I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
I am so pissed that Element or any other Matrix app does not support push to talk OR a minimum noise gate. If it did it would clearly get tons of new users, it would be pretty much no question which plattform to replace discord with
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I have tried XMPP, Matrix and now I’ve settled on Mumble.
Me and my fellows mostly just need a voice room or a couple to sit in, and Mumble does that best out of these three, in my opinion.
I recommend giving Mumble a try as it is super easy to set up and use. Users don’t need to even create accounts to join servers.
I second this. My gaming group probably won’t leave discord for the foreseeable future but Mumble is probably where we’d go if we did. IMO all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does, when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at their scale.
I don’t want federation. I don’t want it to scale to infinite concurrent users. What I want is something simple I can plonk on a crusty old laptop running Proxmox or a Raspberry pi for a few friends.
I’ve got a Mumble server running on a little Linux container in my home lab.
Easy to set up and configure, very stable. Nothing special, it does what it is supposed to do, be a low latency, stable voip system, and it does great.
Mumble is nice, but it hasn’t changed much since the time people explicitly moved away from it to Discord, so why would they go back it it now?
Mumble isn’t requiring you to submit your ID.
Probably nothing has really changed. And I am not claiming it to be a Discord killer, as it really only does the voice rooms well.
But I am recommending it if you and your friends just need a voice room or two (as me and my friends do).
Seeing Teamspeak outlive Discord just keeps making me laugh.
“outlive” Discord is quite the exaggeration. Let’s not pretend that we’re not a vocal minority here, and that Discord will keep trucking just fine.
Even if the age verification wasn’t a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually. So it’s not going anywhere for now, but I’m pretty sure the investors will want their money back sooner or later.
Now I’m just waiting for Ventrilo and the All Seeing Eye to come back… Maybe one day I’ll be able to play CoD1 mp and have weekly scrims again : (
Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn’t mean Discord is dying.
What’s wrong with team speak? It was a good service circa 2006. And I don’t see how it is significantly less valuable to the “gaming” community. I know it isn’t as feature rich and discord has evolved a lot from its “gamer” origins. I see it used for all kinds of community’s as a catch all system. I guess that is good, but I don’t get much value from it being a centralized point of community building.
Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.
I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.
Imo the biggest problem with Teamspeak is that it still requires an active connection to the server at all time… So unless your computer is on with the app opened 24/7 you may miss messages. That may or may not be an issue, but you may miss messages that your friends send to the group when you aren’t actively online.
Frankly the UI of TeamSpeak is ageing as well, and there is value in for instance being able to simply attach a screenshot directly in a Discord chat without having to upload it to some external service.
They have acknowledged the offline messaging part. It does work in group chats and has E2EE there, but I think it’s something they are going to look into for servers. It’s closed source, so we are at the mercy of their few developers and cannot help. While I do trust them more than Discord, I would rather have an open solution, like Stoat/Fluxer, take off instead.
Check out the Teamspeak6 beta. I don’t know about offline messages but it addresses all your other complaints. I moved to it from Mumble somewhat recently and have been very happy with it.
@aeronmelon @ampersandrew crazy world isn’t it?
Fluxer is of particular interest to the folks here at AN. We’ve talked a bit about exploring it once they finish work on federation.
That’s a primary focus of the app after stability. The dev was able to hire on a co-developer, so hoping to see the project accelerate
It comes down to Fluxer and Stoat. Or just Stoat if you dislike Fluxer’s AI-assisted development.
One thing is clear, both are currently working great and are the closest thing to Discord’s core features.
Damn it this is the first I’m hearing about Fluxer’s AI development.
It’s definitely going to be one of these two. Matrix and XMPP are just too much for casual users, and there’s no one client for either of them which supports all of Discord’s core features.
Out of those two, Fluxer feels like the better choice right now, but I do wish they’d take a stronger stance against LLMs. Stoat feels clunkier, buggier, and feels like it’s getting left behind.
I’ve had the most people switch over to element (a full 2 people plus myself)
Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?
Are you talking about self hosting for fluxer? They explicitly state in their documentation they don’t want people using the current version because they’re doing a rewrite, so you should wait.
Yes, Fluxer’s self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn’t self hosted enough for my needs. It’s cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.
I like the alternatives, but they mean nothing with being federated.
For me it’s federation and encryption. Yeah obviously, if I’m in a public space then encryption means fuck all, but for messages between me and close friends I want encryption.
I hope we get encrypted hosting sites that can help people do easy automated setups. A bunch of people want something that is just create a server and go. I know several discord admins that aren’t really hardware and self hosting literate.
https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger is an XMPP client by the ejabberd people that seems aimed at being a Discord alternative. I think it is intended to support voice and screen sharing eventually, though it looks like they want to focus on getting text chat worked out for the time being.
They’ve got xep-0503 on the roadmap, so it’s not there yet, but is for sure something worth keeping an eye on.
Xmpp already survived Google divesting from it, so I’m more inclined to believe it has real staying power compared to all these new apps partially written by ai or with problematic security policies.
I hear Snikket makes it really easy to host XMPP (aka Jabber).
Yes, but it isn’t a Discord replacement, but rather a WhatsApp replacement.
https://movim.eu/ is xmpp based and might be more suitable as a Discord replacement, but to be honest it isn’t quite there yet if you are looking mainly for a voice chat app.
Hmmmm voice chat eh?
Well then it’s time to recommend Mumble!
But then it’s not chat anymore. Or screenshare.
There are many good tools that solve individual issues. But Discord solved many of these issues in one tool, and that also has its charme.
The project I posted here yesterday focuses on providing text, voice and screen share. My goal is to provide an easy to host tool for those three things. Check it out if it’s just those you want in a single package.
