• Signup can be tricky.
• 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.

You are a verified user for their account. That is literally using their card with extra steps.

Also, there is frequently an age 13 requirement to be an authorized user which would count for everything except porn.

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.

You are a verified user for their account.

Right, which is different from the user’s account, and thus does not verify their age.

there is frequently an age 13 requirement to be an authorized user which would count for everything except porn.

Discord doesn’t have a 13 age group. It’s just adults and children.

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.

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.

Best of luck in migrating! I wish I had a solution for you

Oof that’s a no-go

I’m not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.

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.

Yeah no. There was a reason we all abandoned TeamSpeak years ago.

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.

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

You can self host stoat.

Hosting it is far from simple

This doe a much better job at saying what I was trying to say haha

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.