5 ms·

I don't mean to be dismissive, but I do have a few nitpicks: > Complicated setup process. Any new member must also go through a setup process. > Paid hosting.

by keb_ 6y ago

I don't mean to be dismissive, but I do have a few nitpicks: > Complicated setup process. Any new member must also go through a setup process. > Paid hosting. No one wanted to pay when there were free options. Especially true as servers grow. To my group at least, the ability to self-host is a major bonus and provides peace of mind. For the record, I do use Discord for text channels. My group primarily uses and prefers Mumble for VOIP, and it is plenty cheap to host. Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, based on my experiences inviting folks to our server. > Unclear benefits. Convincing one person was not enough, you needed to convince your whole group of the benefits of switching. > Weird ideological reasons. Your platform was your tribal affiliation, switching means abandoning your tribe. Everyone looked down on people who didn’t use the same platform as them (even if it was jokingly). How is Discord any different on these points? I'm really not seeing it.

dylz 6y ago
> Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure. The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA. For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.
- captainzidgel 6y ago
  I've had a lot of success telling people "just click next" for every button in the Mumble setup, but Mumble doesn't make things simple for the non-enthusiastic end user. The harder part for most users is figuring out how to connect. Mumble has a URI Protocol but that's only a temporary fix as it can't add a favorite to someone's list. IMO the only reason Mumble can't compete with Discord is that they serve different niches. Mumble doesn't offer much for users who want a permanent text suite or multiple server connections at a time, but for friends/gamers hanging in voice it works fine (and Mumble beats Discord at VOIP). (and all of Mumble's competitors like Teamspeak also fall to Discord for the same reasons).
  - dylz 6y ago
    That's my thought too, Mumble's text chat is terribad, the UI looks like crap. The onboarding is typical of non-hipster F/OSS. The setup guide for servers isn't "run murmur.exe", it's "run openssl commands to generate a private key and generate a CSR" and the setup guide for clients is "if you lose your client certificates, you potentially lose all ability to connect, and permissions/rights, hope there's another admin". Also, the access tokens option seems absurd from a UX perspective. Instead of just asking for a password with a remember box, you go to Server > Access Tokens and paste a string in and it'll attempt it the next time you're prompted for a passworded channel or server. Small things like that. But it has the absolute lowest latency I've ever seen for VOIP, beats Discord significantly in quality, latency, and security (mTLS auth, client certs, pin your own CA for server, you control TLS on both ends). From a strictly engineering POV it's excellent. It also has some pretty amazing features for voice control, passing audio downstream/upstream into parent/child channels (eve players might get what I mean for fleet ops). TeamSpeak tries to do too much, with chat, filesharing, and now no one really wants to host TS3 other than it being concentrated on a specific few like OVH because half of TS's server services can be misused for reflection spoofed DDoS attacks. I'm not sure what Ventrilo is these days. They would not sell you a personal use licence at all - you had to sign up to "resell" a minimum of several thousand slots, and increase your purchase every contract period, or they would terminate all of your licences. You aren't permitted to run a community, nonprofit server for yourself, and at $1-2/slot/month a large community server would never happen for cost reasons.
mholm 6y ago
This will all be entirely anecdotal, but Discord has provided great value to my group. > Setup How so? New account setup is extremely simple. Are you thinking of how some servers require some advanced setup for your account? Adding a new member to a server is also just sharing a link. > Paid hosting While I do wish a self-hosted option were available, I can't see it being a draw for the platform, especially as it would mean releasing a server application to end-users who might not have a good understanding of how to correctly run it. At this point, I'd gladly pay for Discord Nitro if there were any benefit I could get from it. > Unclear benefits Most of these are going to be situational based on where your group is coming from, but Discord was the only competitor that really worked for my group. Cross platform, message reactions, reliable, intuitive. Personally, we switched from Facebook Messenger, which despite facebook's atrocious policies, is the most usable/convenient chat application in the world (imho). > Weird ideological reasons It was upsetting to lose the functional benefits of being on a facebook platform (real names, communicating with nearly anybody I know on the fly), but we all disliked facebook on an ideological level. That made the switch easier, in the end. Other than that, competitors like Skype and Teams are software dumpster fires, while Slack, Signal, and Telegram are extremely restrictive to users who don't care too much about their particular features.
- ivanagas 6y ago
  Thanks :)

by keb_ 6y ago

dylz 6y ago

> Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure. The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA. For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.

captainzidgel 6y ago
I've had a lot of success telling people "just click next" for every button in the Mumble setup, but Mumble doesn't make things simple for the non-enthusiastic end user. The harder part for most users is figuring out how to connect. Mumble has a URI Protocol but that's only a temporary fix as it can't add a favorite to someone's list. IMO the only reason Mumble can't compete with Discord is that they serve different niches. Mumble doesn't offer much for users who want a permanent text suite or multiple server connections at a time, but for friends/gamers hanging in voice it works fine (and Mumble beats Discord at VOIP). (and all of Mumble's competitors like Teamspeak also fall to Discord for the same reasons).
- dylz 6y ago
  That's my thought too, Mumble's text chat is terribad, the UI looks like crap. The onboarding is typical of non-hipster F/OSS. The setup guide for servers isn't "run murmur.exe", it's "run openssl commands to generate a private key and generate a CSR" and the setup guide for clients is "if you lose your client certificates, you potentially lose all ability to connect, and permissions/rights, hope there's another admin". Also, the access tokens option seems absurd from a UX perspective. Instead of just asking for a password with a remember box, you go to Server > Access Tokens and paste a string in and it'll attempt it the next time you're prompted for a passworded channel or server. Small things like that. But it has the absolute lowest latency I've ever seen for VOIP, beats Discord significantly in quality, latency, and security (mTLS auth, client certs, pin your own CA for server, you control TLS on both ends). From a strictly engineering POV it's excellent. It also has some pretty amazing features for voice control, passing audio downstream/upstream into parent/child channels (eve players might get what I mean for fleet ops). TeamSpeak tries to do too much, with chat, filesharing, and now no one really wants to host TS3 other than it being concentrated on a specific few like OVH because half of TS's server services can be misused for reflection spoofed DDoS attacks. I'm not sure what Ventrilo is these days. They would not sell you a personal use licence at all - you had to sign up to "resell" a minimum of several thousand slots, and increase your purchase every contract period, or they would terminate all of your licences. You aren't permitted to run a community, nonprofit server for yourself, and at $1-2/slot/month a large community server would never happen for cost reasons.

mholm 6y ago

This will all be entirely anecdotal, but Discord has provided great value to my group. > Setup How so? New account setup is extremely simple. Are you thinking of how some servers require some advanced setup for your account? Adding a new member to a server is also just sharing a link. > Paid hosting While I do wish a self-hosted option were available, I can't see it being a draw for the platform, especially as it would mean releasing a server application to end-users who might not have a good understanding of how to correctly run it. At this point, I'd gladly pay for Discord Nitro if there were any benefit I could get from it. > Unclear benefits Most of these are going to be situational based on where your group is coming from, but Discord was the only competitor that really worked for my group. Cross platform, message reactions, reliable, intuitive. Personally, we switched from Facebook Messenger, which despite facebook's atrocious policies, is the most usable/convenient chat application in the world (imho). > Weird ideological reasons It was upsetting to lose the functional benefits of being on a facebook platform (real names, communicating with nearly anybody I know on the fly), but we all disliked facebook on an ideological level. That made the switch easier, in the end. Other than that, competitors like Skype and Teams are software dumpster fires, while Slack, Signal, and Telegram are extremely restrictive to users who don't care too much about their particular features.

ivanagas 6y ago
Thanks :)