it's Element/Matrix if we're lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won't be a "platform" you have to leave when it goes corporate.
Nheko provides an interface that is reminiscent of Discord. Fully featured and fast Matrix client.
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord 'existing' has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I'm very excited!
Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.
The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.
I feel like matrix isn't a one-to-one replacement. It's a good slack replacement.
I haven't used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there's no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that's a client feature so maybe that's a bit different
Honestly, I am ready to go straight back to TeamSpeak.
I miss hosting my own server and having full access and control over it
I used to just host it on a piece of shit. 2003 Dell XP machine I put Ubuntu on
Hell yah, TS3 crew all the way. (Or TS5 for the zoomers...)
My nerds herd recently also set up a cluster of Matrix Synapse servers so we got our little "We have Telegram at home" set up. Getting non-tech people to accept that this is how to find me has been tricky without sounding like a digital prepper.
There is also Mumble. TS3 era voip and text chat features, but it's FOSS.
An alternative would need screen share, just voip is not enough any more.
The problem is that performant screenshare (to multiple users) more or less requires infrastructure. That requires money, and it's impossible to compete on price with services that have the VC-enshitification model.
You can get around this in a few ways, but they're all tradeoffs that are in some way or other worse than discord.
I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it's not perfect, but it's simpler and by it's very nature doesn't require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.
Plus, don't forget screen sharing in discord isn't very good as is (720p30) if you're not a paid user.
I'm running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I've set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.
Did you follow a guide, or know one you could link? I'm thinking this is the path for me and my friends too.
It never made sense to me how popular discord was to begin with.
@Xanza@lemm.ee Among my friends, it replaced Facebook Messenger, Teamspeak, and Mumble instantly. It was fast and the voice quality was excellent. The appeal in 2017 was obvious. The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.
Don't get me started on the "rewards"...
Don't forget free servers.
On TS3 it was to either know a friend that rented/hosted it, rent/host it yourself or use a public server.
That’s just off the top of my head.
It’s enshittifying, but the value proposition is still hard to beat. I’m really hoping Matrix catches up with the feature set soon.
It used to be fast and not full of useless bloat like what you see right now. The usual enshittification.
Other voice chat programs were crap, discord was significantly better and more consistent. Simple as. It still has features way ahead of other services. The business side is shitty but it works without anyone needing to know anything with no troubleshooting.
man I wish mumble had a better interface and a chat function, it could real FOSS competition with Discord, but the lack of a chat feature is holding it back
It's so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.
It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.
Unbelievably so. Mumble is... basically one setup command. Don't even need a domain. And it needs absolutely no resources, can run on a Pi Zero.
Setting up my own Matrix server was honestly one of the most difficult things I've ever attempted in decades of non-professionally using computers and I'm still not sure I'd be able to properly take care of the installation if it breaks. Sooo many moving parts. All the federation-oriented projects that rely on adoption rates reaaaaally desperately need setup wizards before any other additional feature.
I've set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.
Matrix is like "Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn't work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that's NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?"
What are your thoughts on xmpp? Recently I have come to like a lot and am pretty active with friends there.
There are people using xmpp? Last time I set up a server and tried using it with Pidgin, I couldn't find a soul that used it
XMPP?
https://spacebar.chat/ looks like it will eventually be good, it looks like it's in its infancy right now though
Mumble?
Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
I guess that's the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.
Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.
Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?
Discord is not even necessarily Electron. I'm running it as Datcord, which is a Firefox based wrapper.
Discord has a searchble chat history, which is what sets it apart from IRC. Everything else can be emulated by modern IRC clients, such as emoji and embedded / unfurling images and link previews.
However imagine the chat history as if you had a bouncer that has 100% uptime and joined all possible chat channels from their creation, along with offering you search and buffer.
If not IRC, either Matrix or XMPP should be capable of this.
I'm fairly sure Discord's popularity was due to aggressive marketing, likely during their venture capital funding rounds. Something which FOSS does not have.
In addition to the replies you got already, discord has screen sharing/streaming. An experience kind of like zoom (I don't use it and dont see the appeal but maybe someone who does can elaborate more. My partner uses this feature sometimes).
mumble is great for VOIP.
Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.
revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there's that. There's also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.
I've also been comparing Element and Revolt. Both seem really solid, both are open source and both are self-hostable. Hard to find any downsides there.
There's a discord server that me and a bunch of friends use as our main hangout. They've raised the prospect of bailing before things enshittify, and of course I've been tasked with pitching a replacement. For my money, Revolt is the way I'm going to go, specifically because it's basically a one for one clone of Discord. The people I'm pitching this to are a mix of technical and non-technical, so I think something that looks and feels like what they're used to will be the easiest transition.
It also feels like Element is geared pretty heavily towards being a replacement for Slack / Teams rather than a replacement for Discord. Their pitch seems a lot more focused on the enterprise market. Revolt seems more focused on gaming, casual hangout, that sort of thing.
I like Element a lot, but for me it doesn't feel like the right solution to this specific problem. But if I was pitching something to my work as a Teams replacement, Element is definitely the way I'd go.
Man I wish my online friends were that easy to switch.
As soon as I mention Lemmy "what's wrong with reddit". As soon as I mention element "but everyone uses whatsapp/discord".
It suck that 90% of the people are stuck in their old ways and refuse to try anything new.
Hell I almost got banned for even mentioning lemmy once.
I've started my self-hosting journey having Matrix in mind - especially the Matrix bridges to cut off the need to use social media clients like Discord.
Today, I'm slowly convicting my friends to join my instance. So far, that's just one of the closest ones (still win for me).
I hope one day decentralization in social media would take off!
Avoid Revolt as there moderation is questionable
If you're self hosting, it's Revolt. But the default instance limits you to 20mb or something for files, which is a problem for me, personally.
Revolt is also an annoyance to self host and the apps don’t support self hosted instances without you rebuilding them because the server is hardcoded.
Way too few mentions of Jitsi.
I use it with friends, it has good server config, and I'm pushing it on businesses.
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