Discord keeps walking into rakes, but TeamSpeak is thriving after 'incredible surge of new users'
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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.
channels within servers
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.
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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.
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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.
Stoat has no voice chat and streaming.
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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.
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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
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I don’t know what they’re even doing. TeamSpeak/Mumble is not a replacement for Discord. There’s no separate text channels in addition to the voice ones. It’s just a VOIP program. If you move from Discord to one of those you’re either in addition fundamentally changing your way of thinking or you’re in for disappointment.
For one there’s no “public communities” as with Discord. Here are the biggest servers from mumist.eu:
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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.
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.
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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 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.
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channels within servers
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.
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Bring back Ventrilo. Get on Vent or I’ll have you bent
We sit here on Ventrilo playing some DotA
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I don’t know what they’re even doing. TeamSpeak/Mumble is not a replacement for Discord. There’s no separate text channels in addition to the voice ones. It’s just a VOIP program. If you move from Discord to one of those you’re either in addition fundamentally changing your way of thinking or you’re in for disappointment.
For one there’s no “public communities” as with Discord. Here are the biggest servers from mumist.eu:
teamspeak 6 has group chats and private messagimg
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This is actually a good point for fluxer. Stoat being UK based isn’t great, I’ll agree with that and it’s something I didn’t even think about until now.
Maybe fluxer being based in sweden (I think) is better? On the surface, I think it is but my knowledge of swedish privacy laws is pretty surface level.
That said, fluxer asks for a date of birth when signing up and also has like pricing tiers and stuff which instantly gives me the ick. Stoat is just like “name and email please” and you’re done lol
There’s also Movim, which doesn’t even require an email, you can join instantly with just a username and password.
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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.
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Stoat has no voice chat and streaming.
Movim does, and it’s federated and offers encryption!
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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.
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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.
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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Bring back Ventrilo. Get on Vent or I’ll have you bent
Ventrilo has innate delay and is proprietary.
Mumble is open source and has lowest latency of all the apps.
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XMPP can actually do everything, chat, group video calls, and even screen sharing with the Movim client. It’s a one-stop shop.
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
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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.
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