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Discord Alternatives, Ranked

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Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#291

Post by saintfire »

Moomoomoo309 wrote: post #262

I'm quite surprised to not see teamspeak 6 on here. From what I've seen, it has all the features discord has now, including screen sharing, video calls, channels like discord, and it's also designed for gamers. It's been mentioned in some replies, but not any top-level comments yet. Is TS6 missing some discord features? (maybe calendar events, and their bot ecosystem is a lot smaller)

Its in beta and you can't get more than a 32 slot server.

Anecdotally it felt a little uncooked.

https://github.com/teamspeak/teamspeak6-server?tab=readme-ov...

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#293

Post by jagermo »

opan wrote: post #272
jagermo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No voice chat.

IRC + Mumble is a good combo in my experience. I only fire up Mumble as-needed since I tend to prefer text chat.

i agree, but you need your people to have 2 logins. Great for friend groups, not working in scale.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#294

Post by jjice »

hiccup_socks wrote: post #287
TechSquidTV wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They dont just not care that it's centralized, that's the only option they would ever entertain. A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization.

> A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization. no, people hate friction. it just so happens that most/all decentralized things have more friction than centralized ones. 99% of people do not give 1 shit in either direction of centralized vs. decentralized. they just want an app that is easy and "just works".

True, but I haven't found any good decentralized options for almost anything that don't have enough friction to scare the average user away. I'm talking about decentralized options that are actually decentralized, not "potentially decentralized in theory but no one uses them in a decentralized way".

I do see a future where we crack the code to a smooth flow that does allow for decentralized networks, but it does suck for most people currently.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#295

Post by pixl97 »

opan wrote: post #250
popcar2 wrote: post #222

I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives. Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-wai…

This may be a good time to consider whether one program should really be handling all those things, or if it's putting too many eggs in one basket and asking too much of any one program. Discord seems comparable to a Chinese superapp, made to trap its users and become an irreplaceable part of their everyday lives. I think I understand it's hard to give up some of these features once you're used to them, but it seems…

The particular problem with most of humanity is we value convenience over just about everything else.

Superapps are just going to just keep winning because of this.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#296

Post by MarsIronPI »

opan wrote: post #254
ethin wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP's biggest failure is that there is no client which is on advanced on most of it's compliance suites. So if someone uses Windows for example, they're pretty much locked to "Well, you can chat, but no video/voice calls for you". I really hope this changes because XMPP does look interesting.

Gajim works on Windows and is the best non-mobile client.

But Gajim doesn't support the defacto standard calls extension. And now even the support for the older extension has been removed. Dino is a better experience, for the limited feature set that it supports (which does include calls and group calls).

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#297

Post by MarsIronPI »

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 is what I mean by "it needs a good client". It needs a single implementation that works consistently across platforms and has the features and UX people care about. The groundwork is there, and is better than Matrix. It's a matter of writing software to implement the useful subset of the specs.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#299

Post by MarsIronPI »

worble wrote: post #37
aaravchen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a recommended or "blessed" server and client combo for someone who just wants to migrate their friends off discord? The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.

If you stick with mobile use, there is Snikket[0], which provides a branded server+mobile app ecosystem that should "just work". YMMV; I haven't tried it myself.

[0]: https://snikket.org

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#300

Post by MarsIronPI »

edhelas wrote: post #146
cookiengineer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ironic part is that those software description files are meaningless. AstraChat claims Advanced in all categories, but it's a proprietary commercial software, so nobody ran any kind of test suite to verify this. That software list, how it's done and how it's ranked is literally confirming my initial point of critique :D Last time I tried out several chat clients, most of them were alpha software, had lots of bugs…

> I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats. This is exactly what the Compliance Suits are for, and the XMPP Software Fundation is taking car…

There is the XMPP Compliance Tester[0] by the author of Conversations. It does a good job at testing servers. On the client side I'm not aware of any kind of benchmark.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/iNPUTmice/caas

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