from 64bithero@lemmy.world to privacy@lemmy.ml on 17 Feb 17:28
https://lemmy.world/post/43250238
There is no truer adage to me than nothings is perfect. And when it comes to anything related to Discord it’s no different.
Discord itself to me has been an issue for years. Its use of data collection, the obsession of companies trying to buy it all were concerning. For me the latest age verification just further reinforces my beliefs. That being said the majority of users who ignored all this and kept going, really nothing would change. Most people I know use Discord lightly and aren’t in large chats that use hentai gifs. I still would tell anyone who would listen to get out of dodge. But if you never cared about data usage then you’re probably not going to start now.
For all the alternatives out there truth is, none are really anywhere near perfect. Matrix and most of its clients while encrypted don’t offer true jump in /jump out game chat. More a kin to Skype really. Foss Discord implementations like Spacebar are to all over the place and for me are not really functional. Stoat while probably my favorite is still really small and not holding up to the stress of the user influx. And of course it’s missing “discord features” and the new kid Fluxer while appealing is still to new and it’s monetization model a little to concerning. 300 bucks as a backer for unproven project ? And of course with the exception of Matrix none of the other projects currently offer encryption.
Truth is no option really is ideal. Truth is all the options have some pretty serious flaws. And truth is getting your large swaths of friends to move might be close to impossible.
So if you are looking to move please do some digging. Ask people who use the apps their opinions. Try to as a group of friends chose to make a move.
And the final truth is it’s a really good thing we finally have some options. No matter the flaws having competition brings innovation.
I hope this posts helps clear up some things for people who might be confused or concerned.
threaded - newest
ICQ was perfect in 1996.
Damn, I think I’ve finally forgotten my ICQ number.
I haven’t. Still mourning.
95589327
Damn I have forgotten every telephone number I ever had, but my ICQ# still pops out instantly.
my solution is Zulip/XMPP/IRC/Jitsi, none of them can replace every functions of discord but they partially can and it seems like they’ll work for my use case.
That’s the other thing, everyone’s use case is slightly different, which honestly I’m kinda glad there are so many options for even if all of them have their flaws.
Just curiousity: why not Matrix?
the clients still feel extremely buggy to use and has poor ux, there are too many frictions overall. surely it works for some people, but it feels not optimal for me. i even tried it with a quite techie friend once and they had extremely bad experience with it that they’re now skeptical of any alternative chat systems i ask them to try out with…
That was my experience too. I can’t remember now what my objections were, but I tried it and did not like it or want to use it.
I am now self hosting XMPP + encryption server which I have got some of my friends to install clients for. Oh, they bitch nonstop about how it isn’t as nice as whatever big tech app they are used to. But they use it, because I am not going to talk to them on $TrendingSurveillanceApp.
For me it’s purely the voice chat issue. I rarely use chat rooms anymore. Arguably something like TeamSpeak would work just fine for me.
The Movim client for XMPP can do all of those functions as a one-stop shop. It can even do screensharing with audio passthrough (though you need to use a chromium based browser to pass the application audio in the stream). I think it’s easily out best option right now.
thanks. i guess it’s as good as the other electron/web based clients on desktop, but on mobile is PWA okay to use? my phone is too old and suffers with everything but well optimized native apps, so my experience doesn’t match others’.
It’d be pretty easy to quickly test. If it runs okay in your phone’s browser, it’ll run okay as a PWA.
Alternatively, you could use a native XMPP mobile app, which would allow you to access the same servers and chats as you could from Movim. The only downside is that the mobile apps available are lagging behind Movim’s feature set. They can do 1 on 1 audio/video calls, but cannot yet join a group call or screenshare. Depending on your needs, that may or may not be adequate.
it runs like crap on my phone since it’s 12 years old. conversations.im works but it’s features can’t completely replace discord, at least for my friends.
Oh wow, I wasn’t expecting it to be that old. That’s actually quite impressive you’re able to keep it functioning that long, are you still able to get battery replacements?
Sucks that the PWA isn’t able to cut it. Perhaps you might have better luck with Fluxer when that releases a mobile app? (I think its only offering a PWA for now as well).
unfortunately i can’t get new batteries, the battery life isn’t good but it’s usable as i don’t really use my phone much. also have 6 replacable batteries that i carry sometimes.
for now my group will migrate to zulip and their app works on my phone, i was just trying to attempt xmpp too since it’s always great to have more options (and possibly setup xmpp as a backup to the zulip room with matterbridge on physically distant server)
Im about to try to self host stoat. I’m really feeling like spinning up 3 or 4 of the new services and trying each to see which one or mixture works best. If anyone else is doing this we should start a megathread
Agreed, I’d really like to know how that goes! I didn’t even think of selfhosting stoat, but I’m intrigued now
I don’t believe Stoat is federated so your server would be in its own silo. But it’s great if you just want a space for you and your friends
Oh, apologies if this was about federated options. I’m just excited for the death of discord.
Oh no it’s not purely about federated. And I love Stoat. I just wanted to make sure that wasn’t lost in translation. Especially if you had any interest in that part
I actually do but I kind of dont know what that would entail with an app like discord. I’d imagine it would just be the same but with @domain.com instead of Username#1234
Basically how discord works right now with other “servers” but it can actually ne a different server.
Movim would be a good one to try. It’s actually more full featured than Stoat as well, as it offers Encryption, Federation (XMPP), group video/audio calls, and screensharing with application audio! (must use a chromium based browser to pass the audio for now). It is currently missing Discord-like channels with rooms, but the dev is actively working on that.
Stoat currently cannot do video calls or screensharing, and has no plans to implement encryption or federation, AFAIK.
Also @astropenguin5@lemmy.world, @Pika@sh.itjust.works and @betahack@lemmy.world
Stoat did a Q&A the other day. Looks like voice is live and screen sharing is implemented but not live yet.
That being said it looks like these updates apply to the hosted service. Improving the self hosted experience is something they want to do but right now they are just trying to keep the hosted service humming due to increased activity.
thanks for the ping, I’ will defo look into that one as part of my testing as well!
I’m not looking for perfect. I just want a similar layout with voice call, custom emoji and decent permission control.
The closest I’ve seen is space bar, stout or matrix. But matrix is a beast to get people on, and stout + space bar are both really premature atm client wise.
some of my group moved to steam groups but it’s so clunky and missing many features
I’ve gone through like 5 different services trying to set one up. Am I dumb or does no one know how to make a straightforward docker compose? I thought the whole point of Compose was to copy-paste a config, change a few variables and hit go. Several of these assume you know so much about how to setup these services and then just leave you to your devices.
I want like 5 or 6 variables in an .env file. No reason I should have to spin up my own database and link it when you should be containerizing the entire thing in the first place. The only services so far that I’ve had any success setting up are Mattermost (which doesn’t offer group calls) and VoceChat (which I can’t get the voice to work in).
All the others either don’t offer voice at all or I can’t get past the setup.
You can PM me your error messages for help. When it comes to simple group voice chat, I recommend mumble
I know I didn’t mention it in my post, but I do have a couple requirements:
Nice-to-haves:
I have my sights on Snikket at the moment, but that was one I couldn’t get up and running. I can reach out with errors and maybe get it running, but my point stands that Docker Compose is supposed to be as hands-off as it gets, but some devs seem to not get that.
From my quick testing I did the other day, the conclusion I came to was:
- Fluxer looks like the easiest drop-in replacement for my group. I agree I am also a little hesitant about its longevity & funding.
- Matrix UX leaves some to be desired, but it’s functional and I like the E2EE.
- We don’t have anyone good enough at selfhosting in my group to even attempt Spacebar.
- Stoat just doesn’t seem viable. Lack of screenshare is a big issue for my group.
Surprisingly, the new TeamSpeak 6 looks pretty okay to me, but the UX is pretty different so might have a little bit of a learning curve for some people in my group. It costs money for a server but honestly my group is fine with that. We used to pay for a Mumble server back in the day but it doesn’t have robust text channels so we don’t want to move back to that.
if you tried TS6 may i ask how it was? it still seems to be in beta and i couldn’t find any easy setup guide or demo…
It seemed like it would work for me. The user experience is pretty different than Discord, but I caught onto it pretty quick. There are public servers you can join to see what it could be like. When you launch the desktop client, there is a “popular servers” section on the home page that lets you pick from a couple different community servers. I joined the “Official TeamSpeak Community Server” and then just jumped into the Counter-Strike channel and played around, tested streaming, chat, etc.
To be clear this is the TS6 client, not TS3.
As far as I can tell you can’t actually test creating your own server before you pay for a community, although the cost is cheap ($5 USD a month) and it looks like there is a trial.
From a longevity perspective, TeamSpeak might be a good choice for my group, since it’s been around in some shape or form for like 30 years at this point. My group has moved like 3 or 4 times. Not sure if we’ll find a forever home but the longer we can stay somewhere, the better.
Self hosting TS6 is as simple as running the file and port forwarding setup on your router. I have not tried using it with anyone else yet, as I was not satisfied with the lack of persistent text chat, but setting it up is pretty easy.
If you’re familiar with Docker they have a Docker compose file example as well.
i was under the impression their UX is just like discord and they use the matrix protocol underneath, seems like it’s not :( that’s a dealbreaker… thanks for sharing
There is some way to do it using like, group chats and their hosted services, but there is no self hosted server based persistent chat.
Honestly, spinning up the Synapse stack (Matrix) from their Helm documentation wasn’t too difficult. I have not tested the voice chat super thoroughly yet, but the text chat is working great. The hardest part was formatting some of the config files correctly so it would use them properly. https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm/tree/main
For me Fluxer is technically more feature complete with steaming options. But banners and custom emojis are behind paywalls. (Non local hosted)
Stoat offers free banners, emojis a nice UI even a community browser! Its voice chat works well enough but no streaming features. Stoat is purely donation based at the moment.
Sounds like Fluxer is gaining momentum mainstream wise. I’m happy with either option …
I’m interested in movim. They are a mature project that has been around for ~15 years and are working adding some discordy features. With those coming it seems more promising to me than the alternatives that haven’t even hit a stable state yet
EDIT: The Fluxer dev has agreed to remove the CLA!
I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.
Also @64bithero@lemmy.world
I’ll be sticking with Movim, which is already federated, encrypted, can do group video calls, can even screenshare, and most critically does not have a CLA.
Movim looks insanely promising. I’ll have to check it out after I get off work. I’ll have to update my write up if it’s that impressive. Curious how it will handle from what I understand XMPP is protocol like matrix yes ?
Yes, it’s an open-standard that anyone can create a client for. Here’s a good presentation with more details on XMPP itself, if you’re interested :)
While I appreciate what Movim is going for it feels like something different then Discord. It fees like it’s trying to be a whole social network. Which is kind of cool but it also feels very very busy.
Honestly that’s fair enough, it definitely could use a professional UX pass. Cheers for giving it a shot though :)
I might end up trying that as my Facebook replacement but not Discord. Their policies and data handling should win them an award
Hey, quick update, the Fluxer dev has agreed to remove the CLA, so I’d say that puts it back in the running.
discord was a one-stop shop for multiple very different things.
Retvrn to gamer clans coordinating in forums, talking in mumble, chatting in IRC &c.
one program for one purpose and a community webpage tying it all together
This is the way.
The big problem is, every good privacy-respecting solution costs money and comes with the inconvenience of setting up a new account. Having lived 90s Internet I don’t mind that at all, I actually kind of prefer it, but I can understand how younger folks can be discouraged.
My young friend was like , why would you have to pay for a server?? And I’m Like bud, if you aren’t paying, you are the product. They don’t get concepts like servers and that they are offsite hardware…hard for them to conceptualize.
Because discord uses the word differently than the rest of the world. Convenient.
One of the problems is that a “privacy-respecting solution” that includes a monthly bill is self-defeating. It creates a paper trail.
Part of why I want to self-host in the first place is to get away from shitty gigantic corporations. Discord, Spotify, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. Just because you are paying them doesn’t mean they aren’t making you a product anyways anymore.
I would love for a good way to do this without having to rely on Cloudflare or Tailscale or similar too. Even if they have free options today, what are those free options going to look like 2 years from now?
I told that in the most general sense. You may self-host or rent a VPS, all cost money and maintenance. There is always more private and less private options. But anything run but a volunteer or community or selfhoster wouldn’t data mine to sell ads, that you can be sure.
Movim doesn’t cost anything and is federated (just like piefed/lemmy are). It also offers really solid encryption for privacy. I’d say it’s out best long-term option.
what about mumble?
For straight up talk it works. UI is dated and I am not sure if you have to self host or not ?
Been working great for my group. I think the criticism for the open source options is over played. And so is the monetization angle for creators with fluxer, avenues for that bridges a lot of gaps for adoption.
Read the privacy policies too. I can’t remember which one I was reading yesterday but it read like they were going to monitor every word I said… All the while saying they are privacy advocates and based in Europe
If you can remember please report in.
It might have been fluxer but I’m not positive. I’ve been looking at all of the options because I need an alternative so there’s lots of mixed info in my brain. I should have started a spreadsheet
Even stoat writes on their privacy policy they store everything you write on their servers. That if needed they will hand over what’s required of them as of GPDR compliancy.
Now if that analyze said data and sell it, that’s another thing entirely.
With both Stoat and Fluxer community audits should be done, if Fluxer has had AI generated code that opens up unforeseen risk.
Thanks for the heads up!
Self hosting stoat is gonna be awesome for my community :)
What does this mean?
Services like Discord allow you to keep an always on chat channel. People can join and leave as they like and no one is disrupted. Matrix is more like Skype/Zoom you create a call or session. But there is a person host. Once host leaves the call ends. In some cases you need to invite people to join the call.
I guess you must mean an always on voice channel. Thanks for clarifying.
(For what it’s worth, my groups are using Mumble for that purpose, alongside Matrix, at least until MatrixRTC brings its voice features up to speed.)
I have deployed LiveKit for my homeserver yesterday. I’m not gonna lie, it does involve a bit of work, but once it’s running it is very seamless.
Do you mean LiveKit?
Yup, typo. It is lit, though.
This is what I’ve ended up doing, too. Now the only issue is that we’re missing noise suppression. The boys are not passing this year’s emissions testing.
That’s true for Matrix with Jitsi. I’m selfhosting with Element Call enabled and we’re using video rooms that you can use as one does on Discord. It’s nice but needs a few more features before I’ll be completely happy with it. For a group to voice chat it’s great. If you’re sharing shows, movies, games, etc then I think it needs the following…
I’ve seen pull requests that address these things so I’m hoping that we see these features soon than later.
I know that the cinny client for matrix is getting fairly close to adding this fwiw
what is everyone’s opinion of Root? is it a viable option?
my biggest hurdle is getting everyone on board. even in my group I have people dragging their feet and not wanting to start something new…even though they know they should
In my eyes they are no different than Discord. They are a venture capital driven corporation who will use your data in the same manner. I like the added features for mmo clans. But that’s not enough to give up the privacy issue.
If you don’t have many concerns about privacy to start with then why not stick with Discord?
I do, my group does not. I’d rather use signal. but have not been able to convince them otherwise
i got a team speak 6 server running for my friend group. there are things i wish were better, but ultimately it’s really not that big of a deal. mainly it’s the separating the text chat from the voip servers, and the text chat not being hosted on my machine. but then again others would rather it was on a companies servers any way
but now it’s just the work of pushing my friends to not stick around due to momentum and the whole “but discord retracted their decision! i don’t want to!”
After complaining about it heavily for a few days, I did find one client that has that same feel, commet.chat. I haven’t done a whole lot of testing yet, but from what I’ve seen/experienced, it’s close, if not there
Personally I still prefer XMPP+Cheogram. It’s more Signal than Discord, but it’s a lightweight chat server with voice call abilities, and that’s what I needed it for
Check out the Movim client for XMPP, it allows it perform group video/audio calls, and even has screen sharing! (though you need to use a chromium browser to share the audio of an application for now). And the dev is currently working on implementing Discord-style channels with collections of rooms.
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Genuinely curious: Stoat’s Community Guidelines list the legal jurisdiction for their Service Operator as the United Kingdom (sorry for the awkward sentence structure) I know that any online platform that provides “risky” content to the UK has to perform age checks, but I’m curious if the privacy impact increases when the service is hosted in the UK? Eg, would they be required to conduct age checks for all users, rather than just UK users?
Very good catch. Honestly the platform is so small I doubt it will come under fire. Worse case if the platform takes off more can self host and completely avoid these requirements
Any opinions on team speak 3?
Proprietary 👎
US based as well, unfortunately.
TS6 is already avaiable and good replacement for many (sadly not all) of discord functions
Fluxer wants to have a ‘monetization’ to give payouts to ‘creators.’ Hard pass.
My wife and I have been using Stoat and it’s been mostly fine, but they’re already implementing age verification.
Stoat being based in UK makes me nervous as their laws are ridiculous. Devs claim that they are going to try to only apply draconian things when necessary but I have my doubts.
Can’t you self-host stoat?
you can try but right now it is not supported, same as fluxer
I’m not sure I understand why Fluxer’s monetization gets so much hate. It seems to me like it is a built-in way for the people hosting servers to accept money from users.
Any source on this Fluxer monetization? I get that they need to sustain the flagship server, but AFAIK the dev said none of these monetization features will limit what you can do in your self-hosted Fluxer (when it comes)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m wary of Fluxer but it seems like the dev does have a plan unlike Stoat that’s has been very slow (already tried it when it was called Revolt and has not changed at all)
Item #9 on the roadmap
thanks. it’s really weird that they don’t make clear if this monetization feature will be limited to their main instance or will be available to selfhosters too
would this add a limitation of some kind, would every selfhoster be required to add this feature do be federated?
i’m gonna keep looking at XMPP at the moment
Can you elaborate on this? I can’t find anything about it online
I have offered to do a lot of education and technical effort surrounding this, e.g. helping groups migrate in some of the circles I’m involved with and all it’s really gotten me is abuse and condescension, bafflingly. No one cares and if they do it’s mostly superficial and they want the easiest way out—someone/something do everything for me, and I mean everything. I don’t want to click more than two buttons and even that is pushing it, buster. Sometimes there aren’t easy solutions, though, and I think this is one of those times. Big Tech is massive and in the world we live in now we cannot have all of the things it promises without immense tradeoff, and for the most part it just isn’t worth it. The modern web being almost completely centralized around Discord is really harmful, like what happened with Facebook years ago. What used to be simple, publicly accessible websites for all these groups, locations and interests with email, forums and chat rooms for asynchronous as well as real-time communication is now entirely on Discord or Facebook. It’s disastrous. Neither of those things are easily accessible or friendly to archival…why do I need to be in a Discord chat room or Facebook group for community events around my public library? It’s absurd. I hate all of this so much, and basically no one around me agrees with me so we’ll just circle the drain forever while the “pet cameras” start calling DHS on our neighbors.
I’m just going back to xmpp, maybe mumble for voice calls. They’re both friendly and simple and xmpp supports modern features just fine. I can host it for myself and my friends who care; I don’t have much hope for the masses anymore. I don’t really like how bloated Matrix/Synapse is, and everything else is riding coattails we don’t need to ride. I don’t care about video games or streaming to people in a chat room or anything like that, and if I did I’m sure something like Jitsi handles that well enough. Oh no, a second program!! We are all so dependent on tech in our lives but it seems like so many want nothing to do with being informed about it on any level…I just don’t get it.
I feel this in my soul, and it’s something I’ve noticed a lot on reddit when trying to tell people that lemmy/piefed exist. Some of them will just find any reason whatsoever to not do something, pointing out the most minor of differences or slightest inconveniences as insurmountable obstacles that no human could be expected to overcome, and usually end it with “if It’s not already perfect/better than what I’m currently using (despite the alternative not being actively user-hostile like the thing they’re using and complain about is) I’m not going to bother”.
With the Movim client (or Dino client), XMPP can do group voice/video calls :D
I’m gonna try setting up an XMPP server for group calls, I read prosody is good and light
Matrix is a mess to setup in baremetal behind a CGNAT and I only use playit.gg to proxy my homeserver (for minecraft at the moment)
Prosody is what I use on my current server, which is just a really ancient Dell sitting in my closet. It could not handle Synapse+federation whatsoever. Prosody (and really anything XMPP) has been an absolute breeze in comparison.
I get what your saying and it’s true people are insanely lazy. But the whole point of these applications is to chat with your friends. So if you can’t get them to move in the first place , what’s the point of the application then ? So while there is no perfect solution , trying to do to much at once won’t work either …
I mean, if they are your friends and you are offering an alternative (assuming they asked or want it) they should to put some effort to install an app or two just for that
Now, if your ‘friends’ are a discord community with hundreds of users, that’s a different use-case.
🫂
I wasn’t really sure if the US chatroom app infamous for harboring pedophiles and saving hyperlinks of users’ deleted photos in rooms’ modlog was evil but now that the logo is red and has scary eyes I’m seriously considering it
This was probably one of the first times I can remember when our chat programs were under one primary program. Before Discord there was market segmentation abound and I think it made the system better for there were alternate means of contact. Discord becoming monolithic like it it did was a real issue and let’s be honest, we need to have alternatives. I foresee Discord still being used for a bit by most of my groups, but they are certainly considering alternatives.
Managed to get a matrix server up + a web client frontend hosted on same site for friend group .
3 container docker compose: continuwuity, tunnel, premade Cinny image with nginx serving frontend.
Great if you don’t care about voice, but if you do then you’ll need to host a TURN server on a VPS and connect home server to that.
isn’t matrix compromised and holding ties to israel?
Matrix was originally developed by Israeli company Amdocs, which has since rebranded and moved to the UK.
But they are sketchy as all hell, denying that their parent company was involved in proven spying incidents.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36020947
Isn’t Matrix open source? And wouldn’t hosting your own instance unfederated resolve that concern?
Yes Matrix is open source so technically if there’s a backdoor people should be able to find it. But the dev team behind Matrix sketches me out so I wouldn’t be surprised if they sneakily hid a backdoor.
Personally I wouldn’t trust "privacy’ software developed by an Israeli company which has made spyware in the past. It’s not direct evidence that Matrix has backdoors, but sometimes stuff is just sketch.
Good points. I have been trying to spin up my own instance because the alternatives are still not up to snuff but Matrix seemed a decent alternative if self hosted.
I just saw another article today about XMPP which was going to be my last ditch effort, but that will be my next foray it seems!
thank you for the information.
Back to irc, you silly fucks.
We switching to Fluxer
Besides the lack of features, what is the temperature of Stoat platform? I have had it reccomended a lot to me.
Not sure I follow what you mean by temperature? Socially I’d say it’s all over the place. You can make channels for whatever you like. To be transparent the only feature to me missing is streaming / screen share. And the mobile apps need a lot of work …
The app looks and runs like a university project.
By which I mean badly
Found another “new” discord clone called Kloak. Slightly curious as they claim to use purely a username and key to identify you and nothing else.
Some of the site seems AI generated and the project is entirely closed source. I am curious but I have my reservations even trying it.
Right now it appears registration is closed which is also odd.
kloak.app
Might be worth keeping an eye on. But it might be worth entirely avoiding