Discord keeps walking into rakes, but TeamSpeak is thriving after 'incredible surge of new users'
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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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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.
I set up Matrix accounts for my parents this weekend and was completely horrified at how inconvenient the experience is for normies.
And that was with just using matrix.org as the server. AND the user experience after registration and login was not good either.
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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.
I absolutely loath PvP in gaming. Always have. However, I recently discovered that I enjoy extraction shooters (I think that’s what these types of games are called). Been playing HOLE and wished for something like it with co-op for me and a friend to play.
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Been on IRC for like 3-decades and is where I get my media content, mostly. Highly recommended if you give zero shits about fancy text!
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This is the history they warned us not to repeat!
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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
The paid tiers are only to support the development and the official server costs. If you self-host you can do whatever you want. And federation is on the roadmap of the project.
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What issues? I can’t even remember the last time I used TeamSpeak. Ha to be around Windows XP.
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Teamspeak is not a good replacement lol
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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.
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.
When the alternative is Discord that’s no different. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
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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.
Thanks! Yeah because I’ve been scratching my head over their comment for some time now as I’m not able to figure out how to use it like I used use Discord.
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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:
Discord was originally a replacement for teamspeak/mumble and it’s how most people I actually know still use it. It was “nice” because you didn’t need to set up your own server. Using it as a replacement for irc came later. Image support in chats is nice, but I really only use it for the voip chat rooms.
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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.
I think I locked myself out of my account. I’m only logged in on my old computer and I’ve deleted the app from my phone. I saved my security key (I have a session security key field and
security-key.txtin my 1password) but Element didn’t seem able to use it to reactivate. I would lose all my chats. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, but still, I’m just demonstrating that I’m tech savvy enough to save things I’m told to save but I either missed saving a recovery key, wasn’t told to, or the process is just lacking. Regardless, like I said, I’m just demonstrating that it can be tricky. -
XMPP can actually do everything, chat, group video calls, and even screen sharing with the Movim client. It’s a one-stop shop.
Can it do drop in/drop out VoIP rooms like mumble?
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VENT or nothing!
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