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.
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.
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.
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.
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
TeamSpeak tested
Great now I feel old
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.
Yeah, but what about “Balls of Steel” Ventrilo?
I’ve got …
“Balls of steel? What is that?”
deleted by creator
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
