Some time ago when Discord used Surveillance Services to face scan all their users a lot of possible alternatives where thrown around.
- It should be already hosted by someone
- have voice chat
- Be easy to sign up to so that i can convince people
The steam voice chat feature really improved and is very intuitive to use now. I’ll frequently use that.
We’ve been using steam for many years for our weekly gaming sessions. Can’t remember why we stopped using discord but it was way before all the photo ID requests. I definitely don’t miss discord downloading like 20 updates every week.
Look at Mumble. It’s FOSS (Free Open Source Software)
Mumble lacks a ton of stuff that Discord has. There’s no persistent text chat, no screen sharing, no video. What it does have is really really easy administration.
It frustrates me that all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at scale. Discord has been in the “be really cool to attract users” phase, and now it’s morphing into the “Oh crap we actually have bills to pay” phase. That’s why you’re seeing ads now, and it’s only going to get worse.
I don’t want a billion concurrent users. I want a place for my small group of friends to hang out that isn’t hard to deploy or manage.
Mumble lacks a ton of stuff
You’re there to voice chat while gaming. It’s not a support forum and it’s not a wiki.
Why ‘systemd’ something simple?
You’re there to voice chat while gaming.
And while doing so, one might want to do one of the things they listed… being able to quickly share screens is a huge part of discord for my group, we’re always showing each other new games we’re playing or helping each other out on games we’re playing together
Yeah, and who ever sends text to people they want to game with?!?
Fair point. My game client has a text chat for the game in question, but the voice chat isn’t working under lutris because another group coded it and they cheated with the APIs.
So we can and do use text chat from the game itself and the voice chat is the only broken bit.
I’ve tried Fluxer but it’s been a bit fiddly for me on Linux. It’s okay, voice chat works, but there are bugs for me with video chatting or screen-sharing. If it starts getting fixed, I’ll stick with it, otherwise I’m gonna keep looking.
Discord is still king. People are way too invested.
Matrix is decent for me. Voice, video, and screen share, works well. Have not had issues with small friend groups
Matrix + Jitsi
We have element call now and its so much better
So screensharing works without issues? Is it customizable on the backend?
And how is it better, if I may ask?
Screensharing does indeed work but only tab audio works atm. The audio quality imo is better in element call there is noise suppression i explained it a bit more in another comment on this post here
Thank you!
Stoat and Fluxer so far
I use a self-hosted TeamSpeak6 server with my friends. My friends use Discord without me afaik. I can’t make people share my principles, but they’re slowly coming around to how bad companies can be with their encroaching data hoarding.
TeamSpeak or an old fashioned LAN Party
Mumble + phpBB
Back in the day we used Ventrilo for voice chat.
Stoat seems like a nice, newer alternative to Discord.
web.fluxer.app is your best choice.
When i play with my brother we use our phones to, get this, call each other. Obviously harder to do with more people but if its just you and a buddy your phone can be used as a phone.
isn’t that expensive?
I’ve done this before and it works in a pinch.
This is what I did years ago. No cell phone, land line. DSL still required a phone line at the time but long distance was included free. Would play Diablo 2 with someone I knew who was about 800 miles away.
Teamspeak 3, we like sticking to the older version and its nice to have not things change or look super polished and web-page like. Also Mumble, but thats only for groups that require it.
The dust hasn’t settled yet. Still waiting for options like Fluxer or Stoat to cover the basic use cases fully.
Element works fine for me
I’m very tired so I thought you were saying discord was gone and what would I do then and I was like “well. Me and twin game from adjacent rooms so we’d open the doors and yell but husband would be annoyed” and now I understand you mean new program.
I’d probably go back to ventrillo since I know it existed.
