Maybe this bullshit will be the spark needed to move us all off Discord. It’s fine for voice-chat in games, don’t get me wrong, but I HATE how its replaced forums/wikis for so many games/mods/etc. Searching disparate Discord servers is like looking for a nonferrous straw-colored needle in a haystack.
Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.
What’s wrong with good old fashioned data base backed message forums? There are so many implementations available, I’m sure many are FOSS, and I’m sure there’s managed solutions as well. It’s a mature, tested, rock solid reliable technology that has existed pretty much since the inception of the internet, and can be easily incorporated into other tools and workflows - because there is 40+ years of development work with the concept.
Forums are great for being forums. Real-time instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing are all a very different use-case. They’re two entirely separate products, and comparing them is apples and oranges. People are looking to replace Discord with Discord-like services, because forums don’t fucking do what Discord does.
The big problem (and the reason everyone seems to compare the two) is that Discord started eating forums, as companies realized it was easier to create a Discord server instead of creating (and hosting, and maintaining) a support forum. And that’s a perfectly valid complaint. But that doesn’t mean forums are a valid replacement for Discord.
He is talking about forums because the main issue with discord is that it’s cut from the rest of the internet so nothing is indexed and a lot of platforms and services use discord like a forum (it isn’t).
No one wants our conversations indexed, and discord shouldn’t be a forum.
I mean, I share the complaint of Discord having tons of unindexable knowledge locked away in it, but forums are not good replacement for my friend group. So yeah we kinda want a Discord alternative specifically.
Obviously the problem isn’t you and your friends, the problems is services that use discord like it’s a forum, dispatcharr for example “oh do you want support? Join our discord”. Fine, I’ll figure it out myself.
My group of friends, like yours, we have a discord server with 9 channels, more than half aren’t used, and one of the channels is to share links.
I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it’s pretty far from the same level of comfort.
Don’t take that the wrong way though, I’m all for supporting open alternatives, I’m just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.
I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.
I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.
Have they finally released screen sharing in ts6? I gotta say that the development of that project is pretty comical. Radio silence with the only communication being the community manager shitting on discord every other day while giving no updates on their own product.
I haven’t followed the development communication much, but yes, screen sharing works now. It wasn’t working on wayland like 8mo ago, but I tried again a month ago and it’s now working.
No. Recently I played a bit using a friends mumble server. And it’s a friend that is already privacy conscious. But these friends are not the norm. They are the exception.
Interesting to see Teamspeak evolved but still you have to pay to host a server so that’s a huge difference.
Well yes, I would say it’s very much an integral part of my social life.
I spend a lot of time with my gamer friends and it revolves around our discord servers.
We even have a discord servers dedicated to our role play sessions.
IMHO Discord is a bit more than just a voice chat app. It’s also rooms with persistant chats. It’s the ability to share media etc.
Also their noise reduction tech is top notch.
I knew when I got in that it would be another “Gmail” for me. It’s great but you have to give a bit of your soul to it and I knew it would enshitify eventually.
For context my country (France) is trying to pass a law that forbids the use of social networks to users younger than 15yo. So I suppose this move from Discord is partly due to that.
Now that being said I would hope the verification process will have much more scrutiny in Europe than it would in the US.
I would definitely not be happy about it but if they are not allowed to keep any of the verification data afterwards it could be “acceptable”. But if I have the feeling they keep any data I will actively look into building a Stoat instance and try the even harder task of convincing my friends to switch over.
I don’t know what problems you found, but the biggest bugs I encountered in past years seem to be fixed now, at least on recent clients. (Element X is recent, and I’ve seen praise for FluffyChat.)
Matrix for text and Mumble for voice works well for me.
Voice chat isn’t inherently costly to host, usually the server acts as a broker and then people connect P2P. Do you remember jitsi? It was used as an alternative to zoom during covid, it was a webpage like Google meet where you opened a room, and people joined with the link. Actually under the good the first one that joined the room acted as a host so all voice communications never reached jitsi’s servers.
Jitsi still exists btw, although I understand that a more integrated solution like matrix is preferable. Matrix IS the federated discord-like solution, although last time I read about it it had some issues with scalability and the typical foss Dev drama.
Didn’t have much of an aim beyond trying to cook it up from scratch as a personal research project. That includes the protocol, since I’m handling priv/pub keypairs in a creative way to facilitate both encryption and user identity verification.
I’ll swap to a shared calendar and any other voice chat software. Sure I can’t post on those but that’s why we also have a group chat for the different gaming groups I’m in.
Well, looks like I’m leaving discord.
Maybe this bullshit will be the spark needed to move us all off Discord. It’s fine for voice-chat in games, don’t get me wrong, but I HATE how its replaced forums/wikis for so many games/mods/etc. Searching disparate Discord servers is like looking for a nonferrous straw-colored needle in a haystack.
Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.
People are already looking to migrate to checks notes apps exactly like discord.
What’s wrong with good old fashioned data base backed message forums? There are so many implementations available, I’m sure many are FOSS, and I’m sure there’s managed solutions as well. It’s a mature, tested, rock solid reliable technology that has existed pretty much since the inception of the internet, and can be easily incorporated into other tools and workflows - because there is 40+ years of development work with the concept.
Seriously, why?
Forums are great for being forums. Real-time instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing are all a very different use-case. They’re two entirely separate products, and comparing them is apples and oranges. People are looking to replace Discord with Discord-like services, because forums don’t fucking do what Discord does.
The big problem (and the reason everyone seems to compare the two) is that Discord started eating forums, as companies realized it was easier to create a Discord server instead of creating (and hosting, and maintaining) a support forum. And that’s a perfectly valid complaint. But that doesn’t mean forums are a valid replacement for Discord.
He is talking about forums because the main issue with discord is that it’s cut from the rest of the internet so nothing is indexed and a lot of platforms and services use discord like a forum (it isn’t).
No one wants our conversations indexed, and discord shouldn’t be a forum.
Exactly my point - And public help forums should be indexed, and should not be on Discord.
It is not comparing apples to oranges, there are many companies that use Discord as a direct replacement for help forums or product wikis.
Read the rest of my comment.
I’ve already read your whole comment. It’s not comparing apples to oranges.
I mean, I share the complaint of Discord having tons of unindexable knowledge locked away in it, but forums are not good replacement for my friend group. So yeah we kinda want a Discord alternative specifically.
Matrix is great for this. Fluffy chat is a client that even uses jitsi for video chats
For others who are interested:
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
Does it work on Linux?
I found it on linux
Wire exists.
Obviously the problem isn’t you and your friends, the problems is services that use discord like it’s a forum, dispatcharr for example “oh do you want support? Join our discord”. Fine, I’ll figure it out myself.
My group of friends, like yours, we have a discord server with 9 channels, more than half aren’t used, and one of the channels is to share links.
[cries]
Agreed. As if every company just having a subreddit wasn’t bad enough.
I have just been using signal. Works fine.
Sure.
But what are you replacing it with ?
I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it’s pretty far from the same level of comfort.
Don’t take that the wrong way though, I’m all for supporting open alternatives, I’m just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.
I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.
I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.
Stoat looks promising, open source
https://stoat.chat/download
They won’t even send a verification email to my gmail account so I can sign up.
They were suffering with email issues due to the “hug of death” effect, try again now maybe it’ll work
Same :)
Were you trying Teamspeak 6? The UI is different, but the functionality is on par I believe. Not open source, but at least you can self-host.
Have they finally released screen sharing in ts6? I gotta say that the development of that project is pretty comical. Radio silence with the only communication being the community manager shitting on discord every other day while giving no updates on their own product.
Weird vibes.
I haven’t followed the development communication much, but yes, screen sharing works now. It wasn’t working on wayland like 8mo ago, but I tried again a month ago and it’s now working.
No. Recently I played a bit using a friends mumble server. And it’s a friend that is already privacy conscious. But these friends are not the norm. They are the exception.
Interesting to see Teamspeak evolved but still you have to pay to host a server so that’s a huge difference.
I haven’t tried mumble yet.
You pay for the hosting resources yes, but you can host it anywhere. I’ve been playing around with it using a docker instance in my homelab.
You can selfhost TS6 now? O:
Sure can
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Well yes, I would say it’s very much an integral part of my social life.
I spend a lot of time with my gamer friends and it revolves around our discord servers.
We even have a discord servers dedicated to our role play sessions.
IMHO Discord is a bit more than just a voice chat app. It’s also rooms with persistant chats. It’s the ability to share media etc.
Also their noise reduction tech is top notch.
I knew when I got in that it would be another “Gmail” for me. It’s great but you have to give a bit of your soul to it and I knew it would enshitify eventually.
deleted by creator
For context my country (France) is trying to pass a law that forbids the use of social networks to users younger than 15yo. So I suppose this move from Discord is partly due to that.
Now that being said I would hope the verification process will have much more scrutiny in Europe than it would in the US.
I would definitely not be happy about it but if they are not allowed to keep any of the verification data afterwards it could be “acceptable”. But if I have the feeling they keep any data I will actively look into building a Stoat instance and try the even harder task of convincing my friends to switch over.
I see luck with “combos”
XMPP + Mumble is a common one. The room is on XMPP, some users are in a mumble server with info in the topic.
Matrix is buggy and doesn’t scale imo, it isn’t a sustainable alternative. Stoat looks like a great option and there are lots of open instances.
I don’t know what problems you found, but the biggest bugs I encountered in past years seem to be fixed now, at least on recent clients. (Element X is recent, and I’ve seen praise for FluffyChat.)
Matrix for text and Mumble for voice works well for me.
Yes, many of my childhood best friends live a 9 hour flight away.
I did start a projects aiming to be a more decentralized/federated discord more akin to how IRC was back in the day. Time to revisit it, it seems.
A federation based discord would be amazing !
But still that’s a big challenge as voice chat will be costly to host.
Also out of curiosity do you aim for something that would connect through the fediverse ?
Voice chat isn’t inherently costly to host, usually the server acts as a broker and then people connect P2P. Do you remember jitsi? It was used as an alternative to zoom during covid, it was a webpage like Google meet where you opened a room, and people joined with the link. Actually under the good the first one that joined the room acted as a host so all voice communications never reached jitsi’s servers.
Jitsi still exists btw, although I understand that a more integrated solution like matrix is preferable. Matrix IS the federated discord-like solution, although last time I read about it it had some issues with scalability and the typical foss Dev drama.
Didn’t have much of an aim beyond trying to cook it up from scratch as a personal research project. That includes the protocol, since I’m handling priv/pub keypairs in a creative way to facilitate both encryption and user identity verification.
I’ll swap to a shared calendar and any other voice chat software. Sure I can’t post on those but that’s why we also have a group chat for the different gaming groups I’m in.
@Oni_eyes @criss_cross
Yeah its kinda terrible