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.

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

Fluxer feels more full-featured to me

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.

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.

• https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/

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.

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.

yeah, I don’t love that

Yup, I’m pretty active on the game dev server on stoat. Anyone lurking here, come check it out!

EDIT>> And apparently I’m not the only one who may have issues with their current methodologies for using docker compose: https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted/issues/176

EDIT 2>> I tried Stoat using their hosted service (not self-hosting), and it leaves a lot to be desired as it relates to roles/permissions. I figure it’s a good six months or more away from being a viable alternative to Discord. It’s a good start, though.

Thanks for the reminder of that!

I’ve heard of it, but hadn’t yet looked into it much. I see this: https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted . It seems promising, I just wish it was a simple docker compose file with parameters (such as domain name/config file volume path/etc), so I can easily run it on UnRAID. But it’s requesting I run a shell script to generate some configuration file which could have been simple docker compose parameters. Therefore, in its current form, it requires I run docker compose via a shell that has the repo cloned.

And in order to do it a more proper way, in my opinion, I’d have to alter the compose file to change the “volumes” for many of the defined services to point to UnRAID’s appdata location. Every bit of this could have simply been environment variables within the compose file. And it would be ideal if the compose file could be set up to allow for external docker services that already exist (such as mongodb, redis, and rabbitmq). And it should expect reverse proxy hosting by default, not be the exception, again in my opinion.

I get that it’s open source and I could submit a pull request to do all I’d want, I’m just looking for a quick alternative to Discord without this level of effort. None seem to exist currently, at least for self-hosting. So I’ll continue looking into this when I decide to put in the effort for it. But I do appreciate your suggestion and may indeed go down this path soon.

The fact you can’t use the desktop client with a self hosted server and that there is no public iOS app right now are dealbreakers for me

Tangentially related: Fuck Arc raiders.

True. However TS has been around for a very very long time and have a proven record of not shitting on users. The free server and client have remained free all this time.

That doesn’t mean things will always be good though.

It’s all about friction. As long as the user has to pick an instance they will always hesitate to pick any federated service. The average user will always choose the path of least resistance.

Proprietary services spend a lot of time trying to reduce friction, and it works.

The only solution I can think of would be a three part one:

1. The main app of a federated service automatically rotates between a pool or reliable, reputable, non-extremist instances where the user can log in with an email and password.
2. The federated service makes it trivial to migrate accounts amongst instances.
3. the user can log into their instance threw any other instance perhaps threw oauth.

This would of course require some federated account login system. Hard but not impossible. It could be some sort of Casandra style ring based account service where nodes are part of the ring.

This eliminates the new user friction.

1. Download app
2. Sign up
3. Login

It works anywhere any time with corpo style low friction. You don’t need to think about instances at all till you are ready to.

Bring back Ventrilo. Get on Vent or I’ll have you bent

XMPP!

Stoat is dead in the water due to dependency on the UK and not an easy solution to deploy yet.

Fluxer is dead in the water due to license.

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.

Sure, but I see no need to host when so many cool nerds will gladly host your space for you. Different strokes, I guess.

time repeats itself.

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.