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For those interested in open source/decentralized alternatives to Slack/Discord/etc, I've had a pretty great experience with both the voice and video integrated

For those interested in open source/decentralized alternatives to Slack/Discord/etc, I've had a pretty great experience with both the voice and video integrated into Riot.im[0] (uses Matrix protocol[1] for chat, and Jitsi[2] for voice/video). I've said before that I can't really justify nonfree software for something as simple as text chat. That said, rooms with very large numbers of people trying to communicate with voice/video is one use case where maybe it makes more sense for a commercial product to solve it. [0] http://riot.im/ http://riot.im/ [1] https://matrix.org/blog/home/ https://matrix.org/blog/home/ [2] https://jitsi.org/ https://jitsi.org/

singularity2001 8y ago
Why is the riot "TRY now" link so damn hidden? Two clicks, one long search here https://riot.im/app/#/home https://riot.im/app/#/home No private room? Not working without google? Very bad first impression :(
- anderspitman 8y ago
  Not sure what you mean by not working without google?
  - hegz 8y ago
    Iirc there is a captcha on sign up. Same as discord.
- Arathorn 8y ago
  isn’t the “try now” link the big flashing button labelled “launch now!” on http://riot.im http://riot.im?
  - anderspitman 8y ago
    That's how I always start it. Unfortunately that link is on a carousel for some reason, which automatically advances. Definitely not ideal UX in my opinion.
  - singularity2001 8y ago
    It should be but it takes you to a messy page where nothing happens
geek_at 8y ago
Personally I'm sad that people are going for non-decentralized solutions these days. I thought we aggreed that decentralized is the way to go. Everyone hosting their own Ventrilo/Mumble/Ts3 servers had the huge advantage that not only one single company got all data everyone produces. Not to mention outages. They say in the blog post > Routing all your network traffic through Discord servers also ensures that your IP address is never leaked Yeah, except to your centralized company servers.
- Sammi 8y ago
  They also clearly explain why decentralization doesn't work for large rooms: > Supporting large group channels (we have seen 1000 people taking turns speaking) requires client-server networking architecture because peer-to-peer networking becomes prohibitively expensive as the number of participants increases. It's unfortunate, but it's just the truth. The reason we aren't seeing decentralized solutions to the problem that Discord solves is technical. It's not because people don't want it or aren't trying. I just doesn't perform well enough.
  - ckocagil 8y ago
    Federation is good enough for practically everyone.
  - geek_at 8y ago
    that is not an argument for centralized vs decentralized, that's an argument for client-server vs peer2peer Not many selfhosted (eg decentralized) solutions use peer2peer because this requires NAT punching and other methods. TS3, Mumble and Ventrilo are all "proxies" in that manner and not peer to peer
- aepiepaey 8y ago
  > > Routing all your network traffic through Discord servers also ensures that your IP address is never leaked > Yeah, except to your centralized company servers. Which most gamers don't care about. What they do care about, is what follows that sentence: "preventing anyone from finding out your IP address and launching a DDoS attack against you". Especially for high profile e-sports figures and streamers, that's a very real problem: they want to interact with their fans using chat/voice calls, without giving bad actors the means to DDoS their residential connections (causing disconnects from game matches etc). That's also why Discord proxies all embedded media from third parties through their own servers (except for some major sites, that are white-listed).

singularity2001 8y ago

Why is the riot "TRY now" link so damn hidden? Two clicks, one long search here https://riot.im/app/#/home https://riot.im/app/#/home No private room? Not working without google? Very bad first impression :(

anderspitman 8y ago
Not sure what you mean by not working without google?
- hegz 8y ago
  Iirc there is a captcha on sign up. Same as discord.
Arathorn 8y ago
isn’t the “try now” link the big flashing button labelled “launch now!” on http://riot.im http://riot.im?
- anderspitman 8y ago
  That's how I always start it. Unfortunately that link is on a carousel for some reason, which automatically advances. Definitely not ideal UX in my opinion.
- singularity2001 8y ago
  It should be but it takes you to a messy page where nothing happens

geek_at 8y ago

Personally I'm sad that people are going for non-decentralized solutions these days. I thought we aggreed that decentralized is the way to go. Everyone hosting their own Ventrilo/Mumble/Ts3 servers had the huge advantage that not only one single company got all data everyone produces. Not to mention outages. They say in the blog post > Routing all your network traffic through Discord servers also ensures that your IP address is never leaked Yeah, except to your centralized company servers.

Sammi 8y ago
They also clearly explain why decentralization doesn't work for large rooms: > Supporting large group channels (we have seen 1000 people taking turns speaking) requires client-server networking architecture because peer-to-peer networking becomes prohibitively expensive as the number of participants increases. It's unfortunate, but it's just the truth. The reason we aren't seeing decentralized solutions to the problem that Discord solves is technical. It's not because people don't want it or aren't trying. I just doesn't perform well enough.
- ckocagil 8y ago
  Federation is good enough for practically everyone.
- geek_at 8y ago
  that is not an argument for centralized vs decentralized, that's an argument for client-server vs peer2peer Not many selfhosted (eg decentralized) solutions use peer2peer because this requires NAT punching and other methods. TS3, Mumble and Ventrilo are all "proxies" in that manner and not peer to peer
aepiepaey 8y ago
> > Routing all your network traffic through Discord servers also ensures that your IP address is never leaked > Yeah, except to your centralized company servers. Which most gamers don't care about. What they do care about, is what follows that sentence: "preventing anyone from finding out your IP address and launching a DDoS attack against you". Especially for high profile e-sports figures and streamers, that's a very real problem: they want to interact with their fans using chat/voice calls, without giving bad actors the means to DDoS their residential connections (causing disconnects from game matches etc). That's also why Discord proxies all embedded media from third parties through their own servers (except for some major sites, that are white-listed).