Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
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Somebody needs to create an XMPP/Jitsi hybrid
Jitsi-meet is already using xmpp under the hood.
But there are some efforts to add multi-user video calls to full xmpp clients as well. Dino can already do it for a while, and Movim and Libervia recently added experimental support.
Its not quite a full Discord replacement, but for private groups it works quite well.
Isn’t the video the jingle part that Google added to jabber originally (before it dumped everything to remake it from the group up about 4 more times like a GSoC crossed over with groundhogDay)?
Today xmpp uses a distant relative of those original jingle specifications, which have been modernized to use Webrtc.
Do any of the xmpp clients have screen share?
Movim does, for Libervia and Dino I am not 100% sure right now, but at least for Libervia the browser version should have it as it is really more of a general Webrtc browser feature than client specific.
Time to dust off my old Mumble server!
I was reading this thread and started looking for that app again.
Mumla? Is it even still being updated?
Mumla the ever living!
https://spacebar.chat/ looks like it will eventually be good, it looks like it’s in its infancy right now though
An alternative would need screen share, just voip is not enough any more.
Most of the discords I’m on never use screen share for anything.
All the ones I’m on, around 30, it’s the only thing it’s used for.
The problem is that performant screenshare (to multiple users) more or less requires infrastructure. That requires money, and it’s impossible to compete on price with services that have the VC-enshitification model.
You can get around this in a few ways, but they’re all tradeoffs that are in some way or other worse than discord.
- P2P - sacrifice latency, reliability
- direct multi-stream - sacrifice PC performance and/or bitrate
- paid infrastructure - sacrifice money
I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s simpler and by it’s very nature doesn’t require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.
Plus, don’t forget screen sharing in discord isn’t very good as is (720p30) if you’re not a paid user.
honestly that isnthe only thing that stopd me from going all in on teamspeak/mumble
i just need a screen sharing solution (not necessarily built into those tools)
What if you had OBS create a “camera” of your screen, and then use that through video chat?
Ah, the good old “screenshare not working on wayland” workaround!
TeamSpeak recently added screen share to their TS6 beta, however it currently only works on official servers provided by TeamSpeak; they have not yet released TS6 server software, only the client. To my understanding, they are thankfully still planning on releasing it though.
Ah this is so exciting!
Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.
When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)
I’m very excited!
I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.
I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?
those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different
Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.
The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.
Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.
It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.
What are you using instead? I only recently set up my synapse server and I’d be interested to head what the alternatives are
I’ve found SimpleX a much better solution than matrix for a discord alternative.
Synapse has seemingly improved since 2020. A word of warning though: if you join large rooms from your server, Synapse will eventually grow the DB to a huge size due to a “lookup” table state_groups_state, and will require manual cleanup. See https://www.sequentialread.com/matrix-synapse-out-of-disk-space-state_groups_state/
Woah nice heads up I appreciate it!
I’ll keep the janitor tool in my pocket for now as my instance takes up negligible space at the moment but someday that might not be the case.
Here’s the referenced tool for anybody else interested:
https://git.cyberia.club/cyberia/matrix-synapse-diskspace-janitor
Conduwuit is actively developed and works pretty nice for me. Single user, but bridged to hundreds of telegram, WhatsApp and discord rooms. As well as a few matrix rooms too.
Matrix is the way. It’s federated and you can have your own server.
Matrix.
Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.
Element/matrix all the way
if you want something that looks like discord there are themes for the clients, there’s even commet.chat for a discord like experience (but they haven’t added calls yet)
Calls and easily sharing my screen are 90% of my use cases for Discord. The entire appeal of it initially was that it was a more functional Ventrilo with both text and voice channels. Hopefully something FOSS gets further developed by the time Discord completely shits the bed.
Then i’d recommend the element client in particular.
https://github.com/aaronraimist/element-themes/tree/master/Discord
^^there’s also this!
revolt developers have openly said they aren’t a free speech platform and argue constantly amongst themselves. I’d do Matrix
This would be the perfect time for someone to throw up a nice UI for a webrtc based voice chat platform in the browser. Nothing to install, no crazy permission/server setup. Just create a room and invite your friends. Boom, team based voice chat.
Jitsi-meet does that. Easy to install as well.
XMPP?
If you’re self hosting, it’s Revolt. But the default instance limits you to 20mb or something for files, which is a problem for me, personally.
Doesnt discord also have a max of like 25mb? Unless you pay for nitro?
If that, depending on the type of file sometimes its 10mb
Yea that’s what I thought, cause I’ve had small files get rejected recently now.
I believe it’s ~100mb. I don’t mind paying for more. That’s not an option on Revolt.
Wait? I thought this was FOSS? Is there no settings to allow you to change the upload size of files?
Again, if you’re self-hosting, yes; If you’re using the default instance, no.
It was 8mb then 25mb then 10mb now (for non-Nitro users)
Revolt is also an annoyance to self host and the apps don’t support self hosted instances without you rebuilding them because the server is hardcoded.
Why even give the option then lmao
That’s just it, it isn’t an option
Just use croc to share files. Then size doesn’t matter.
Yes that sounds super convenient…
Mumble?
if discord is going public they don’t need my turbo sub anymore
Cancelled mine when they redesigned the mobile app anyway. I don’t want a different interface on mobile vs desktop. I want a unified experience, which was their original purpose.
