deal with that yourself, there are managed hosts available for all of these pieces of software. If you don’t want to administer a Mumble server you can just rent one for less than the cost of a single Discord subscription. There are similar managed hosts for all of the other software.
Every game that I’ve ever played as part of a large community has had forum software and voice chat that we’ve hosted ourselves. Discord killed all of that because they offered the same service for free and made it easier.
Well, it wasn’t free, they’ve been steadily enshittfying and profiting off of the users. The prices keep increasing and they’re depending on the Network Effect (“I can’t leave because everyone uses it!”) to keep you trapped on their services.
Apparently you can self-host TeamSpeak
Kind of, they give everyone a free 1 server 32 slot license.
That isn’t guaranteed to be there forever and they could decide in the future that you need to buy that license.
However, if you install a Mumble server then it can’t be taken away from you. The hosting process is largely the same from an administrative perspective so I’d prefer the ‘free forever’ to the ‘free, limit 32, while supplies last’ license-wise.
time repeats itself.
Bring back Ventrilo. Get on Vent or I’ll have you bent
For-profit companies cannot be relied on for this kinda thing (for anything at all). TeamSpeak is good now, maybe, but there’s nothing actually protecting it from turning to shit the very instant management changes.
True. However TS has been around for a very very long time and have a proven record of not shitting on users. The free server and client have remained free all this time.
That doesn’t mean things will always be good though.
I am much more inclined to trust TeamSpeak, but personally I’d rather move personal smaller groups to Matrix, and bigger public communities to Discourse or Lemmy where they are properly indexed and searchable.
TS also has a straightforward charge for server hosting.
This is free on Discord, but we all know nothing is actually free.
Can we all not move to another proprietary paid service again? Good god.
Stoat has been wonderfully simple so far and is free and open source. It’s got voice chat. It’s only been about a week of using it so far so please correct me if I’m wrong or point out issues that I haven’t seen or mentioned.
It seems like the most realistic option to me since I doubt the masses wanna get into self hosting.
It seems like the most realistic option to me since I doubt the masses wanna get into self hosting.
You only need these services as part of a gaming community.
I think you’d have a hard time finding a gaming community that didn’t contain at least a few people who could handle installing a docker container on a VPS.
The trade off, to save minimal administrative overhead (compared to moderation and such), you give up complete control over how your system is run, how your data is divulged and any control over future cost increases.
Everyone should be self-hosting (and also running Linux, but we’ll beat that horse later) if they’re running a gaming community.
Im seeing a huge increase in people using stoat. And its been fun.
If anyone is interested in Retro Games: https://stt.gg/GJh5JHy2
dude hell yeah count me in
coo see you there!
It’s all about friction. As long as the user has to pick an instance they will always hesitate to pick any federated service. The average user will always choose the path of least resistance.
Proprietary services spend a lot of time trying to reduce friction, and it works.
The only solution I can think of would be a three part one:
- The main app of a federated service automatically rotates between a pool or reliable, reputable, non-extremist instances where the user can log in with an email and password.
- The federated service makes it trivial to migrate accounts amongst instances.
- the user can log into their instance threw any other instance perhaps threw oauth.
This would of course require some federated account login system. Hard but not impossible. It could be some sort of Casandra style ring based account service where nodes are part of the ring.
This eliminates the new user friction.
- Download app
- Sign up
- Login
It works anywhere any time with corpo style low friction. You don’t need to think about instances at all till you are ready to.
Using Stoat’s main server raises a privacy concern because it’s UK-based and AFAIK lacks E2EE—UK authorities could seize server data without our knowledge. That effectively means private use requires self-hosting.
Issue with self-hosting Stoat is, it’s currently more complicated than Matrix. This user created a detailed GitHub guide that documents their research and pitfalls for getting Stoat working with voice/video: https://github.com/javif89/stoat-selfhost
The official self-hosted guide (https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted) looks simple at first, but if you look at the compose file, it requires FOURTEEN containers to run and doesn’t yet include voice/video support which will increase complexity.
By contrast, TeamSpeak’s self-hosting appeal is its simplicity: only two services (or one with SQLite) and it works out of the box today.
But I agree — moving from one closed-source silo to another isn’t ideal. I just wish Stoat were easier to run behind the scenes.
For me, a combination of matrix for text chat and mumble for voice is the simplest and most privacy respecting way to self-host a discord alternative.
The official self-hosted guide is actually quite simple and straightforward. I had it set up and going in a half hour or so, and that’s even with removing Caddy and using my existing nginx reverse proxy. It’s intimidating at first-glance, yeah.
That being said, the official self-host guide is also 5 months out of date. The alternative you linked requires jumping through a bunch of hoops because it’s just a small community of enthusiasts hacking together the current version of Stoat for self-hosting.
So I acknowledge that self-hosting current version of Stoat with voice is rather complicated and frustrating right now, but hopefully it becomes as simple as the official self-hosting guide eventually.
This is actually a good point for fluxer. Stoat being UK based isn’t great, I’ll agree with that and it’s something I didn’t even think about until now.
Maybe fluxer being based in sweden (I think) is better? On the surface, I think it is but my knowledge of swedish privacy laws is pretty surface level.
That said, fluxer asks for a date of birth when signing up and also has like pricing tiers and stuff which instantly gives me the ick. Stoat is just like “name and email please” and you’re done lol
Yeah honestly. Running the teamspeak server executable is hardly selfhosting, and they’re just another closed source proprietary service. Cool they’re still around after all these years I guess but they shouldn’t even be considered as a migration option.
Stoat and Fluxer are both open source, very straightforward and familiar, and I believe self-hostable. Much easier for casual users than Matrix too.
I know folks like the other commenter mention that Matrix is simple and all but I think for the average person that’s just wrong.
Maybe in the fediverse our vision of what the average person can do/understand with/about tech is skewed but trying to get some of my friends onto Matrix would be an absolute nightmare.
Not to mention the VAST majority of people don’t like playing tech detective to figure things out, even if they could, and just wanna sign up and move on with their lives. That is something stoat as offered so far while remaining free and open source.
This doe a much better job at saying what I was trying to say haha
Yeah honestly. Like I work in IT, have my own home server, run linux on everything, etc etc etc, but even I found Matrix to be a convoluted mess, and most clients have their own issues. I can’t imagine trying to get someone who’s not tech-savvy to try it out.
Ok, I don’t feel to bad now lol I also found Matrix to just kinda be a mess. I don’t run home servers or anything but I’m a fairly experienced linux user and like to poke around tech and all that. I felt kinda dumb for not figuring it out tbh haha
I’m unsure what is difficult about Matrix.
I’ve had several “casual” friends register and join my space on their own.
- Signup can be tricky.
- Managing your encryption keys is tricky for normal people (I know someone who signed up for it on incognito because they weren’t sure about it yet then got a bunch of confusing popups when they signed on with their phone).
- Room organization is missing a layer used on discord (server->room instead of list of rooms) leading to confusing moderation structures and nearly required manual organization of rooms if you’re in more than 10.
- notifications rules can be obtuse.
- having different commands based on the clients used can lead to confusion.
- most clients have security related popups that just confuse people (This person reset their identity!).
- people can struggle with how to properly interact over federation, much like in the fediverse
- screensharing tools just aren’t there yet
Things have been getting better fast for matrix, but its just not ready for the masses IMO. I still suggest it when I can when the use case makes sense.
Hosting it is far from simple
Sure, but I see no need to host when so many cool nerds will gladly host your space for you. Different strokes, I guess.
I’m not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.
XMPP!
Stoat is dead in the water due to dependency on the UK and not an easy solution to deploy yet.
Fluxer is dead in the water due to license.
I don’t get why so many people are saying this. Afaik, it doesn’t have channels within servers like Discord and Slack, which I feel is a defining feature in the text chat part of the apps.
Me either tbh so I did a bit of digging and found that stoat has been around a bit longer and (I know this is a dumb metric for this) seems to have more stars and forks on their github which indicates to me it’ll be around longer.
That said, fluxer has nicer UI imo and I think it has a few more features so it might outdo stoat in the future idk.
Ultimately, I think both are great and likely to be around for a while so just pick one and go with it. They both are open source, use the same license and all that. So you can’t go wrong.
One thing that worries me a little about fluxer is this:
Finally, we can offer commercial licences to companies that want to run Fluxer internally without being bound by the AGPLv3 copyleft terms. This is enabled via a contributor-friendly CLA, but it doesn’t create a separate “enterprise edition”. It’s still the same Fluxer software everyone else uses.
They have a CLA on contributions. So while today Fluxer is licensed as AGPLv3, tomorrow they can pull the rug and change the license, just like everyone else has been doing.
yeah, I don’t love that
Fluxer feels more full-featured to me
Yeah… I hate watching people make the same mistake over and over. I guess we just have to take the lead and build the communities that we need over on Stoat and Matrix.
AmericansPeople will do anything but just setup XMPP, this is literally what it was invented for.Yup, I’m pretty active on the game dev server on stoat. Anyone lurking here, come check it out!
Nice, what’s the link?
lemme know if that doesn’t work!
It looks like its not working for me.
Stoat, both its app and website refuse to open on my mobile data. I doubt it’s only happening to me. Teamspeak at least lets people host and have control of their own servers.
I had problems logging in the other day, which I assume was the server getting hammered.
That’s a separate issue from what I’m having. It only doesn’t work on my verizon cell service. Unfortunately it makes stoat not an option for me.
Weird it works perfectly fine on my mobile data.
Yeah, I get “address not found” regardless of browser. I’ll probably be keeping a closer eye on fluxer.
Best of luck in migrating! I wish I had a solution for you
The fact you can’t use the desktop client with a self hosted server and that there is no public iOS app right now are dealbreakers for me
Yeah no. There was a reason we all abandoned TeamSpeak years ago.
I know Teamspeak 6 is in beta, so I get it. But boy when I tried it, it was just awful. It took me literal minutes just to figure out how to disconnect from the voice server. They desperately need to hire someone for UX who has actual experience in, you know, design.
And getting Matrix (Synapse) to run is about as teeth-pulling as getting an Oracle database system to run back in 2001.
I don’t like what Discord is doing. And I’ll likely find some alternative if I can convince others to also join me, but there simply is no viable alternative that gives the exact level of experience that Discord does (from a feature point of view and a UI/UX point of view).
And yes, I’ve tried Fluxer. It’s a good start, but still needs a lot of work, which the maintainer says is ongoing (work such as making self-hosting viable, etc). While I like the UI/UX of Fluxer, I am concerned that its UI is effectively a direct copy of Discord from a few years ago and I don’t know if Discord would be legally able to do something about this. Perhaps it’s all fine, and if so, I wish Fluxer immense success at being that viable Discord alternative, and I will keep an eye on this project.
Stoat seems pretty close to where it needs to be. Plus it’s open source and self-hostable.
EDIT>> And apparently I’m not the only one who may have issues with their current methodologies for using docker compose: https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted/issues/176
EDIT 2>> I tried Stoat using their hosted service (not self-hosting), and it leaves a lot to be desired as it relates to roles/permissions. I figure it’s a good six months or more away from being a viable alternative to Discord. It’s a good start, though.
Thanks for the reminder of that!
I’ve heard of it, but hadn’t yet looked into it much. I see this: https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted . It seems promising, I just wish it was a simple docker compose file with parameters (such as domain name/config file volume path/etc), so I can easily run it on UnRAID. But it’s requesting I run a shell script to generate some configuration file which could have been simple docker compose parameters. Therefore, in its current form, it requires I run docker compose via a shell that has the repo cloned.
And in order to do it a more proper way, in my opinion, I’d have to alter the compose file to change the “volumes” for many of the defined services to point to UnRAID’s appdata location. Every bit of this could have simply been environment variables within the compose file. And it would be ideal if the compose file could be set up to allow for external docker services that already exist (such as mongodb, redis, and rabbitmq). And it should expect reverse proxy hosting by default, not be the exception, again in my opinion.
I get that it’s open source and I could submit a pull request to do all I’d want, I’m just looking for a quick alternative to Discord without this level of effort. None seem to exist currently, at least for self-hosting. So I’ll continue looking into this when I decide to put in the effort for it. But I do appreciate your suggestion and may indeed go down this path soon.
TeamSpeak only supports 32 simultaneous users, you must purchase a license to support more than that.
Yeah, this bit was all I needei to know:
Besides all of that, if you’d rather not chat to randoms who also happen to have an unhealthy obsession with Arc Raiders, you’ll likely need to pay an admittedly small subscription fee to rent your own ten-person community voice server. By that point, you’re handing over card details and essentially fulfilling an age assurance check anyway. If you’d rather limit how much info your chat platform of choice has about you, there are arguably better options out there.
Tangentially related: Fuck Arc raiders.
How does CC details qualify as age verification? It’s WAY better than gov ID or face scan.
I just mean this type of business model is ripe for enshittification.
Face scan is actually much easier to defeat than CC details.
Nowadays with VISA ‘3D Secure’ and the equivalent on Mastercard you have to validate your legal name attached to the credit card, this is done via third-party which can request details your bank has on file (often your home address or mobile number), and even while those details are not supposed to be shared with the merchant (we know how careful banks are about keeping control of PII), the core detail - your legal name, is confirmed. It is not hard to tie a user to other data via data brokers once you have their legal name, and credit card number, and any other details they may share with the service (email, phone, etc).
Face scan is actually much easier to defeat than CC details.
I don’t understand. You don’t need to “defeat” CC details.
They do not contain your age or your govt documents. Even if they did, a child is likely just going to use their parents’ CC. So it’s not a form of age verification at all.
In context, defeating the privacy exposure of requiring to use CC details would be buy getting an a anonymous credit card, which in most countries are now either very difficult to obtain or simply no longer offered (outlawed).
Hope that helps.
It is the same effectiveness of scanning an ID since that could also be their parent’s.
The point of scanning the ID is (supposedly) to verify the age of the user, not their parents.
Using a credit card or an ID are both just using a physical item to ‘verify’ an age of someone who may or may not be that person. Getting a credit card has a minimum age, so the end goal of age ‘verification’ is met either way although the ID has way more personally identifiable information like skin color, actual birth date, gender, etc.
It isn’t like scanning an ID verifies that the person scanning the ID is the person on the computer.
Oof that’s a no-go
That’s 32 connected users to voice, not total server users isn’t it?
Correct. 32 people connected to voice simultaneously, but there isn’t persistent text chat. So really, only 32 users at a time, at all. The lack of text made me set up a Matrix homeserver instead.
I don’t know. They call them “slots” without elaborating and tell you to contact them for more details.
For a room to chat or to talk with mic or webcam? I never used Teamspeak before.
For anything, is my understanding. If they try to open it, they’re just represented with a “server full” notification.
Only the person who creates the room have to pay or everyone who want to join a room that is bigger than the limit?
Whoever hosts the server
Was looking at moving over, but among other things their mobile client is paid, and poorly reviewed. My main discord community is 1100 members, it’s already going to be hard to get most of them to jump to another platform without it costing all of them for phone access.
Does anyone know if their self hosted version has caught up to their client version? (In terms of features)
Their client runs on top of the ts3 server, so I assume it should just work. Set up the server and you can choose from the old or new clients.
i got the server up and running on my linux mini pc.
the voice quality is great, and the video streaming is good, someone mentioned the resolution looked super smeared when they joined, but it corrected itself before i could ally tab look at it.
i have found that an important detail is that the text chat is either directly attached to the voice channel, and to see/manipulate it you must jump into that channel, or there are global chats that are separate entities from the channel, even if handled by the same ui. once you find your friend server, make sure to book mark it as it’s not an automatic thing.
also right now hosting your own server is preferable, as the explosion of users maxed out the us located servers, and japan is not an acceptable server spot.
