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.
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.
We switching to Fluxer
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?
Back to irc, you silly fucks.
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.
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
ICQ was perfect in 1996.
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.
thank you for the information.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, hot shit! I know about Movim, it’s just not my main client (notifications are finnicky, and offline messages don’t seem to work right for me?), but them adding discord-style rooms is great!
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
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
offer true jump in /jump out game chat.
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.
an always on chat channel.
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.
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.
Any opinions on team speak 3?
Proprietary 👎
US based as well, unfortunately.
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
I seem to recall the one for Root was particularly bad, can’t remember for the others.
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.
Stoat and it’s been mostly fine, but they’re already implementing age verification.
Can you elaborate on this? I can’t find anything about it online
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.
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.
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?
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.
