Comment on How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord?
recklessengagement@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.
I’m becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be “one of the good ones”.
I really hope we find and establish a “low executive cost” solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
Matrix+elements is very easy to selfhost in any homelab. works well enough for goverments. Federated and easy end to end encryption. And one can easily set up a web archive bridge forvarchiveable rooms.
That beeing said i still think IRC is the best for pure text chat.
But neither have seamless voice chat/screen sharing, which is a staple of Discord that users are very used to.
What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.
Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).
What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.
it’s convenient, also it’d be nice if it had the feature capability.
Mumble is great, but if there was something like mumble, that implemented video sharing, that would be miles better, though a lot of people would probably still use mumble, as it’s fine.
From what i’ve dug into, basically every video sharing capable setup is based on web technology, and i simply refuse to go near web technology unless i WANT to use a web browser. It’s just, worse, in so many ways.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
this is unironically such a big problem, there are great voice chatting solutions, mumble, and the handful of other ones that exist out there.
There are basically 0 good usable video conferencing/sharing softwares out there. The same goes for desktop streaming. If we just focused like, a little bit more of our energy on these two things, i think the world would unironically get better. It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?
The ones that do exist are likely to be web based, and thus, webRTC, the dreaded behemoth of both web support and also, generally poor implementation. I just want mumble but with support for video streaming, how hard is it >:(
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
It’s not about the hardware. (Not like it’s that ubiquitous anyway; I’m daily driving a machine from 2017)
I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.
And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.
The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.
In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time. For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.
In the end, something like a simple jabber-like chatroom is far easier and more productive to work on, even before we get to the coding part.
Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
this definitely makes sense in the OSS community, but i feel like someone should’ve already done it as a semi pet project already. I know i would’ve done it.
that’s an interesting take, but personally i think the web should stick to pretty much static web pages, the browser is turning into a secondary operating system, which is being run on an operating system, which is just, stupid.
Personally i don’t think any of this stuff should be done over the web, period.
yeah, my main complaint though is that we do have things like jabber, this is already incredibly accessible, there is almost no need for expanding the current landscape because it’s been around for like 30 years now.
no but that’s not the immediate use case either, something like mumble is really nice if you’re playing games with other people and just want to VOIP so you don’t have to use a text chat, you can talk and play video games at the same time pretty easily. It’s also nice if you just want to casually hang around other people without having to be physically near them, or at a keyboard typing on it constantly.
i mean, you don’t need a camera, maybe in a professional setting, but in a casual setting, screensharing something to show someone else for example, you don’t even need a camera.
this is fair, and tbh i don’t even really want a discord clone, you could very easily just adapt one of the many existing text chat protocols IRC being the most obvious, and VOIP is basically a solved problem, that’s not hard either. Mumble has a pretty good low latency implementation of it, but you don’t always need low latency. Video sharing/video conferencing is harder, but we have things like youtube and netflix, so the actual video streaming part isn’t the hard thing. We have entire video manipulation libraries like FFMPEG as well, which will do everything you need it to do.
Mumble i think is the perfect example of a “minimalist” application, it does VOIP and it does it really well. I pretty much just want mumble but for video sharing and i’d be happy.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
Pet project, yes; production-ready, that’s a whole 'nother story.
Ultimately some things are too complex to deliver out on tem “just because”. Such as web browsers, hence ATM there only exist about 2.