Discord keeps walking into rakes, but TeamSpeak is thriving after 'incredible surge of new users'
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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, 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.
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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.
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Yeah, I get “address not found” regardless of browser. I’ll probably be keeping a closer eye on fluxer.
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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.
I know folks like the other commenter mention that Matrix is simple and all but I think for the average person that’s just wrong.
Maybe in the fediverse our vision of what the average person can do/understand with/about tech is skewed but trying to get some of my friends onto Matrix would be an absolute nightmare.
Not to mention the VAST majority of people don’t like playing tech detective to figure things out and just wanna sign up and move on with their lives. That is something stoat as offered so far while remaining free and open source.
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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
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Yeah, this bit was all I needei to know:
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.
Oof that’s a no-go
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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’m not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.
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I know folks like the other commenter mention that Matrix is simple and all but I think for the average person that’s just wrong.
Maybe in the fediverse our vision of what the average person can do/understand with/about tech is skewed but trying to get some of my friends onto Matrix would be an absolute nightmare.
Not to mention the VAST majority of people don’t like playing tech detective to figure things out and just wanna sign up and move on with their lives. That is something stoat as offered so far while remaining free and open source.
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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Yeah no. There was a reason we all abandoned TeamSpeak years ago.
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I’m not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.
Me either tbh so I did a bit of digging and found that stoat has been around a bit longer and (I know this is a dumb metric for this) seems to have more stars and forks on their github which indicates to me it’ll be around longer.
That said, fluxer has nicer UI imo and I think it has a few more features so it might outdo stoat in the future idk.
Ultimately, I think both are great and likely to be around for a while so just pick one and go with it. They both are open source, use the same license and all that. So you can’t go wrong.
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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.
Ok, I don’t feel to bad now lol I also found Matrix to just kinda be a mess. I don’t run home servers or anything but I’m a fairly experienced linux user and like to poke around tech and all that. I felt kinda dumb for not figuring it out tbh haha
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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.
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I know folks like the other commenter mention that Matrix is simple and all but I think for the average person that’s just wrong.
Maybe in the fediverse our vision of what the average person can do/understand with/about tech is skewed but trying to get some of my friends onto Matrix would be an absolute nightmare.
Not to mention the VAST majority of people don’t like playing tech detective to figure things out and just wanna sign up and move on with their lives. That is something stoat as offered so far while remaining free and open source.
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I’m unsure what is difficult about Matrix.
I’ve had several “casual” friends register and join my space on their own.
Hosting it is far from simple
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This doe a much better job at saying what I was trying to say haha
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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.
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.
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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.
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
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I’m not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.
Fluxer feels more full-featured to me
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I know Teamspeak 6 is in beta, so I get it. But boy when I tried it, it was just awful. It took me literal minutes just to figure out how to disconnect from the voice server. They desperately need to hire someone for UX who has actual experience in, you know, design.
And getting Matrix (Synapse) to run is about as teeth-pulling as getting an Oracle database system to run back in 2001.
I don’t like what Discord is doing. And I’ll likely find some alternative if I can convince others to also join me, but there simply is no viable alternative that gives the exact level of experience that Discord does (from a feature point of view and a UI/UX point of view).
And yes, I’ve tried Fluxer. It’s a good start, but still needs a lot of work, which the maintainer says is ongoing (work such as making self-hosting viable, etc). While I like the UI/UX of Fluxer, I am concerned that its UI is effectively a direct copy of Discord from a few years ago and I don’t know if Discord would be legally able to do something about this. Perhaps it’s all fine, and if so, I wish Fluxer immense success at being that viable Discord alternative, and I will keep an eye on this project.
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Me either tbh so I did a bit of digging and found that stoat has been around a bit longer and (I know this is a dumb metric for this) seems to have more stars and forks on their github which indicates to me it’ll be around longer.
That said, fluxer has nicer UI imo and I think it has a few more features so it might outdo stoat in the future idk.
Ultimately, I think both are great and likely to be around for a while so just pick one and go with it. They both are open source, use the same license and all that. So you can’t go wrong.
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.
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