ICQ was perfect in 1996.

Im about to try to self host stoat. I'm really feeling like spinning up 3 or 4 of the new services and trying each to see which one or mixture works best. If anyone else is doing this we should start a megathread

From my quick testing I did the other day, the conclusion I came to was:

• Fluxer looks like the easiest drop-in replacement for my group. I agree I am also a little hesitant about its longevity & funding.
• Matrix UX leaves some to be desired, but it's functional and I like the E2EE.
• We don't have anyone good enough at selfhosting in my group to even attempt Spacebar.
• Stoat just doesn't seem viable. Lack of screenshare is a big issue for my group.

Surprisingly, the new TeamSpeak 6 looks pretty okay to me, but the UX is pretty different so might have a little bit of a learning curve for some people in my group. It costs money for a server but honestly my group is fine with that. We used to pay for a Mumble server back in the day but it doesn't have robust text channels so we don't want to move back to that.

Fluxer wants to have a 'monetization' to give payouts to 'creators.' Hard pass.

My wife and I have been using Stoat and it's been mostly fine, but they're already implementing age verification.

Stoat being based in UK makes me nervous as their laws are ridiculous. Devs claim that they are going to try to only apply draconian things when necessary but I have my doubts.

Read the privacy policies too. I can't remember which one I was reading yesterday but it read like they were going to monitor every word I said... All the while saying they are privacy advocates and based in Europe

This was probably one of the first times I can remember when our chat programs were under one primary program. Before Discord there was market segmentation abound and I think it made the system better for there were alternate means of contact. Discord becoming monolithic like it it did was a real issue and let's be honest, we need to have alternatives. I foresee Discord still being used for a bit by most of my groups, but they are certainly considering alternatives.

Genuinely curious: Stoat's Community Guidelines list the legal jurisdiction for their Service Operator as the United Kingdom (sorry for the awkward sentence structure) I know that any online platform that provides "risky" content to the UK has to perform age checks, but I'm curious if the privacy impact increases when the service is hosted in the UK? Eg, would they be required to conduct age checks for all users, rather than just UK users?

I wasn't really sure if the US chatroom app infamous for harboring pedophiles and saving hyperlinks of users' deleted photos in rooms' modlog was evil but now that the logo is red and has scary eyes I'm seriously considering it

I’ve gone through like 5 different services trying to set one up. Am I dumb or does no one know how to make a straightforward docker compose? I thought the whole point of Compose was to copy-paste a config, change a few variables and hit go. Several of these assume you know so much about how to setup these services and then just leave you to your devices.

I want like 5 or 6 variables in an .env file. No reason I should have to spin up my own database and link it when you should be containerizing the entire thing in the first place. The only services so far that I’ve had any success setting up are Mattermost (which doesn’t offer group calls) and VoceChat (which I can’t get the voice to work in).

All the others either don’t offer voice at all or I can’t get past the setup.

I have offered to do a lot of education and technical effort surrounding this, e.g. helping groups migrate in some of the circles I'm involved with and all it's really gotten me is abuse and condescension, bafflingly. No one cares and if they do it's mostly superficial and they want the easiest way out—someone/something do everything for me, and I mean everything. I don't want to click more than two buttons and even that is pushing it, buster. Sometimes there aren't easy solutions, though, and I think this is one of those times. Big Tech is massive and in the world we live in now we cannot have all of the things it promises without immense tradeoff, and for the most part it just isn't worth it. The modern web being almost completely centralized around Discord is really harmful, like what happened with Facebook years ago. What used to be simple, publicly accessible websites for all these groups, locations and interests with email, forums and chat rooms for asynchronous as well as real-time communication is now entirely on Discord or Facebook. It's disastrous. Neither of those things are easily accessible or friendly to archival...why do I need to be in a Discord chat room or Facebook group for community events around my public library? It's absurd. I hate all of this so much, and basically no one around me agrees with me so we'll just circle the drain forever while the "pet cameras" start calling DHS on our neighbors.

I'm just going back to xmpp, maybe mumble for voice calls. They're both friendly and simple and xmpp supports modern features just fine. I can host it for myself and my friends who care; I don't have much hope for the masses anymore. I don't really like how bloated Matrix/Synapse is, and everything else is riding coattails we don't need to ride. I don't care about video games or streaming to people in a chat room or anything like that, and if I did I'm sure something like Jitsi handles that well enough. Oh no, a second program!! We are all so dependent on tech in our lives but it seems like so many want nothing to do with being informed about it on any level...I just don't get it.

discord was a one-stop shop for multiple very different things.

Retvrn to gamer clans coordinating in forums, talking in mumble, chatting in IRC &c.

one program for one purpose and a community webpage tying it all together

Any opinions on team speak 3?

The big problem is, every good privacy-respecting solution costs money and comes with the inconvenience of setting up a new account. Having lived 90s Internet I don't mind that at all, I actually kind of prefer it, but I can understand how younger folks can be discouraged.

my solution is Zulip/XMPP/IRC/Jitsi, none of them can replace every functions of discord but they partially can and it seems like they'll work for my use case.

what about mumble?

Managed to get a matrix server up + a web client frontend hosted on same site for friend group .

3 container docker compose: continuwuity, tunnel, premade Cinny image with nginx serving frontend.

Great if you don't care about voice, but if you do then you'll need to host a TURN server on a VPS and connect home server to that.

I'm not looking for perfect. I just want a similar layout with custom emoji and decent permission control.

The closest I've seen is space bar, stout or matrix. But matrix is a beast to get people on, and stout + space bar are both really premature atm client wise.

some of my group moved to steam groups but it's so clunky and missing many features

For all the alternatives out there truth is, none are really anywhere near perfect. Matrix and most of its clients while encrypted don’t offer true jump in /jump out game chat.

After complaining about it heavily for a few days, I did find one client that has that same feel, commet.chat. I haven't done a whole lot of testing yet, but from what I've seen/experienced, it's close, if not there

Personally I still prefer XMPP+Cheogram. It's more Signal than Discord, but it's a lightweight chat server with voice call abilities, and that's what I needed it for

i got a team speak 6 server running for my friend group. there are things i wish were better, but ultimately it’s really not that big of a deal. mainly it’s the separating the text chat from the voip servers, and the text chat not being hosted on my machine. but then again others would rather it was on a companies servers any way

but now it’s just the work of pushing my friends to not stick around due to momentum and the whole “but discord retracted their decision! i don’t want to!”