drislands@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn’t rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.
Only option available is Matrix. It has its problems, but they’re being worked on.
Right now it lacks the gaming/voice chat parts of discord - so for an OSS alternative for that part of discord specifically, there’s Mumble.
For everything else, Matrix is a good alternative. Just be sure to pick a discord-like client. (E.g. Commet or Cinny)
I use Jitsi for my voip / screen share
Works great if you don’t want/need PTT.
Seems like you have to keep something running for it to work. Some obscure service relied on it as a support channel and last thing I remember is that matrix server stopped working. Though it would help so much if it would be p2p.
“something running” - do you mean the server binary? Because, yes, if you’re using your own server you do need it to be running. Same for the client, I guess? I guess I don’t really understand what you meant by that.
Some obscure service relied on it as a support channel and last thing I remember is that matrix server stopped working.
That’s an issue with any federated service, yeah. If the server is down, it’s down. But as a bonus, unlike Discord, when a server is down you can just move to another. So, honestly, I see that as a boon.
As far as p2p goes, there was an effort to make that a while back, but it looks like people lost interest.
Though, personally I think federation is good enough. That’s why I’m on Lemmy/the Fediverse, after all.
I only mean that the requirements are high enough for someone to stop using it at some point, losing users of that server in the process. It might be different if it didn’t require running a server. Or they could choose to host their rooms on some existing server, I guess.
Damn, I’ve been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn’t do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it’s just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don’t want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I’ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord’s bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.
i self host matrix and some other docker runs the voice for it, so it is there if you got a server. which i mean, not everybody does so that sucks. it was a bit of a pain but im not the best at server stuff
Yeah, my primary concern is I’m part of a community of ~350 people who games together, and while there’s probably some folks in there who could swing a server, right now discord isn’t costing us anything and does everything we want (chat, voice, streaming, etc). If we were to consider moving we would probably need a reasonably beefy server and some software with all of those features, and right now that just doesn’t seem feasible.
Technically speaking, Element does have “voice and video rooms” available as an experimental feature, but until it’s out of prime time it totally makes sense to wait.
Gotta remember that Element/New Vector (the company spearheading Matrix’s development) is getting funded mostly by orgs who are looking for a replacement for internal comms like Slack or WhatsApp.
It does voice via Jitsi matrix.org/…/running-your-own-secure-communicatio…
This is outdated and no longer preferred, it now has its own internal system called Element Call (aka an implementation of MatrixRTC).
That’s what we’ve started using my friends and I, can’t complain, sure it doesn’t integrate all the gaming shit but just have it running in the background so we can talk anyway
Yeah, I’ve done the same and it works quite well.
The only thing I was really missing from Discord was Ai noise cancellation like Krisp - and I got that by installing Easy Effects
solrize@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
I’ve never used Discord – is it similar to Mumble? I tried Jami but found it too unreliable to recommend.
drislands@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It serves the key purpose of Mumble, in that it provides a reliable way to get in a voice chat with people. The other features (text chat, video calls, screen sharing, “servers” that let people aggregate for a dedicated purpose/community) come together to make a legitimately good product that’s hard to replace.