Some time ago when Discord used Surveillance Services to face scan all their users a lot of possible alternatives where thrown around.
- It should be already hosted by someone
- have voice chat
- Be easy to sign up to so that i can convince people
I went back to using in-game communication and social features and I can’t believe we stopped doing it. It is so much more immersive to hang out in, say, a guild hall to chat with whoever happens to be online, than to be available 24/7 in an outside app.
I don’t do online multiplayer anytime. If I’m playing a video game with someone, they’re in the room with me.
The dust hasn’t settled yet. Still waiting for options like Fluxer or Stoat to cover the basic use cases fully.
We are using Fluxer, looks a lot like Discord, but is open source. It’s hosted, but you can also self-host.
Mumble + phpBB
Ventrilo. Hobbles away on my cane.
The steam voice chat feature really improved and is very intuitive to use now. I’ll frequently use that.
We’ve been using steam for many years for our weekly gaming sessions. Can’t remember why we stopped using discord but it was way before all the photo ID requests. I definitely don’t miss discord downloading like 20 updates every week.
Look at Mumble. It’s FOSS (Free Open Source Software)
Mumble lacks a ton of stuff that Discord has. There’s no persistent text chat, no screen sharing, no video. What it does have is really really easy administration.
It frustrates me that all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at scale. Discord has been in the “be really cool to attract users” phase, and now it’s morphing into the “Oh crap we actually have bills to pay” phase. That’s why you’re seeing ads now, and it’s only going to get worse.
I don’t want a billion concurrent users. I want a place for my small group of friends to hang out that isn’t hard to deploy or manage.
Mumble lacks a ton of stuff
You’re there to voice chat while gaming. It’s not a support forum and it’s not a wiki.
Why ‘systemd’ something simple?
You’re there to voice chat while gaming.
And while doing so, one might want to do one of the things they listed… being able to quickly share screens is a huge part of discord for my group, we’re always showing each other new games we’re playing or helping each other out on games we’re playing together
Yeah, and who ever sends text to people they want to game with?!?
Fair point. My game client has a text chat for the game in question, but the voice chat isn’t working under lutris because another group coded it and they cheated with the APIs.
So we can and do use text chat from the game itself and the voice chat is the only broken bit.
Signal, but I don’t play with randos, just people I know.
I’ve tried Fluxer but it’s been a bit fiddly for me on Linux. It’s okay, voice chat works, but there are bugs for me with video chatting or screen-sharing. If it starts getting fixed, I’ll stick with it, otherwise I’m gonna keep looking.
Element, or whatever Matrix client of choice if you prefer a different one.
Fluxer appears to be the most promising, though it is still very new and they are working furiously to get it up to par with a tiny dev team that consists of two (three?) people. Most basic features are quite usable now, though.
We use matrix
Telepathy
Stoat and Fluxer so far
Stoat desktop feels like it was just put in the oven, especially on Linux. It may get there someday, but I cannot recommend Stoat in good faith.
