Pretty much what it says on the tin, but for more context. My friends and I use Discord to play D&D and other TTRPGs. We also use it to send memes and just have conversations. We mostly do the chat, text, images, gifs, etc. But we also use the voice and video chat pretty regularly too. Screen share sometimes as well. So I’d like to try to find something that has all those features if possible.
The new ID or facial recognition requirement they are implementing is a deal breaker for a few of us, and so if I can set up some kind of alternative to make it a non-issue, I’d like to.
I’m running Ubunutu 22.04 LETS, AMD 3700X, 64GBRAM, 10x 6TB HDD, and and 2 4TB NVmE. Have a 2gb up/down internet connection. So I don’t think we should have any issues making it work smoothly for 7 people.
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Yes, Mattermost. It’s very similar to Slack and Discord. I have hosted it for years for our organization.
There’s a web interface, and has an app available. Can have all sorts of integrations and bridges to other services.
Mind you that they keep paywalling previously free features. Example of them paywalling group calls and their Playbooks feature (v1 - generally available, v2 - in paid plans only): https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/mattermost-v10-changelog.html
When I realized they paywalled OIDC I had to look elsewhere.
@Vaggumon I think the nearest thing might be matrix…someone else might know other stuff
Self hosting a Matrix server was daunting when I first looked into it, so concerns over it being difficult to deploy are pretty founded. But that changed when I discovered this repo. This makes quick work of getting one spun up, but the true gem of this is their documentation. They’ve probably got the best documentation I’ve ever read that explains the “why’s” and not just the “how’s”.
I still use IRC. There are now modern web clients like The Lounge or Convos that can display/share images in the channels, keep history and push notifications. Apparently Convos can do video chat but I never tried it. Unfortunately I’m not aware of screen sharing features for any of these.
So on a very simple setup, you need an IRC server, then install and connect one of those clients to your server, and use them through a web browser, either on a computer or on a phone.
It’s obviously not entirely Discord-like, but it is a simple way to chat and share images.
Back in my day, (shakes cane), Teamspeak and Ventrillo were the big voice chat platforms/tools. Both have text chat and channels/rooms; but their focus is voice chat for gaming.
Ventrilo was awful, having huge delay. Also no persistent chat.
TeamSpeak is proprietary and required a license for more than 8 users iirc. Chat might have been persistent?
Mumble was/is king in terms of voice chat. Open source, fully featured, strong certificate based security, best latency. It’s used as backend in many big games, too. No persistent chat, though.
We used IRC for chat and Mumble for voice like 10 years ago when I played Eve Online. Works great!
Mumble was awesome. It probably still is, to be fair
Ventrillo.
Dammit, son, makin’ me feel old now
Roger Wilco
Hahahahaha
I’ll be over here crying in the corner.
Next you’re gonna mention ICQ
Wow you invoked a name I hadn’t thought of in a very long time. Shit did I use that playing Unreal Tournament, StarCraft or was it late enough to be WoW?
Edit: final release 2003, guess it was unreal.
What’s that you say? IRC?
XMPP aka Jabber.
Yeah, we’re using Conversations and it’s fine for most things.
Will be self hosting prosidy “sooon”… and it’ll all be in-house.
Good luck! Report results.
Does XMPP work with group audio calling and video calling?
Matrix is an option but it’s slow and breaks all the time. I’m a big fan of XMPP myself but good luck convincing anyone else to make an account 😔
Dont knock matrix for being slow, it updates just as fast as anyone else’s network speed is and it is focused on encryption and security. Given [gestures broadly to everything these days] people moving away from major platforms should really take into account their digital footprint and privacy.
So do you have to have an account on a specific server and then get the client or get the client first? I can’t recall how to do it any longer.
Its pretty similar to Lemmy or anything else in the fediverse, someones full user name includes their home server.
Your admin just needs to have configured the service to except comminication from other servers and not just its internal users.
could you recommend a good xmpp setup? i heard good things about snikket, maybe something else too?
The Mastodon founder, Eugen Rochko, has just announced that “We’ve moved our internal communications from Discord to Zulip at Mastodon”.
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/116041405748460511
Zulip is probably more focused toward work than TTRPGs, but it can’t hurt to try it. (I haven’t tried it personally, yet.) It is self-hostable.
Five years ago, a open-source project I worked on moved to Zulip (from Slack) and it was a small hurdle. But after a month, I really like it!
So much that I’ve pushed a few other open source projects (who lived on Discord).
I was really surprised when I started a new job two years ago and THEY used a self-hosted Zulip. It’s everything Im used to on Slack.
Discord has team speak/video sharing, which I don’t think Zulip has. But then again, we use something else for video calls.
Zulip integrates with Jitsi, Zoom, and Bigbluebutton for voice and video chat. Looks like a sensible solution.
Zulip is great… on a PC. On mobile is a totally different thing, and not in a good way. 😕
What was the problem with Zulip on mobile did you have?
I only use it for text chat, so I’m curious.
Basically, the interface, or the almost lack of it. You use Discord on a PC or mobile and the experience is pretty much the same. On Zulip this does not happens. It’s a totally different experience with several things lacking, like the folder organization, for instance.
Discord on mobile
Zulip on mobile
I’ve always found the Discord ui on desktop and mobile to be really bad, just very busy and unintuitive.
It’s a shame, zulip doesn’t have e2ee. not even DMs. but they seem to be working towards federation of some sort? there are no good/perfect solutions out there.
For 7 people you could look into Virola Messenger. Not open source but uses Mumble under the hood and is super lightweight. No electron shit.
My guess is that it would be difficult to find a piece of software that does all the stuff discord does. But I also think it’s a non-issue. You could split these needs onto multiple solutions. My group uses mumble for gaming voicechat, Signal for group conversations, and a simple rtmp server for streaming. We don’t need nor use discord and never did.
I like the idea of a single piece of software that does one job well instead of a giant powerhouse that does everything.
i also have a mumble server but every once in a while we need streaming. what is your rtmp setup? i am thinking of mediamtx, but am annoyed by having to post the link to the stream every time and everyone needs to resize windows manually to fit all on ome screen.
Matrix?
https://github.com/spacebarchat/spacebarchat
Literally reverse engineered discord, made open source.
There another thread about discord requiring a face scan next month,so I think alternatives might start getting pushed.
Such as https://stoat.chat/
Edit: Not sure you can self-host it, but it does have a back end server listed in it’s source code with a docker, however it might just be for code testing.
Right RTFM… https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted yes you can self-hosted it.
To create an invite you:
# drop into mongo shell docker compose exec database mongosh # create the invite use revolt db.invites.insertOne({ _id: "enter_an_invite_code_here" })That’s pretty jank.
Also - I’m getting pretty fed-up with self-hosting documentation that assumes very specific environments and goes into detailed configuration for that environment. Don’t tell me how to setup a server and how to enable/configure SSH and setup UFW as part of setting up your software. Just tell me how to setup your software and what ports it uses.
Wait, requiring a face scan of everyone?? I know they started doing that as an age verification thing for some people, but everyone?
Your correction is accurate. I should have been more specific.
Discord announced on Monday that it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults.
Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.
That doesn’t sound like it is necessary for private chat, the only thing I really use it for. Would be nice to have an alternative all the same
It does lead to slippery slopes. First, it’s to block “adult content”.
Then, they’ll consider certain topics “adult”. News about current events? LGBT content? Video games with some violence in it?
Facebook is an example of this slippery slope. And for parts of the country, they do need to scan an ID.
Less a correction, more a question. I’d heard about them doing it in some countries, I didn’t see the post where it was going to be international.
Yeah. Solid chance I’m dropping the few discord-related things I do use here soon.
sigh
Bummer that it doesn’t have voice chat yet in the self hosted version. Hopefully soon - I would probably switch if they had that.
I would take a look at TeamSpeak or Matrix.
Of the two Matrix is probably the closest to Discord.
TeamSpeak 6 maybe. Don’t know where they’re up to on it at the moment kinda lost the thread a while ago.
