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Discord Alternatives, Ranked

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Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#11

Post by stryan »

warmedcookie wrote: post #8
jszymborski wrote: post #6

This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat. I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s

It would be nice if Valve filled in the gaps here. They already got a lot of community features built into Steam.

Steam Group Chats are sort of there; no video chat but text chats and drop-in voice chats like Discord. On the other hand they're basically ephemeral, with messages disappearing from history at some given point.

I also can't figure out a way to access them outside of the Steam client and in DOTA where I believe they're tied to the in-game guild system.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#12

Post by cookiengineer »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #5

I'm sad to see XMPP missing from this list. I wonder if the author was simply unaware of it or simply ignored it. IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is stil…

The problem with XMPP is that it's a suite of RFCs.

It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely.

XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people.

(I am still a proponent of XMPP, but the working groups need to get their shit together to unify protocol support across clients)

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#13

Post by stryan »

jszymborski wrote: post #6

This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat. I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s

Matrix/Element has video rooms as a Lab function and for a while it had voice rooms too. Not sure what happened to them, but either way with MatrixRTC coming out the technical underpinnings are all there, clients just need to put it all together.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#14

Post by busterarm »

mgrandl wrote: post #10
jszymborski wrote: post #6

This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat. I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s

Yeah it’s so odd that none of the open-source alternatives have this feature. No video calls are not an option. We need video/voice rooms!

Aside from Discord, nobody has gotten this right since Yahoo! Live and Tinychat. Both are dead.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#15

Post by cbdumas »

I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble.

I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#16

Post by aaravchen »

Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use. Presumably you're already using Signal and getting mainstream contacts to start using it too. You probably have a basic profile that at least includes your real name, and might also have your picture. Maybe you're even one of the 7 people in the world that use the Stories feature in it. Well good news, now all of that is also unconditionally available to anyone in any group you ever join, including any future changes you ever make to that info, unrevocably forever into the future.

Signal has a fun dark pattern where it unrevocably grants permissions for anyone you allow to contact you to see everything in your profile for the rest of time. It has only a single trust level with contacts effectively: full trust. This is unacceptable in any tool you use for online community, unless you exclusively use it for online community and can decline to provide any info in this full-trust level. Unfortunately Signal also makes very sure you can't have a second account, by tying your account to a phone number, and only allowing one Signal instance per mobile device.

Is Signal good? Yes, but only exclusively for communication with people you already trust.

EDIT: typos

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#17

Post by ziml77 »

mgrandl wrote: post #10
jszymborski wrote: post #6

This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat. I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s

Yeah it’s so odd that none of the open-source alternatives have this feature. No video calls are not an option. We need video/voice rooms!

If an option doesn't have that then it's not a Discord alternative for me or many of my friends.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#18

Post by aaravchen »

cookiengineer wrote: post #12
MarsIronPI wrote: post #5

I'm sad to see XMPP missing from this list. I wonder if the author was simply unaware of it or simply ignored it. IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is stil…

The problem with XMPP is that it's a suite of RFCs. It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely. XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people. (I am still a proponent of XMP…

This has been brought up on HN before, and people smarter than me identified that this view is about 10 years out of date. Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently that include all of the things any other similar tools do. It sounds like only very niche old/minimal XMPP clients don't support encryption by default for example, and virtually all servers have supported it for many years.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#19

Post by aaravchen »

stryan wrote: post #13
jszymborski wrote: post #6

This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat. I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s

Matrix/Element has video rooms as a Lab function and for a while it had voice rooms too. Not sure what happened to them, but either way with MatrixRTC coming out the technical underpinnings are all there, clients just need to put it all together.

Someone mentioned (I believe?) after talking to Element/Matrix at FOSSDEM this year that the organization has been struggling a lot to get this going. Apparently issues with thier project organization forking and funding the last few years has made one of thier primary contributors, who already had fully functional and working video/voice, all but give up on the project because the upstream forming means it's now forked from a commercial/defunct version of the original code(?)

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#20

Post by apitman »

Matrix is the only one that offers the killer feature of Discord, which is being able to join many communities from a single login.

Sadly Matrix has never had a good UX for me. IMO they spent too many complexity tokens on e2ee and there are simply not enough left.

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