Every few years we rediscover decentralized chat and I’m here for it.
Wow, TeamSpeak is still around???
Sorta, and like the old days they claim they are working on things then take 4 years to do nothing…
Ventrilo. Been sitting in ventrilo for 30 years
Some of my friends have registered on Flux but still use discord. It’s sort of just there until discord makes it unbearable for them to use but discord will never do that. They’ll just slowly tighten the noose until you get comfortable.
They pay for nitro, which to me is bonkers.
when my nitro expired, I was astonished how much basic functionality was locked behind that paywall. The vanilla experience is so unpleasant.
Meanwhile on stoat, there is no subscription and most of discord’s paid features are just… features. Sure, stoat is janky as balls, but so was discord when it was new.
Genuine question: as someone who has never used Discord’s Nitro, what basic functionality am I missing out on?
There were 2.5 major ones for me:
- Higher upload limit for game clips/highlights. OBS didn’t handle transcoding the stream down to a lower resolution without hitting the GPU hard enough to make the game stuttery
- Higher stream resolution/fps. This mattered less to me as the homies aged and played games less frequently
- Use the obnoxious custom emoji reactions between servers. I could upload some real egregious shit on a test server and use it in the homie server
This is one of the reasons these “let’s replace Discord” threads are so tricky. I use Discord basically every day, and heavily twice a week for games nights with two different groups, for 6 years. I’m in there. And I have never uploaded a clip or streamed anything, so I never considered that this might be something people want, or are using the platform for. And I’ve seen a few custom emoji around, but never considered using some dude’s emoji in a different group’s chat.
So it’s wild how different people are using it, and getting one replacement to do all of it is a big ask!
lots of customization options for both the interface and your profile, but more important to most people is being able to use emojis/stickers from your subscribed servers everywhere on the platform. This might seem petty, but there’s no other software that I regularly use that requires me to pay in order to for example, change the theme of the interface.
edit: that does not include the stuff that I knew I was paying for and was on purpose paying for, like better stream quality and larger upload size and extra shit for my server.
Exactly, right? I remember streaming on discord was a pain because of all the lag and TeamSpeak + pigdin + Overwolf was so much better.
Now i use Legcord instead until my friends switch, which I hope is soon.
well, better streaming was one of the things that I was knowingly and intentionally paying for nitro for.
Very interesting. I’ve never really noticed the difference.
I’ve never been able to do a direct comparison, so maybe that part was a scam too.
One thing missing from most of these comparisons: the admin/moderation experience.
Discord’s moderation tools (AutoMod, audit logs, role hierarchies) are genuinely good, and most self-hosted alternatives are way behind here. If you’re running a community server, this matters a lot.
My ranking for communities (not just friend groups):
- Matrix (Synapse/Conduit) — best moderation tools of the self-hosted options, rooms/spaces model works well
- Revolt — closest Discord clone, but moderation is still basic
- Mumble/TeamSpeak — voice-only, but rock solid for gaming guilds that don’t need text
For just friends? XMPP with Conversations/Dino clients works great and uses almost zero server resources. I run an ejabberd instance on a $5 VPS alongside 5 other services.
Teamspeak 6 is looking reaaaally promising. Text chat, screen sharing, webcam support. Self hostable, not open source tho.
Looking forward to the first full release
i love stoat, free, open, can self host, just enough features compared to discord for it to be viable
still using discord since a lot of things i use depend on discord for many things, though. and if you haven’t seen, there’s stoat to discord and vice versa bridges.
Ok everyone. Hear me out. Let’s just all get in the same room and play the same game.
wish it was that easy,
My closests friendgroup dispersed around the province, one in kelowna, one in enderby, and im out on the Coast now. Discord (and now steam chat) kept us close
I kinda wish the fediverse had started with an account system which could then be integrated with various servers. It would concentrate on just keeping account configs where new services had new tab areas or such. Then you could have the services instances that would authtenticate and use the login configs for view and such. of course many instances would do multiple things but it would be so great to go to mastadon and have it interact with the same fediverse account as what I would use at lemming or peertube.
Maybe have a party of some kind?
That is a great idea. We could have pizza and snacks.
We could connect our computers via wires even.
out of the loop. what is discord doing to force an exodus?
ID check. This was also a few months after they had a major leak and hackers stole personal information.
They downplayed it but if it’s like all the other social media platforms, it’s going to be garbage.
I thought they cancelled.l the ID thing after the backlash. They are still rolling it out?
They have publicly rolled back this particular effort. It’s extraordinarily likely that this will resurface in a few months with a different coat of paint.
Not to defend discord, they’re plenty shitty, but the core ID verification premise may be out of their hands, based on the surge in legislation on the topic globally.
Bringing in age-ID verification that they had to apply in the UK and Australia globally for all accounts to access NSFW channels and to be able to take the baby filter off of DMs.
They got heavy backlash for it, and have now delayed it.
Friday night and Sunday night I could not open discord. They seemed to have an outage based on down detector. I had already been toying the idea of switching to matrix but would rather have gamed than figure that out for my tech-normie friend.
Luckily steam voice chat is straightforward and good quality
The fact that we went from Teamspeak to Skype to Discord and back to Teamspeak again is wild.
that we went from Teamspeak to Skype
Who did?
I went from TeamSpeak to mumble
I think Skype was more on the IRC > AOL > MSN pipeline
I miss Dolby Axon
He mentioned IRC but skipped it, probably thinking it’s still text only. However there are now web clients that can display inline images, url preview, persistent chat and push notifications. To me it’s the most KISS solution, as it’s super easy to setup and self-host.
In order for this to work, one needs an IRC server and a place to host the web client’s server. That’s it. I use The Lounge but there are others like Convos or ObsidianIRC.
It’s still text only. When I hear text only I already assume it supports all you mentioned.
Text is not ASCII only :)
Beyond text only comes voice calls, video calls and screen share, which are paramount for my discord use case. Me and my friends like to game while sharing our screens, so I game in my main monitor and have a matrix of screens on the second. It creates a LAN party feeling and it’s important to maintain connection after some moved out of town.
Text is not ASCII only :)
If you want to be technical, IRC supports Unicode so it’s just not ASCII only. Convos is also supposed to support voice chats.
That’s what I meant tho, you were under the assumption that the author thought that IRC meant text only, and said that IRC supports rich text with images and links and the like. And my point is that that’s still text, that text isn’t ASCII only, technically.
In any case, I did look the video support that Convos offers, and it seems like an external integration with jitsi (camera button opens a jitsi conference externally and shares the link in chat). Better than nothing for sure, yer subpar for the use case we are looking for.
Thanks for the suggestion though!
Why is it a web client? I’d much rather have a local client.
I still use Hexchat
It’s much easier to code this way and it’s cross platform. There are some experimental programs like Srain based on GTK. I tried it and it’s promising but it’s unfortunately too experimental for me so far and it’s lacking some features like persistent chat, so one would still need a bouncer which is an additional layer to setup.
Yeeah… Noble effort, really. Except people don’t give enough of a shit to actually move.
I’ve arranged for a Matrix space and Teamspeak server to be used for my friend Discord of about 100 people. 10 registered and 0 actually use the Matrix.
The bridged Matrix channel is only used for lighthearted spam from the Discord side.
The Teamspeak got like 6 registrations and 0 active users.
Most people won’t budge until they see the ID verification screen, and some not even then.
I don’t think making these other programs optional is going to work to migrate a community. You can’t say to your football team that you’re gonna start playing basketball and be disappointed when they don’t come with you.
If the discord and matrix server was fully bridge then maybe you’d are a bit more success as the community would be less fractured. If you’re friends don’t want to move from discord, and you really don’t want to be in discord, that’s a tough situation for you be in.
Delete the discord.
I have a discord with 14 friends that we’re abandoning. I created a Root community (yeah, not open source or self hosted, but it’s what I can do) and we’ve had 7 move over in the last month. The rest have 2 weeks before the discord gets deleted …
My friend group looked poised to move, disabled their nitro and such, and… Then discord pulled back and they bought nitro again.
My discord group had discussions about stopping discord use for weeks. I kept saying “if no one comes up with a better idea, I’ll go back to IRC.” The discussion didn’t move anywhere, I told them that by the end of February, I’ll go to IRC and delete my account. End of February came, I said “alright, IRC installed, I’ll be at X network, I made a channel called Y, see you there.” Then I deleted my account.
Three people followed me but they also stayed in discord. They tell me that everyone over there is surprised that I did what I told them for weeks that I would do lol.
But anyway, I’ve experienced this before. I left facebook in 2011, I lost contact with about 80% of the people I knew, because apparently calling, Whatsapp/SMS is not good enough. Then I left Whatsapp for Signal. I have 2 contacts there…
I’ve come to the conclusion that most people just don’t care about privacy and big corporations controlling shit. I wont be a part of that silly bollocks.
I did the exact same thing. Stuck to my guns, and the only person who mattered followed. I’ll take it
Yup. I don’t need 20 people to talk to. A few is enough. And I found a nice IRC channel with a lot of nice new people anyways. If the others want to stay in Discord, fine by me. Of course it helps that the people on Discord were not IRL friends that I’ve known since childhood. I lost those years ago =D
I am not as gung-ho on irc, most of my friend group just hangs out in audio channels and such.
But yeah, I cancelled my nitro after 6+ years when they clearly started enshittifying with the “quests” popups and other shite I had no interest in seeing and of course the IPO talks looming sometime last year or the year before.
Yeah it was pretty easy for me to switch to IRC because I have never liked audio/video chat stuff. I tried that once or twice with a very small group, I think I said 10 words all in all. I’m not a talker lol
That’s so frustrating.
This is the way.
It isn’t a great discord replacement but it’s a metadata blackhole with PQC and Tor support that’s surprisingly stable.
Downside is that the founder is apparently a die-hard trump supporter. Which doesn’t mean the app is bad, but still would leave me wondering if one should contribute to its’ success via network effect, or perhaps ignore it.
Jack Dorsey money too. But the code and whitepapers look good. IMHO take over the discourse. It’s mostly dumb rightwing conspiracy nuts and libertarians right now but it’s not very popular, lemmy.world could easily take over and relegate the early adopting groups to obscurity.
Fluxer is the most promising one so far. It doesn’t have easy self-hosting yet, but it’s in development. What exists so far is pretty good though.
It’s roadmap is amazing, I’m hoping it will go far
Yeah this is what we’re waiting for too.
Looks very exciting to self host with Tailscale/Netbird.
TeamSpeak tested
Great now I feel old
