Matrix has the best architecture by far. The only feature it lacks is high fps screenshare with audio. Right now its only acceptable for like a powerpoint presentation.
When the update fixing that comes it will finally be ready to fully replace discord.
I ended up running the element-call stack for our matrix server. Has worked great for group vid calls and screen sharing so far. I don’t think it had audio for screen shares, the only item missing from your list
This feels like it’s happening way too soon. Sure, at the current pace I would expect an exodus from discord eventually, but I didn’t believe that there was so many proactive people on the platform.
Anyway, TeamSpeak has always been great. Discord voice can be rather unstable as you add more people to a chat, or depending on the locations of the people in it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think I locked myself out of my account. I’m only logged in on my old computer and I’ve deleted the app from my phone. I saved my security key (I have a session security key field and security-key.txt in my 1password) but Element didn’t seem able to use it to reactivate. I would lose all my chats. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, but still, I’m just demonstrating that I’m tech savvy enough to save things I’m told to save but I either missed saving a recovery key, wasn’t told to, or the process is just lacking. Regardless, like I said, I’m just demonstrating that it can be tricky.
Everyone needs at least one friend who’s willing to break their own brain about tech, so they can host all the neat shit! Plus if everyone chips in it’s pretty cheap
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.
Fluxer is doing the same thing, no email signups right now on its homepage.
It’s no different from how lemmy/piefed function. Some instances require email, others don’t. My instance, as an example, doesn’t require an email to sign up, but it does require you to write a short message as to why you’re interested in joining the server, and what communities are appealing to you. This weeds out 99% of bots or spammy users, and the handful that get through that are quickly banned.
Movim currently has so few users that the main server is trying to put as few barriers as possible to adoption, other servers can and do enable the Email requirement.
If it becomes more popular and bots or spam accounts become an issue, they could easily activate the email requirement, or even implement a system similar to what I described above. Instances that don’t take appropriate measures to those threats as they become a problem can just be defederated as they are here. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
The paid tiers are only to support the development and the official server costs. If you self-host you can do whatever you want. And federation is on the roadmap of the project.
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.
When the alternative is Discord that’s no different. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
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.
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.
Oh that is like the second most common thing on XMPP! It’s rooms/chats/conversations on servers/conferences/salons, etc. Like, come on, even IRC has that and that was made before I was born.
The one thing that’s complex, or at least bad in the UI I’ve seen for most XMPP clients, is that searchability of rooms is not very good. Like, discoverability is, but to my knowledge there’s no way to actually filter for rooms based on a keyword, you either get the whole roomlist for a server or nothing.
I think Iambalicious may be confusing terms. AFAIK no XMPP client has discord-like rooms within channels. The Movim client is actively working on implementing that feature (it can also do group video calls and screen sharing), but it’s the only one doing that unless I’m mistaken.
Thanks! Yeah because I’ve been scratching my head over their comment for some time now as I’m not able to figure out how to use it like I used use Discord.
Oh you mean nested rooms? That’s just normal rooms with a different organization. I think there is one XMPP proposal for them but I don’t know of any server that implements it (they are unneeded since you can just create temporary chatrooms, same as in IRC) and then you need client support, of which apparently only Movim and Dino are working on it yeah.
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.
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.
Isn’t that just a problem for contributors to worry about though?
Like, it’s not like they can remove (or change the license of) the code that’s already out there (their CLA says existing source code releases stay licensed as-is), nor does this affect forks. So I don’t really see the harm to the consumer.
any distributed version that includes your contribution remains properly licensed under the project license(s) that applied when you contributed.
They can’t retroactively close-source the older versions released under AGPL, but if it ever required a community fork to continue the last release of the GPL version, it would be a massive burden to maintain it, and could cause federation to break as the codebase diverges over time, which would create a rift in the community. You’d also have to hope that average users care enough about the license to jump ship to the GPL (probably now not as full-featured) version, otherwise the GPL version risks not being able to get enough funding to continue, or enough users to convince the larger communities to move over.
As a somewhat similar real world example, the pixel-art program Aseprite once used a FLOSS license, but it switched to a proprietary license at some point. The last GPL version was forked by the community, but it never got much traction, and is now massively behind the closed source version in features and userbase.
Like with most lisence concerns the avg idiot has no fucking idea what they are talking about and just think things are bad because they were told they were bad.
Yer entirely correct, as far as consumer and users are concerned it’s a fat fucking nothing burger.
And frankly while this is Lemmy and everyone here loves open source. In the real world the total of actual normal users that a community program like this is targeted at.
A grand total of fuck and all actually care. A closed source app is just as good as a open source one.
The onky thing that matters is management. And a open source app can be managed and ran like total dog shit just as much as a closed source one. Lisence also literally doesn’t fucking matter one bit.
Unless someone’s willing to step up fork the project and maintain it entirely on their own and build a whole new team.
Then it literally doesn’t fucking matter. The only thing that matters is there’s an option to fork. That’s literally it. Everything is might as well be people pissing in the wind and complaining about the taste.
I just spent a week trying to set up my own server and good lord it was such a battle I gave up. Matrix? Up in like half an hour. Shame because my friends are so much more interested in Revolt lmao. Just gonna give them some time to sort out their business before trying again.
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.
having a tool intended for a purpose doesn’t necessarily mean it fits that description without issues. the xmpp world is filled with a heterogenous plethora of clients of various quality and encryption duct-taped on top of about a third (made up/guesstimated number based on nothing but my gut feeling having gone down that rabbit hole partly). even if i convinced all of my friends to switch, there wpuld be no client for all platforms and learning miltiple programs to use a single protocol is bad UX imho
It’s a fucking headache and only vaguely is a discord replacement.
That’s the problem. People want discord. They don’t want something else that does vaguely all the same things as discord.
They want a 1:1 copy cat with out the parts they hate.
That is the sole reason xmpp will never catch on with normal users.
You would need discord to actually fully shutdown entirely and permanently and suddenly. If you want something like xmpp to ever become more then a weird novelty power users use.
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.
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.
it’s what other people used to be familiar with though, so that’s probably why. also - can’t you download and host your own teamspeak server? I haven’t used it in so long I can’t remember how it works haha
Yes you can host your own team speak server on your own.
I would recommend a FLOSS alternative, to help the odds of you being able to keep it within your control. There’s a few options others have mentioned around the fediverse.
We’re setting up our own Matrix/Element CE and mulling over the non-technical folks’ fumbling trying to figure it out. Going to have to test a lot. Stoat is promising since it has a familiar UI, but we have a large amount of mobile-only friends.
Not even looking at the non-free stuff. This is the shove we needed to finally move off that type of crap.
Forgot about XMPP until reading earlier comments. Will have to put that on the list.
I’ve found it is clunky and bloated myself, but it’s slim pickins trying to cover everything users expect. Hopefully one of these add-ons makes it less… rough.
That article is 95% uninformed FUD. I really wish people would stop listening to this self proclaimed encryption “expert” that seems only interested in posting badly researched but inflamatory blog posts and then deletes any responses from actual experts from their blog comments.
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.
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.
Not yet, unfortunately. It can currently do a group conference audio/video call, but there are no rooms where you can see who’s in the call and just hop in. That is a planned feature in the future, though. Probably after Discord-like rooms are implemented (which won a recent feature poll).
I have seen the conversation around ditching discord come up a few times, but this more recent one was the first time seeing Movim and it seems to have more folks post about it. Is it newer then revolt, rocket, etc?
The problem with decentralised alternatives to Discord isn’t just the set up time.
Me and some of my friend group are pretty technical and we’re willing to jump through all the hoops and difficulties to make our own little cluster of federated self-hosted servers.
The problems start occurring when we actually look at what these open source alternatives are actually capable of. And… Uh… It looks bad. Voice chatting and streaming and text channels on the same client are an absolute must.
Voice chatting and streaming and text channels on the same client are an absolute must.
Yes, those are certainly a convenience that would be nice to have.
I just don’t think they’re “Be subjected to Discord” nice anymore.
I’ll take on the burden of launching two executables and clicking two different windows in order to not be subjected to the endless monetization and privacy violations.
Not everyone agrees, that that’s fine too. Using Discord (or Signal if your group is small and care more about privacy than open source) isn’t wrong, but some people see the downsides as outweighing the benefits.
“not everyone agrees” explains the nail in the coffin for 99% of groups.
You need a 100% investment from the group or it’s a hard stop.
Your average online group or gamer give zero fucks as long as it works.
For online gaming, that means voice, messaging, and forums in ONE click. You might get away without video.
For gaming, the current steps are …
1 download discord (99% skip because they already have)
2 paste this link into discord (which they already know how to do)
DONE
You proposal? Just list them out for me for your non tech user… Download 3 different programs? Including separate sign on? learn three different programs.
AND NOTE THAT THIS IS JUST FOR YOUR GROUP.
Play 6 games, sorry each game has their own set of programs and logins and learning. And remembering which program you need to use for each.
If you think that’s a workable “solution” to replacing discord, which is currently used for 95% of online gaming in a one stop shop…
Your a fucking delusional idiot. And that’s being nice you.
The topic of the thread is about users migrating away from Discord due to privacy concerns over their ID requirements. If this doesn’t apply to you, what is your purpose commenting? To tell us all that the thing in the OP isn’t actually happening?
Your position is that:
this can’t happen,
people can’t leave discord because people are on discord,
it’s impossible to learn 3 applications,
Therefore nobody would replace Discord with Teamspeak and also use some other chat program (that’s 2 programs! which is nearly as impossible as learning 3 programs!).
You’re posting this opinion in a thread about users migrating to TeamSpeak and calling me the idiot?
That’s certainly an opinion.
Your a fucking delusional idiot.
‘Your’ is the possessive form of you.
You’re is the word you’re looking for, as it is a contraction of ‘you are’ as in ‘you are an idiot’.
Gosh, I hope I can survive the reputation harm that I’m suffering because a faceless person(?) on the Internet has read my comments in bad faith and slaughtering their freshly created strawmen.
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.
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.
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 by getting an anonymous credit card, which in most countries are now either very difficult to obtain or simply no longer offered (outlawed).
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.
For me, it wasn’t about the AI. It’s that early development of the game was all PvE play. PVP was something that was added at launch, and the game is tagged as PvE, along with PvP on steam. Stupid me thought there would be PvE only lobbies and I was clearly mistaken. I tried playing it, I put 100 hours in. The entire game was me grinding the easy map, to level up and craft/buy better guns, only to be shot on sight by someone and have everything I worked for taken. I would solo down bastions, leapers, and bombdiers to have someone run up and shoot me on site, without asking if I would share loot. (I would rather share than lose everything.) Events in the game also reward PvP play by awarding cred. People are making smurf accounts so they can end up in friendly matches to dominate people that don’t want to pvp. Enemy spawns are fucked up too. I’ve downed arc only for the corpses to despawn as I attempt to loot it. I’ve walked into clear areas, only to have bombadiers spawn on top of me out of nowhere. The worst part of the game is being dropped into a map/match after 10 minutes has elapsed, which means anything decent has already been looted and you’re more likely to run into people camping extraction points. They have a temp event running that rewards PvE cooperative play, and I’ve still gotten killed on site, although less frequently. After the event is over, I’ll probably uninstall the game again.
Not trying to change your mind because if you don’t like it you don’t like it, but the fame was developed and play tested as a PvE game. It was slated for release before The Finals. The playtesting revealed that the game was just not fun. The developers, the play testers, everyone involved felt it was boring. They delayed the game and created what was released.
I understand not personally enjoying what was released, but Embark made a decision to change the gameplay during development on their own, they weren’t forced to by a publisher or anything, and they didn’t renege on any promise or anything.
The stuff I read about the play testing indicated it was PVE. I didn’t do enough research before purchasing, no argument there. I happen to actually enjoy fighting the arc, and I really enjoy when I can play co-operatively, and do things like save someone that’s pinned down by ARC, or help others down bastions, bombadiers, and matriarchs. Getting shot in the back after I’m soloing arc and my shield is down isn’t fun. Getting shot even after I say I’m friendly, and I can’t defend myself, or else trigger the algorithm to put me in more pvp matchups isn’t fun. If it was already tested as a PvE game, I don’t see why they can’t give us PVE and PVP lobbies. Letting players decide if they want to risk PVP or not.
I absolutely loath PvP in gaming. Always have. However, I recently discovered that I enjoy extraction shooters (I think that’s what these types of games are called). Been playing HOLE and wished for something like it with co-op for me and a friend to play.
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.
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
No Let’s Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates.
(Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources.
If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
why go from one corporate property to another when enshitification is the problem and libre options are available??
tomorrow’s headline: “Teamspeak CEO excited to be working with Discord”
Matrix has the best architecture by far. The only feature it lacks is high fps screenshare with audio. Right now its only acceptable for like a powerpoint presentation.
When the update fixing that comes it will finally be ready to fully replace discord.
I often fall back to Molly for video chat, the quality is superior
Sticking with discord for slightly better video doesn’t sound reasonable
Well convince my 22 friends to switch when a feature they consider critical is missing
I ended up running the element-call stack for our matrix server. Has worked great for group vid calls and screen sharing so far. I don’t think it had audio for screen shares, the only item missing from your list
I’ll stick to Matrix thanks
Been on IRC for like 3-decades and is where I get my media content, mostly. Highly recommended if you give zero shits about fancy text!
how do you get media isnt it only plain text?
DCC transfers direct from bots. You can do transfers, just gotta trust the source of the content.
This feels like it’s happening way too soon. Sure, at the current pace I would expect an exodus from discord eventually, but I didn’t believe that there was so many proactive people on the platform.
Anyway, TeamSpeak has always been great. Discord voice can be rather unstable as you add more people to a chat, or depending on the locations of the people in it.
VENT or nothing!
mumble is libre
Iirc Ventrilo doesn’t support Linux, or it’s codecs don’t. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong!
I said that the other day and I got back “noone is going to use that windows XP lookin shit.”
:)
Lol, last I used/had vent was playing counter strike 1.6. they have a point.
whatever happened to meeting up with your mom’s house on a bunch of folding tables in the living room
Those must be some big tables
did you just call me fat
Is mumble still a thing? It was the best for low latency and automatic mic pickup/ nouse cancelling back in the day.
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.
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.
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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.
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I set up Matrix accounts for my parents this weekend and was completely horrified at how inconvenient the experience is for normies.
And that was with just using matrix.org as the server. AND the user experience after registration and login was not good either.
I tried to get friends into Matrix before and they were confused by it. So can confirm it’s not that simple for everyone.
Though to be fair, one of them wasn’t able to post without including an emoji in their message, that shit confused me too.
I’m unsure what is difficult about Matrix.
I’ve had several “casual” friends register and join my space on their own.
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.
I think I locked myself out of my account. I’m only logged in on my old computer and I’ve deleted the app from my phone. I saved my security key (I have a session security key field and
security-key.txtin my 1password) but Element didn’t seem able to use it to reactivate. I would lose all my chats. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, but still, I’m just demonstrating that I’m tech savvy enough to save things I’m told to save but I either missed saving a recovery key, wasn’t told to, or the process is just lacking. Regardless, like I said, I’m just demonstrating that it can be tricky.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.
Everyone needs at least one friend who’s willing to break their own brain about tech, so they can host all the neat shit! Plus if everyone chips in it’s pretty cheap
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.
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There’s also Movim, which doesn’t even require an email, you can join instantly with just a username and password.
Those are extremely negative things for a community platform. Like absurdly negative.
That just means it’s going to be attacked by endless bots, impersonation, and general user confusion.
I legitimately can not think of a single stupider thing for a community platform for normal users.
Fluxer is doing the same thing, no email signups right now on its homepage.
It’s no different from how lemmy/piefed function. Some instances require email, others don’t. My instance, as an example, doesn’t require an email to sign up, but it does require you to write a short message as to why you’re interested in joining the server, and what communities are appealing to you. This weeds out 99% of bots or spammy users, and the handful that get through that are quickly banned.
Movim currently has so few users that the main server is trying to put as few barriers as possible to adoption, other servers can and do enable the Email requirement.
If it becomes more popular and bots or spam accounts become an issue, they could easily activate the email requirement, or even implement a system similar to what I described above. Instances that don’t take appropriate measures to those threats as they become a problem can just be defederated as they are here. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
The paid tiers are only to support the development and the official server costs. If you self-host you can do whatever you want. And federation is on the roadmap of the project.
When the alternative is Discord that’s no different. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Just use fluxer…
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:
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.
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.
I’m not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.
Fluxer feels more full-featured to me
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.
Oh that is like the second most common thing on XMPP! It’s rooms/chats/conversations on servers/conferences/salons, etc. Like, come on, even IRC has that and that was made before I was born.
The one thing that’s complex, or at least bad in the UI I’ve seen for most XMPP clients, is that searchability of rooms is not very good. Like, discoverability is, but to my knowledge there’s no way to actually filter for rooms based on a keyword, you either get the whole roomlist for a server or nothing.
Oh shoot, is it? I’m using Cheogram and Conversations on my phone and I can’t figure it out. I guess it depends on the client?? I’m a bit confused.
I think Iambalicious may be confusing terms. AFAIK no XMPP client has discord-like rooms within channels. The Movim client is actively working on implementing that feature (it can also do group video calls and screen sharing), but it’s the only one doing that unless I’m mistaken.
Thanks! Yeah because I’ve been scratching my head over their comment for some time now as I’m not able to figure out how to use it like I used use Discord.
Oh you mean nested rooms? That’s just normal rooms with a different organization. I think there is one XMPP proposal for them but I don’t know of any server that implements it (they are unneeded since you can just create temporary chatrooms, same as in IRC) and then you need client support, of which apparently only Movim and Dino are working on it yeah.
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One thing that worries me a little about fluxer is this:
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.
Hey, just wanted to give you an update that the Fluxer dev actually agreed to remove the CLA!
Holy fuck! Noice!!!
EDIT: The Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!
Woah, didn’t know about that, thanks for the heads up. That’s definitely dampening my goodwill toward it.
As an alternative, I’d suggest Movim, which has no CLA, and is already federated.
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Isn’t that just a problem for contributors to worry about though?
Like, it’s not like they can remove (or change the license of) the code that’s already out there (their CLA says existing source code releases stay licensed as-is), nor does this affect forks. So I don’t really see the harm to the consumer.
They can’t retroactively close-source the older versions released under AGPL, but if it ever required a community fork to continue the last release of the GPL version, it would be a massive burden to maintain it, and could cause federation to break as the codebase diverges over time, which would create a rift in the community. You’d also have to hope that average users care enough about the license to jump ship to the GPL (probably now not as full-featured) version, otherwise the GPL version risks not being able to get enough funding to continue, or enough users to convince the larger communities to move over.
As a somewhat similar real world example, the pixel-art program Aseprite once used a FLOSS license, but it switched to a proprietary license at some point. The last GPL version was forked by the community, but it never got much traction, and is now massively behind the closed source version in features and userbase.
Like with most lisence concerns the avg idiot has no fucking idea what they are talking about and just think things are bad because they were told they were bad.
Yer entirely correct, as far as consumer and users are concerned it’s a fat fucking nothing burger.
And frankly while this is Lemmy and everyone here loves open source. In the real world the total of actual normal users that a community program like this is targeted at.
A grand total of fuck and all actually care. A closed source app is just as good as a open source one.
The onky thing that matters is management. And a open source app can be managed and ran like total dog shit just as much as a closed source one. Lisence also literally doesn’t fucking matter one bit.
Unless someone’s willing to step up fork the project and maintain it entirely on their own and build a whole new team.
Then it literally doesn’t fucking matter. The only thing that matters is there’s an option to fork. That’s literally it. Everything is might as well be people pissing in the wind and complaining about the taste.
Stoat has no voice chat and streaming.
Movim does, and it’s federated and offers encryption! :D
I just spent a week trying to set up my own server and good lord it was such a battle I gave up. Matrix? Up in like half an hour. Shame because my friends are so much more interested in Revolt lmao. Just gonna give them some time to sort out their business before trying again.
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!
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.
Yup, I’m pretty active on the game dev server on stoat. Anyone lurking here, come check it out!
Nice, what’s the link?
https://stoat.chat/server/01JN4QAT47NYTWGB2X0Z7Z1RB5/channel/01JN4QAT47NJP17DD59XCATPC4/01KHMV1GTBETH51GWEVNSN51C9
lemme know if that doesn’t work!
It looks like its not working for me.
AmericansPeople will do anything but just setup XMPP, this is literally what it was invented for.having a tool intended for a purpose doesn’t necessarily mean it fits that description without issues. the xmpp world is filled with a heterogenous plethora of clients of various quality and encryption duct-taped on top of about a third (made up/guesstimated number based on nothing but my gut feeling having gone down that rabbit hole partly). even if i convinced all of my friends to switch, there wpuld be no client for all platforms and learning miltiple programs to use a single protocol is bad UX imho
Movim works on all platforms, already has most Discord functionality such as audio/video group calls, screen sharing with audio, and is currently implementing Discord-like spaces as we speak. It even looks like Discord.
It’s a fucking headache and only vaguely is a discord replacement.
That’s the problem. People want discord. They don’t want something else that does vaguely all the same things as discord.
They want a 1:1 copy cat with out the parts they hate.
That is the sole reason xmpp will never catch on with normal users.
You would need discord to actually fully shutdown entirely and permanently and suddenly. If you want something like xmpp to ever become more then a weird novelty power users use.
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.
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
You can self host stoat.
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
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.
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.
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stoat.chat seems like a good alternative.
UK based, soon to implement identity verification, unfederated
Fluxer.app seems just slightly better.
Teamspeak is not a good replacement lol
it’s what other people used to be familiar with though, so that’s probably why. also - can’t you download and host your own teamspeak server? I haven’t used it in so long I can’t remember how it works haha
Yes you can host your own team speak server on your own.
I would recommend a FLOSS alternative, to help the odds of you being able to keep it within your control. There’s a few options others have mentioned around the fediverse.
We’re setting up our own Matrix/Element CE and mulling over the non-technical folks’ fumbling trying to figure it out. Going to have to test a lot. Stoat is promising since it has a familiar UI, but we have a large amount of mobile-only friends.
Not even looking at the non-free stuff. This is the shove we needed to finally move off that type of crap.
Forgot about XMPP until reading earlier comments. Will have to put that on the list.
Commet might be more helpful there than Element, as it tries to replicate Discord’s UI and UX, making for an easier transition.
Nice. I’ll have to check that out. I appreciate it.
Matrix is actively user hostile. It’s no fun to use at all.
I’ve found it is clunky and bloated myself, but it’s slim pickins trying to cover everything users expect. Hopefully one of these add-ons makes it less… rough.
XMPP is an insecure mess, even if you try to bolt on the weird encryption layer
That is a non-sense comment. Where do you even get that from? And the “weird” encryption layer is literally the Signal library.
https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/
That article is 95% uninformed FUD. I really wish people would stop listening to this self proclaimed encryption “expert” that seems only interested in posting badly researched but inflamatory blog posts and then deletes any responses from actual experts from their blog comments.
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.
XMPP can actually do everything, chat, group video calls, and even screen sharing with the Movim client. It’s a one-stop shop.
@[email protected]
Can it do drop in/drop out VoIP rooms like mumble?
Not yet, unfortunately. It can currently do a group conference audio/video call, but there are no rooms where you can see who’s in the call and just hop in. That is a planned feature in the future, though. Probably after Discord-like rooms are implemented (which won a recent feature poll).
Oh, that looks pretty nice, thanks for the recommendation.
I’ll have to throw up an XMPP setup and give it a shot. It looks like they have a podman container setup available: https://github.com/movim/movim
I have seen the conversation around ditching discord come up a few times, but this more recent one was the first time seeing Movim and it seems to have more folks post about it. Is it newer then revolt, rocket, etc?
Older, actually. Its been around since 2010, and is built upon the XMPP protocol, which is from 1999.
Movim has only recently taken the direction of becoming a Discord replacement.
That makes sense. Thanks for the heads up!
No prob :D
https://lemmy.ca/comment/21700498
You come off very unbecoming in that thread. Strange you advertise it.
I’m technically correct, and at least I’m not spreading disinformation 😘
The problem with decentralised alternatives to Discord isn’t just the set up time.
Me and some of my friend group are pretty technical and we’re willing to jump through all the hoops and difficulties to make our own little cluster of federated self-hosted servers.
The problems start occurring when we actually look at what these open source alternatives are actually capable of. And… Uh… It looks bad. Voice chatting and streaming and text channels on the same client are an absolute must.
Just use fluxer. It literally does all that. It’s basically feature parity with discord.
Other then waiting on them to finish up the native mobile app.
I assume they have a web client, how does that do on mobile?
Yes, those are certainly a convenience that would be nice to have.
I just don’t think they’re “Be subjected to Discord” nice anymore.
I’ll take on the burden of launching two executables and clicking two different windows in order to not be subjected to the endless monetization and privacy violations.
Not everyone agrees, that that’s fine too. Using Discord (or Signal if your group is small and care more about privacy than open source) isn’t wrong, but some people see the downsides as outweighing the benefits.
“not everyone agrees” explains the nail in the coffin for 99% of groups.
You need a 100% investment from the group or it’s a hard stop.
Your average online group or gamer give zero fucks as long as it works.
For online gaming, that means voice, messaging, and forums in ONE click. You might get away without video.
For gaming, the current steps are …
1 download discord (99% skip because they already have)
2 paste this link into discord (which they already know how to do)
DONE
You proposal? Just list them out for me for your non tech user… Download 3 different programs? Including separate sign on? learn three different programs.
AND NOTE THAT THIS IS JUST FOR YOUR GROUP.
Play 6 games, sorry each game has their own set of programs and logins and learning. And remembering which program you need to use for each.
If you think that’s a workable “solution” to replacing discord, which is currently used for 95% of online gaming in a one stop shop…
Your a fucking delusional idiot. And that’s being nice you.
The topic of the thread is about users migrating away from Discord due to privacy concerns over their ID requirements. If this doesn’t apply to you, what is your purpose commenting? To tell us all that the thing in the OP isn’t actually happening?
Your position is that:
Therefore nobody would replace Discord with Teamspeak and also use some other chat program (that’s 2 programs! which is nearly as impossible as learning 3 programs!).
You’re posting this opinion in a thread about users migrating to TeamSpeak and calling me the idiot?
That’s certainly an opinion.
‘Your’ is the possessive form of you.
You’re is the word you’re looking for, as it is a contraction of ‘you are’ as in ‘you are an idiot’.
Haha pointing out the wrong use of a possessive tells me everything I need to know about you.
I made fun of you because of your absolutely delusional refusal to acknowledge the extreme barriers to open source options in the current state.
If you weren’t delusional, a logical response would be…
We absolutely have to address these issues if we want widespread adoption of these applications to replace closed source programs.
Gosh, I hope I can survive the reputation harm that I’m suffering because a faceless person(?) on the Internet has read my comments in bad faith and slaughtering their freshly created strawmen.
“Haha, pointing”
I think you’ll survive, good day.
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.
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:
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).
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 by getting an anonymous credit card, which in most countries are now either very difficult to obtain or simply no longer offered (outlawed).
Hope that helps.
(Edit: spelllering)
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.
Tangentially related: Fuck Arc raiders.
Oh dang. Why?
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_Raiders#AI_use
Oh. Fuck Arc Raiders.
For me, it wasn’t about the AI. It’s that early development of the game was all PvE play. PVP was something that was added at launch, and the game is tagged as PvE, along with PvP on steam. Stupid me thought there would be PvE only lobbies and I was clearly mistaken. I tried playing it, I put 100 hours in. The entire game was me grinding the easy map, to level up and craft/buy better guns, only to be shot on sight by someone and have everything I worked for taken. I would solo down bastions, leapers, and bombdiers to have someone run up and shoot me on site, without asking if I would share loot. (I would rather share than lose everything.) Events in the game also reward PvP play by awarding cred. People are making smurf accounts so they can end up in friendly matches to dominate people that don’t want to pvp. Enemy spawns are fucked up too. I’ve downed arc only for the corpses to despawn as I attempt to loot it. I’ve walked into clear areas, only to have bombadiers spawn on top of me out of nowhere. The worst part of the game is being dropped into a map/match after 10 minutes has elapsed, which means anything decent has already been looted and you’re more likely to run into people camping extraction points. They have a temp event running that rewards PvE cooperative play, and I’ve still gotten killed on site, although less frequently. After the event is over, I’ll probably uninstall the game again.
Not trying to change your mind because if you don’t like it you don’t like it, but the fame was developed and play tested as a PvE game. It was slated for release before The Finals. The playtesting revealed that the game was just not fun. The developers, the play testers, everyone involved felt it was boring. They delayed the game and created what was released.
I understand not personally enjoying what was released, but Embark made a decision to change the gameplay during development on their own, they weren’t forced to by a publisher or anything, and they didn’t renege on any promise or anything.
The stuff I read about the play testing indicated it was PVE. I didn’t do enough research before purchasing, no argument there. I happen to actually enjoy fighting the arc, and I really enjoy when I can play co-operatively, and do things like save someone that’s pinned down by ARC, or help others down bastions, bombadiers, and matriarchs. Getting shot in the back after I’m soloing arc and my shield is down isn’t fun. Getting shot even after I say I’m friendly, and I can’t defend myself, or else trigger the algorithm to put me in more pvp matchups isn’t fun. If it was already tested as a PvE game, I don’t see why they can’t give us PVE and PVP lobbies. Letting players decide if they want to risk PVP or not.
I absolutely loath PvP in gaming. Always have. However, I recently discovered that I enjoy extraction shooters (I think that’s what these types of games are called). Been playing HOLE and wished for something like it with co-op for me and a friend to play.
Shit, thanks for your insight. I was somewhat interested in the game just because of the world it’s set in, but, gah that sounds awful.
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
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.
TS also has a straightforward charge for server hosting.
This is free on Discord, but we all know nothing is actually free.
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.