I’ll stick to Matrix thanks
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.
Is mumble still a thing? It was the best for low latency and automatic mic pickup/ nouse cancelling back in the day.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
stoat.chat seems like a good alternative.
UK based, soon to implement identity verification, unfederated
Fluxer.app seems just slightly better.
VENT or nothing!
mumble is libre
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
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.
I was wondering if it was really the software I was using for World of Warcraft in the 2000s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
