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.
I self-host a federated Matrix server and got my family and close friends using it. They actually took to it pretty easy, and although the initial setup was a bit of a headache it’s been running smoothly for years now.
I don’t really get most of the criticisms of it. I love it.
How do you compare that to Discord? my friendgroup moved to Steam Chat, and thats… not great.
I was leaning more towards Stoat
Steam’s astonishingly less easy to configure but once it’s done it works for basic group chats when playing. It would be amazing if they hadn’t bugged screen sharing on Steam Chat, as it still works well when opened from the main Steam window.
I usually prefer chatting through Steam for anything gaming related and jumping to Matrix or even Jitsi on web for video conferencing and other matters. I’m also open to using other things such as XMPP, Delta Chat, SimpleX and so on, but Steam as a common space for PC users and Matrix for private conversations with all the useful features just hits the right balance between accesibility, reliability and privacy for me.
i really hate the lack of emotes, limited emojis, and things like posting links and photos doesn’t work for us nearly as well as discord, with the links often not loading, or the images coming in rotated.
it works, but it feels like an afterthought, which i guess it is.
Lack of emotes/emojis, broken links and rotated pictures? I have never experienced anything remotely similar on Steam or Matrix. Is it a .gif search bar or stickers what you might be missing?
On steam, not matrix.
I just don’t see any emojis or gifs via steam chat, other than their own ones you need to buy from their store.
Yeah. I’ve got more than enough of those on Steam for free, but that’s mostly because of interacting with it’s community events or playing games there. You should still be able to use regular emojis from your keyboard too (using hotkeys or copying and pasting them from elsewhere).
fair enough, i could search for them… just feels a lot more akward then most other ways, when they are integrated into the keyboard or chat. even here on Lemmy, there is an emoji button!
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
TeamSpeak 6 has been on my radar too. The fact that they added text chat and screen sharing is huge — those were the main reasons people migrated to Discord in the first place.
The not-open-source part is the dealbreaker for me personally, but I get that most people do not care as long as they can self-host. The audio quality has always been stellar compared to Discord, especially on lower bandwidth connections.
Curious if they have improved the permission system. TS3 permissions were powerful but absurdly complicated to configure.
I did not get the permissions so far
Lots of daw boolean values where I have no idea what they do
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
Spelar dota
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.
Every few years we rediscover decentralized chat and I’m here for it.
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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.
Stoat doesn’t have audio notifications. Makes it kinda doa for me
stoat has a lot of new platform jank, but remember discord was just as bad when it was new but we loved it anyway because it was better than everything else at the time. Personally I’m willing to sacrifice some convenience for the sake of privacy and security.
Agreed but audio notifications are pretty much the single most important thing I am looking for. I would actually love to use Stoat but for me it’s IRC atm.
that’s fair
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
Stupid question: why are they looking for a discord alternative, instead of a group chat/Slack alternative? What am I missing?
Because slack alternatives also have video and audio call integration (either with jitsi or something else) and are battle tested with companies.
Because Discord isn’t just for friend groups, it’s also for large open-entry servers open to the wider userbase. Slack-based/group chat alternatives completely lack this.
Not sure about slack alternatives, but Slack does have topic/general servers that people can join. SInce its mostly business/work targeted, a lot of these are tech focused (like for k8s, or pytorch)
Slack is also paywalled to a laughable level.
true
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.
Weird how they are good at digging up the past relationship between the matrix team prior donators with the mosad. but failed to mention not even once that matrix’s biggest advantage is its federated nature.
So imagine you have a selfhosted matrix server and you want to invite a friend over for a chat but this friend already has an account at his other friend’s server. in Matrix he doesn’t have to make an account on every server their interlocutor is in, he just sends his messages, like its done over email, or here on lemmy (fediverse). this is an advantage other software like fluxer of stoat don’t have. and I doubt they will able to add it anytime soon, as the work needed is probably huge and would need years of work to make a proper secure e2e federate messaging solution.
Guy literally told people the criteria he was using, one of which was searching for things like that because that’s the reason for the video in the first place, the Discord exodus due to deep state ties. He admits his knowledge is limited. Weird how hard it is for some people to see things from someone else’s point of view.
EDIT: changed to more accurately represent how Matrix operates.
The issue is that due to the way Matrix is structured, it essentially spreads copies of unencrypted metadata to every instance participating in those rooms, So it’s federated, but difficult to actually keep metadata from being spread around
even if you don’t federate with the main Matrix server, if any server you do federate with dies, it’ll get spread there. You’d have to be extremely cautious who you federate with to avoid that, or not federate at all, which defeats the purpose.As an alternative, Movim, which uses XMPP and is also federated, does not spread meta data around like that.
I’ve had matrix and element set up on my personal domain for a while, but I’ve only used them for evaluation so far. The system and network resources used are HUGE…
I’ve been setting up movim and a seperate xmpp server for a little while, and I have some initial opinions:
- xmpp (prosody) appears to be much better optimised than matrix (synapse)
- matrix and element are much easier to set up
- movim is a huge PITA to deploy yourself (especially in a container… you’re basically on your own at the moment)
- xmpp requires tcp ports and ssl certs that should be easy to set up… unless you’re on a cgnat network. Matrix can be set up through a cloudflare tunnel with https no problem, but xmpp requires some networking elbow grease.
- the mandatory certificates probably make the xmpp network safer?
- Even with the mautrix discord bridge copying the exact layout of discord channels into element, movim seems more familiar to me. I haven’t really had enough time to evaluate movim, but it seems like it’s trying to appeal to discord users, and element is clearly not. Element feels like a well funded enterprise tool that is doing its own thing.
- commet (with 2 m’s) chat is a very faithful discord clone for matrix, but it’s very barebones.
Either way, I am gonna deploy both and let my friends/discord channel users decide what works best.
I’m rooting for xmpp at the moment, but I will be happy with anything that is self hosted, encrypted and federated.
Hopefully I don’t end up having to maintain both protocols with a bridge!
I know that part of the issue is the actual protocol, but you might try alternative matrix servers such as tuwunel for potentially better performance.
Thanks for the link, I’m happy to give it a try.
I just recently migrated all of my stuff to dockerized services, so swapping out pieces should be pretty easy
Resource usage is a common complaint for Synapse hosters, you might find something like Continuwuity more lightweight
movim is a huge PITA to deploy yourself (especially in a container… you’re basically on your own at the moment)
Yeah, hopefully the dev or the community work on making it easier to deploy in a container at some point.
but it seems like it’s trying to appeal to discord users,
It is! But that focus is somewhat recent. The dev recently started a funding campaign to accelerate development, and just landed channels with rooms last week, so it’s still rough around the edges, but the pace that they’re implementing this stuff is impressive. They’re later going to work on having drop-in voice rooms as well.
Despite the challenge getting it set up, I have high hopes for movim! I like the direction they’re going now.
I did end up successfully deploying it in a compose stack (despite this issue), and I’ll probably submit a fix if they don’t get to it before I do.
If anyone is interested, I can share the details about how I got it going.
XMPP is a shitshow of its own, very fragmented architecture. different incomplete implementations. each server can chose which features (extensions) to turn on and which not) so you can’t be sure that the person you are trying to talk to on the other server can have access to the same features, like threads or voip.
I have previously read that omemo 2 implementation is insecure. my previous experience with it 4 years ago made me give up after encrypted messages were getting lost when messaging between different clients
there is no one flagship app for XMPP that works cross platefrom and has all features implemented. heck I can’t even find a windows that support voip. and their will be none. cause xmpp has lost all traction.
As for Movim, I hate using web apps. bad user experience in general. add to that I don’t remember it ever having been audited
I have previously read that omemo 2 implementation is insecure.
It’s not insecure. The origin of that myth is this blog, however the creator deleted a response left by one of the OMEMO developers, which explained that the newer versions of OMEMO were essentially open betas, and that when a final stable release is made, only then should the client developers implement a newer version.
The Blog author’s response to deleting that comment was:
“I’ll make an edit later about the protocol version thing, but I’m not interested in having questions answered. My entire horse in this race is for evangelists to f** off and leave me alone. That’s it. That’s all I want.”
Which I think shows it was done in bad faith.
You can read a longer response I left in regards to that here, if you’re interested.
there is no one flagship app for XMPP that works cross platefrom and has all features implemented.
The Movim client is installable on all platforms as a PWA, which prevents confusion. But if you use other clients, it is true that they have differing feature support.
heck I can’t even find a windows that support voip. and their will be none.
Movim is that client. It supports Group voice/video calls and screensharing w/ audio share (a recent addition, which currently requires a chromium based browser to share the audio). Sure, it’s not a native app, but neither is Discord (it’s just another Electron app).
We need a federated solution now, otherwise we’ll all just hop to another centralized platform with all the pitfalls that brings.
As for Movim, I hate using web apps. bad user experience in general.
As the video mentions, it’s worth some inconvenience for the privacy, and currently there is no other federated Discord alternative besides XMPP and Matrix (and matrix has way too many issues to even consider, IMHO).
The community adopting Movim or supporting it with donations and bug reports will help it develop and become more polished, and there are efforts to standardize a common XMPP package platform to make deployment simpler and easier. The entire landscape for Discord alternatives all have their downsides, XMPP is the only current option that could become a long-term, permanent solution.
The issue is that due to the way Matrix is structured, it essentially copies ALL of your serber’s metadata to every instance, including the main Matrix server.
This is false. Data is only copied to instances participating in the relevant rooms.
You’d have to be extremely cautious who you federate with to avoid that, or not federate at all,
Or just don’t invite users into your private rooms if they come from servers that you want to exclude.
Agh, you’re quite right. Thanks for correction. I crossed my wires and misremembered how it worked after reading this article about it a while back. Edited my previous comment to reflect that.
I suppose in theory that shouldn’t be an insurmountable problem, though in Matrix’s case it’s a big roadblock, as the main Matrix server hosted by Matrix themselves has unfortunately become the defacto main server that most people use, which means not federating with it massively reduces the ability for someone to just be able to seamlessly hop onto your server unless they too are on one of the smaller, less popular servers.
In the example given in the video, it would likely be a bit of a deal breaker if you met someone in an online game somewhere, and then invited them to your self-hosted Matrix server, only to discover they are on the main potentially israeli intelligence-tied Matrix instance, meaning you’d have to explain they need to create an account elsewhere to be able to join your instance. It would be pretty awful UX.
in Matrix’s case it’s a big roadblock, as the main Matrix server hosted by Matrix themselves has unfortunately become the defacto main server that most people use, which means not federating with it massively reduces the ability for someone to just be able to seamlessly hop onto your server unless they too are on one of the smaller, less popular servers.
Maybe. But on the other hand, Matrix is only just beginning to become known among gamers, and there are a lot of us. Seems like a good time for people to stand up a new servers and invite the gaming masses.
it would likely be a bit of a deal breaker if you met someone in an online game somewhere, and then invited them to your self-hosted Matrix server, only to discover they are on the main potentially israeli intelligence-tied Matrix instance,
I’ve seen occasional claims of that for a few years now, yet not once have I seen any credible evidence of it. Not in their own weekly reports. Not from journalists. Not in spec drafts or issue trackers or organizational structure. Nowhere. This particular legend smells more like fearmongering to me. At the most, it looks more like the distant connection that the internet has to the US military: Sure, part of its origin story might have been there, but it’s not relevant any more.
(Also, if your goal is to avoid Israeli intelligence-tied people seeing your room meta-data, you probably shouldn’t be inviting strangers to join. After all, there’s no way to know who they really are, regardless of what homeserver they use or what chat platform you’re on.)
For what it’s worth, account portability (giving people a way to switch homeservers) is on the Matrix roadmap.
Seems like a good time for people to stand up a new servers and invite the gaming masses.
Personally I don’t think it’s ready as a Discord replacement, based on the troubles displayed in the video, such as not being able to get things like video calls or screenshare working easily when self-hosting.
I’ve seen occasional claims of that for a few years now, yet not once have I seen any credible evidence of it.
I’m assuming you haven’t seen the GN video in the OP yet, but they go into that connection, which they personally feel is bad enough to not use it. The issue is that Matrix was created and funded by Amdocs, an Israeli company with possible connections to Israeli intelligence.
The matrix foundation themselves admit to being funded by Amdocs, such as here on their blog:
As unpopular as VC funding is in some circles, the Matrix community owes a huge debt of thanks to Element’s investors (Status, Notion, firstminute, Dawn, Automattic, Protocol Labs and Metaplanet) and Amdocs for funding over $50M of work on both Matrix and Element since 2017.
and here in their FAQ:
How is Matrix[.]org funded? For the first three years of Matrix’s development (2014-2017), most of the core contributors worked for Amdocs, who paid for them to work fulltime on Matrix. In July 2017, Amdocs considered the project to be sufficiently successful that it could now self-support and so stopped funding.
They also specifically attempt to offer their chat services to law enforcement, such as the time they bought a booth at a law enforcement convention, which caused this controversy.
The error shown in the video is the one that means that they just… didn’t set up video calling? It requires more setup than just the text chat for technical reasons that no service can escape.
I don’t have a problem with the org offering services to law enforcement, governments, businesses, etc. Funding like this is how they are able to pay the bills without turning to venture capital or user exploitation.
I did see the GN video. They explicitly stated that they didn’t find a hard link. And, as you pointed out, Amdocs stopped funding almost a decade ago.
You seem to have made up your mind, though. I won’t try to change it.
Amdocs stopped funding it, but Martix and the company developing Element are both still made up of ex-Amdocs people. If they are connected to Israeli intelligence, it’s not as though they suddenly aren’t potential agents just because they stopped being officially funded by Amdocs.
What Metadata is shared if I may ask? Content should be encrypted and therefore private. This might not be perfect but should already be a step up from discord right?
AFAIK; the time sent, size, sender and recipients of messages, and reactions/emojis are shared across all participating servers unencrypted, even on encrypted messages.
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I understand the concern, and I find it fishy that the matrix team didn’t try to address that (maybe they did but I just didn’t come across that)
but on the other hand many governments and ministries like the French MOD have deployed matrix locally for their private use. not sure they want to use a software that the mossad can directly tap into
French MOD have deployed matrix locally for their private usage. not sure they want to use a software that the mossad can directly tap into
I wouldn’t put any stock into that as a metric of if it’s safe or not, since Spain and Germany were happy to [buy a contract for Pegasus, another Israeli surveillance software adopted widely by EU governments. The Netherlands is another suspected user.
EU governments were also happy to adopt Microsoft products despite the security implications, and even way back in the 80’s used Promis, which had a known US/Israeli backdoor in it (there’s a really great documentary about Promis on netflix, surprisingly, though I’d recommend sailing to watch it, yarr).
So should some of Lemmy’s, and yet here we are.
There is no known state or corporate connection to Lemmy or Piefed, unlike Matrix.
Yep, and yet almost anyone who has spent any time on Lemmy knows what I’m referring to (whether they recognize it and do so as a problem is another matter)
I have no idea what you are referring too, but I only look at my subscribed communities, so I have no idea what’s going on in the “Lemmy meta.” Being able to only see the communities I subscribe too is one of my three primary reasons for coming here.
The developer’s politics vs suspecting a platform may be developed and compromised by state actors are on an entirely different level.
It goes beyond politics into flagrantly lying about moderation actions to push narratives.
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Tbf, there were no alternatives at the time when most people moved here. Now there is one with Piefed, I really should move my server.
I maybe too tired to read this thread with all the people implying things and not saying anything straight… I’m very confused, can you maybe let me in on the big secret? Who did what? Lemmy creator/admin? I have no idea what is everyone talking about lol
It seems like an option, but gonna say, having seen some of their biggest contributors try to push people into switching communities over to those moderated by community hoarders also heavily into anarcho-marxism politics - not really getting rid of the problem, are we.
As someone who identifies as an Anarcho-Syndaclist, I’d kindly ask you not to lump Anarchists in with the Marxist-Leninists. Historically, Anarchists usually get fucked over by MLs just as frequently, if not more so, as by capitalists.
Every Anarchist I’ve had interactions with here has been either pretty vocal about opposition to the political and moral leanings of the people you’re referring to, or think anarchist sounds better than Marxist-Leninist, but actually hold to the ideals of the latter not the former.👍Cheers
Afaik, Matrix is also a protocol on which you can build your own thing. To me that was always the biggest draw. The current “Matrix chat” is a reference implementation of that.
A group of developers can take the Matrix protocol and make their own chat app and an organization can be built around it to do operational work and support (hosting). Discord 2 can just be Matrix underneath, not Matrix in name.Matrix is a joke of a protocol. The idea is play but there was clearly no theoretical work before implementation, so they’re running after obvious security holes now.
A lot of those things list, especially around deletion, seem like issues with federation in general. I’d love if they suggested an alternative, because quite a few of these are just general issues with encryption/privacy in any system.
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
