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.

The official self-hosted guide is actually quite simple and straightforward. I had it set up and going in a half hour or so, and that’s even with removing Caddy and using my existing nginx reverse proxy. It’s intimidating at first-glance, yeah.

That being said, the official self-host guide is also 5 months out of date. The alternative you linked requires jumping through a bunch of hoops because it’s just a small community of enthusiasts hacking together the current version of Stoat for self-hosting.

So I acknowledge that self-hosting current version of Stoat with voice is rather complicated and frustrating right now, but hopefully it becomes as simple as the official self-hosting guide eventually.

Oh dang. Why?

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_Raiders#AI_use

Oh. Fuck Arc Raiders.

TS also has a straightforward charge for server hosting.
This is free on Discord, but we all know nothing is actually free.

Their client runs on top of the ts3 server, so I assume it should just work. Set up the server and you can choose from the old or new clients.

Apparently you can self-host TeamSpeak

Kind of, they give everyone a free 1 server 32 slot license.

That isn’t guaranteed to be there forever and they could decide in the future that you need to buy that license.

However, if you install a Mumble server then it can’t be taken away from you. The hosting process is largely the same from an administrative perspective so I’d prefer the ‘free forever’ to the ‘free, limit 32, while supplies last’ license-wise.

I am much more inclined to trust TeamSpeak, but personally I’d rather move personal smaller groups to Matrix, and bigger public communities to Discourse or Lemmy where they are properly indexed and searchable.

It seems like the most realistic option to me since I doubt the masses wanna get into self hosting.

You only need these services as part of a gaming community.

I think you’d have a hard time finding a gaming community that didn’t contain at least a few people who could handle installing a docker container on a VPS.

The trade off, to save minimal administrative overhead (compared to moderation and such), you give up complete control over how your system is run, how your data is divulged and any control over future cost increases.

Everyone should be self-hosting (and also running Linux, but we’ll beat that horse later) if they’re running a gaming community.

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.

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.

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.

Stoat has no voice chat and streaming.