Submitted 2 days ago by early_riser@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
All this talk about Discord replacements plus my own experience attempting to host a Synapse has got me wondering why it seems so hard to implement voice chat.
Stupid idea: back in 2022 I got an Asterisk server working on a raspberry pi over AREDN without too much trouble. What’s stopping people from just using a PBX like that for voice chat?
Try mumble if you just need voice. Just fire up a docker container and open a tcp and a udp port. The settings are under-documented so things like auth are tough to set up.
I second mumble, it’s a 5 min job to fire it up and default servers settings are enough to get going out of the box.
Tried mumble, worked easy and well, but i realised im not able to do without persistent chat and screen share any more. Now trying to get Matrix to work.
I’ll 3rd mumble. Been hosting for over a decade.
No tracking, no ads, no bloat… This does it’s one thing and does it very well.
This has big XKCD Energy. It almost feels like an exact recreation of the comic but with tech:
I meant the OP more as a lament about it being hard rather than a quip about it being easy.
Though upon reflection it’s not the voice chat that’s a problem, it’s the fact that Discord is a lot of things, a chatroom, a VOIP service, and so on, and recreating all those things on top bolting on federation (which I don’t see as a desirable feature in this case) is what makes it so hard.
It’s easy. Mumble. Or the thing you used probably still works.
But you see, people never actually seek a discord alternative. They want a discord alternative that is also federated, AND end to end encrypted, and each one makes things vastly more technically challenging and resource intensive and then you want them together.
A little secret: Matrix is much, much easier to host if you disable encryption and federation. Federation to many rooms is the main performance killer, and “failed to decrypt message” will all disappear if you disable encryption.
I ran mumble for years, insanely easy setup.
I found out the other day that I had a mumble server still running that I had been tinkering with a year or so ago and just forgot about. Hadn’t noticed it was still running this whole time because it’s so low in resource usage
Use mumble
Update: I got Mumble working without a lot of grief. Their mobile client isn’t great though. I might try Stoat.
Federation just complicates things, as it’s just for a myself and a few friends.
I remember using mumble in a time when smartphones weren’t even a thing yet. Love to see the open source tool outlive everything else!
f-droid.org/packages/se.lublin.mumla is not so bad as a mobile client for Mumble.
I’m sure it is but I have an iphone
Look at fluxer it’s stoat developed by someone who isn’t retarded. Has done more in a fraction of the time and actually has functional features
Stoat is the epitome of grief lol
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| TCP | Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP |
| UDP | User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications |
[Thread #88 for this comm, first seen 13th Feb 2026, 05:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Good bot
If you go with anything using livekit (stoat/revolt , lasuite meet), voice is not very hard per se (just a bunch of udp ports required).
It’s video that will get your CPU to its knees
I just can’t get over the name change from Revolt to Stoat, but at least a stoat is cute AF.
Cease and desisted, but yeah it’s sad (and annoying code-wise because you have to rename everything)
It’s not! Use SonoBus; it’s dead simple, and superior to Discord. It’s far lower latency, with customizable filters, peer-to-peer; and totally free.
Now if you want emojis and video and rambling channels and stuff, you will have to go elsewhere.
Sonobus
What a clever name!
I have a Jitsi server hosted through a docker container that was pretty easy, and ties into Rocket Chat. Jitsi does voice and video, Rocket Chat does chat.
So as mentioned we have both Mumble and Team Speak if you are looking for a self hosted VC.
Don’t forget about teamspeak!
Not a good discord replacement but setting up nextcloud talk (simple p2p voice chat) and then the high performance backend (better supports video/voice calls between 3+ people) was relatively easy. We use it among my family now to have group calls instead of relying on facebook messenger.
It’s not, but the people who are asking are often not tech-savvy, and any amount of self-hosting will be hard for them
Nothing is stopping it, it’s just not particularly convenient because it’s designed around the limitations of the phone system.
SIP could handle it all if you wanted though.
VDO Ninja is really nice. My friend self hosts it, and it didn’t seam that hard.
Since no one has mentioned it yet -
If you haven’t tried setting Synapse up with the ansible cookbook you should. It’s almost push-button and has 1:1 voice calls by default. Setting up group voice from there is a bit challenging, but the cookbook has a section for it as well if you’re willing to try.
I haven’t messed with Ansible in a bit. Do you mean playbook? Or is cookbook some other concept I haven’t learned about yet?
Nope, youre right, playbook is the right term. Got it mixed up with chef.
frongt@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Simple 1:1 audio stream is easy.
Groups, screen sharing, noise canceling, NAT traversal, mobile apps, and all those extra features people have come to expect are hard.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Exactly!
people act entitled as if all that you mention was trivial and that somehow FOSS devs “owe” people, but we only see those big corpos make it happen because… well, they’re big corpos, burning VC money on makint it happen and making it happen in a controlled jail.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 1 day ago
I have honestly not seen anyone acting like they are “owed” these things by FOSS developers. We just want them.
matsdis@piefed.social 1 day ago
As for “why is it hard to self-host”, it is only NAT traversal.
TURN, STUN, ICE, etc. are not fun to debug. Not sure if anyone still bothers fiddling with TOS/DSCP on their router. You could build a server that just exposes a TCP port and call it a day, but this gets you latency. Corporate firewalls lovhttps://piefed.social/c/selfhosted/p/1772277/why-is-self-hosted-voice-chat-so-hard#e to randomly block some UDP port ranges but not others.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Mumble will do all of that except screen sharing. Only the server has to deal with NAT.
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Groups: just simple Chanels are fine, password lock them if you want.
Screen sharing: one at a time should be fine. Self hoster can configure max bit rates.
Mobile apps: building your app to be multiplatform is a lot easier than it was a decade ago.
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
The one point that has basically been solved is NAT traversal. Thanks to Wire guard, Tailscale and the like. The relevant parts are open source and can be used basically as a library.
early_riser@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Or we could finally rip off the bandaid and move to IPv6