Pretty much what it says on the tin, but for more context. My friends and I use Discord to play D&D and other TTRPGs. We also use it to send memes and just have conversations. We mostly do the chat, text, images, gifs, etc. But we also use the voice and video chat pretty regularly too. Screen share sometimes as well. So I’d like to try to find something that has all those features if possible.
The new ID or facial recognition requirement they are implementing is a deal breaker for a few of us, and so if I can set up some kind of alternative to make it a non-issue, I’d like to.
I’m running Ubunutu 22.04 LETS, AMD 3700X, 64GBRAM, 10x 6TB HDD, and and 2 4TB NVmE. Have a 2gb up/down internet connection. So I don’t think we should have any issues making it work smoothly for 7 people.
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Yes, Mattermost. It’s very similar to Slack and Discord. I have hosted it for years for our organization.
There’s a web interface, and has an app available. Can have all sorts of integrations and bridges to other services.
Mind you that they keep paywalling previously free features. Example of them paywalling group calls and their Playbooks feature (v1 - generally available, v2 - in paid plans only): https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/mattermost-v10-changelog.html
When I realized they paywalled OIDC I had to look elsewhere.
For 7 people you could look into Virola Messenger. Not open source but uses Mumble under the hood and is super lightweight. No electron shit.
I replaced Discord(and Whatsapp) with Matrix/Element as voice chat (and general chat) with my wife. I remember running it with Docker was bit annoying to set up (I was selfhosting beginner when first doing it now it could be easier), but with Yunohost it is one click install (if you are willing with swap operating server).
Nextcloud Talk could work for your needs, but I have not personally used it so hard to recommend it.
Self hosting a Matrix server was daunting when I first looked into it, so concerns over it being difficult to deploy are pretty founded. But that changed when I discovered this repo. This makes quick work of getting one spun up, but the true gem of this is their documentation. They’ve probably got the best documentation I’ve ever read that explains the “why’s” and not just the “how’s”.
The Mastodon founder, Eugen Rochko, has just announced that “We’ve moved our internal communications from Discord to Zulip at Mastodon”.
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/116041405748460511
Zulip is probably more focused toward work than TTRPGs, but it can’t hurt to try it. (I haven’t tried it personally, yet.) It is self-hostable.
Zulip is great… on a PC. On mobile is a totally different thing, and not in a good way. 😕
What was the problem with Zulip on mobile did you have?
I only use it for text chat, so I’m curious.
Basically, the interface, or the almost lack of it. You use Discord on a PC or mobile and the experience is pretty much the same. On Zulip this does not happens. It’s a totally different experience with several things lacking, like the folder organization, for instance.
Discord on mobile
Zulip on mobile
I’ve always found the Discord ui on desktop and mobile to be really bad, just very busy and unintuitive.
Five years ago, a open-source project I worked on moved to Zulip (from Slack) and it was a small hurdle. But after a month, I really like it!
So much that I’ve pushed a few other open source projects (who lived on Discord).
I was really surprised when I started a new job two years ago and THEY used a self-hosted Zulip. It’s everything Im used to on Slack.
Discord has team speak/video sharing, which I don’t think Zulip has. But then again, we use something else for video calls.
Zulip integrates with Jitsi, Zoom, and Bigbluebutton for voice and video chat. Looks like a sensible solution.
It’s a shame, zulip doesn’t have e2ee. not even DMs. but they seem to be working towards federation of some sort? there are no good/perfect solutions out there.
Check out https://stoat.chat/, it’s the closest self hostable group communications platform to Discord.
has anyone tried their iOS client? from their description it seems like it’s less mature than the android version, kinda concerning as my friend group has some iphone users.
Honestly the name choice adds difficulty in getting friends to take it seriously. Why did they pick “stoat”
What do you meeaaan? Stoats are fucking adorable!
you mean unlike the tools discord has replaced, such as “mumble”, “ventrilo”, “roger wilco” and “trillian”?
Mumble is a verb like chat but what the fuck has a stoat got to do chatting?
now do the other ones
Do them yourself and you want to copy all those failed apps, lmao.
Mumble is great and I still use it. None of those are failed apps.
Not every app seeks to rake in teenagers’ parents’ money with shit like premium emojis.
So, where are all the posts saying, ‘self-hosted ventrilo?’
Discord never replaced mumble. The two are in different circles.
Xfire
Unironically yes
soundn like a problem with your friends then. who doesn’t love a stoat?
I know, it’s picky lol. I’m still considering it as the replacement for my discord groups (also checking out Element/Matrix). The average users aren’t going to be up for swapping around a lot of platforms, so I am hoping to make one big push on the platform of choice. “Revolt” would have gotten less “wtf is that, how do you even spell it?” than “Stoat”
seems like they had a decent name ‘revolt’ but got some cease and desist and didn’t resist and decided to switch.
The name doesnt matter
IRC is a stupid name too, unless you know what the letters stand for
Msn messenger was stupid
Icq was stupid
Wtf even is “skype”?
It just has to be unique
And a Stout is kinda cute
This whole “FOSS names are bad” sounds like a Mccarthyism sysop by this point. Like, really, who is pushing that crap?
No clue! It was revolt before. I think they had trademark issues with that name. What’s wrong with stoat?
I was wondering why I want getting any updates, checked thegithub a few months ago and found out they rebranded. Haven’t had a chance to try the latest version out yet
Nowadays everyone accepted the name “Discord” but I think it’s a pretty poor choice of branding too.
A communication app called Discord is pretty weird too.
A stoat is a pretty cool animal.
I think without prior knowledge of any voice chat Discord would probably rate worse in perception than Stoat.
Nowadays everyone accepted the name “Discord” but I think it’s a pretty poor choice of branding too.
A terrible name for an app meant to facilitate communication. Always baffled me. But the name is so widely recognized that nobody thinks twice about it.
I always thought Noosphere would make a cool name for a Discord replacement, especially if it incorporates a way to permanently catalog the knowledge accrued by the community, say as a built-in wiki. That might actually make it viable as a support platform.
Just a fair warning in reply to this that the self-hosted version of Stoat doesn’t currently have voice chat. It’s an open issue that’s currently paused until they can finish their rework.
If you have the skill for it, it seems like you can patch work the existing voice chat back in, but it’s not part of their initial setup and there’s no instructions on how to do so properly
Link to their voice chat implementatoon.
Looks like you can enable it on self hosted version. Probably worth someone trying it out personally. Before giving up on stoat.
sadly, it’s a little more complex than just enabling it. The supported self host deployment uses docker, and the docker containers that are available don’t contain the interfaces for voice or video calling as they are not up to date.
If I understand it right, to enable it would mean you need to either pull the source yourself and run it off of docker, or make a custom docker image using a version of stoat web that contains the ability to do voice calls.
reading the draft of the linked issue, it looks like the author isn’t doing voice call for the reason that they don’t know the proper way to integrate it into the docker image.
So to answer it: yes it looks like you can use voice servers on the current self hosted model, but you can’t use pre-existing docker images, and it will require you to manually add the new web UI in and patch where needed.
Turns out they also don’t support federation or e2ee. If those are things you care about.
Is there a docker-free build you can either install and mod to re-enable voice, or use to mod the docker blobs in accordance ?
Well that seems like a fairly big deal.
Where is the documentation for self-hosting it?
Check their GitHub. Although it looks like GitHub is having issues right now.
Is there a significant benefit over matrix?
From what I can tell, the only benefit is that the platform is close to the Discord experience. So people migrating to Stoat would feel right at home.
But there’s no federation, no e2ee, apparently it’s difficult to get voice setup if you self host…
Matrix has it’s issues too. Goup chat e2ee is not good. No one uses it. But at least they’ve got federation.
https://continuwuity.org/ seems like a decent server to run if you want to run a matrix server.
TeamSpeek or Mumble.
Both have excellent voice chat.
Teamspeak still requires a license above a small user size, but has multiple clients that can accomodate different target audicences. The TS3 client still looks like it did back in the windows 7 days and the TS5 client is just copying discords homework (Not a clue what happend to 4 and I believe 6 is under development). Both use the same server backend and database structure so both work with one server and different user expirences.
Mumble is still the gold standard for handling large user bases (there is a reason big EvE Online alliances use mumble). It will take longer to set up, the configuration is handled by the server, not through authorized user accounts like TS.
Would Matrix be a good option? I think they have voice chat. There’s a bunch of clients that you can pick from (Element, FluffyChat, etc) that seem pretty good
I would take a look at TeamSpeak or Matrix.
Of the two Matrix is probably the closest to Discord.
@Vaggumon check out https://stoat.chat/
Haven’t found one that’s as good yet personally…
Good old Teamspeak 3 or 6
Teamspeak
@Vaggumon I think the nearest thing might be matrix…someone else might know other stuff
I’m hosting a matrix server it was rough but not impossible. Using conduit as the backend. Now that the setup is finally done it was so worth it. I would do it again if needed. Coturn was easy to set up along side it.
