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?
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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 includes all the features in one app 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 servers is the main performance killer, and “failed to decrypt message” will all disappear if you disable encryption.
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!
Stoat is the epitome of grief lol
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
I ran mumble for years, insanely easy setup.
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!
Don’t forget about teamspeak!
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
VDO Ninja is really nice. My friend self hosts it, and it didn’t seem that hard.
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.
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.
Since no one has mentioned it yet -
If you haven’t tried setting Synapse up with the ansible playbook 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 playbook has a section for it as well if you’re willing to try.
Edit: cookbook - > playbook
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.
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.
