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Hosting a Mumble server is the easy part Convincing everyone else involved to switch over to it however is a near-insurmountable battle. Many years ago I was

Hosting a Mumble server is the easy part Convincing everyone else involved to switch over to it however is a near-insurmountable battle. Many years ago I was playing on a friends Minecraft server, while in a then Skype call with some friends on the server One user couldn't get Skype to work on their Arch Linux install, and proceeded to spend almost an hour badgering us and whining to switch to Mumble so they could "join the fun" From our perspective, shifting our entire group conversation over to a brand new voice chat system just for one person seemed like an absolute joke. So they were left wanting

slim 5y ago
What you did was not optimal. You had the opportunity to switch to a better platform and a strong incentive to do so (one member could not participate without it) you should have put the necessary effort to transition. It would have made your community stronger. Generally speaking, the policy of "none left behind" the most powerful bond-building tool available.
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  This is not the case if setting up and using Mumble would have caused net more friction for the rest of the community. See all the comments about needing to perform constant troubleshooting for mumble users.
- supertrope 5y ago
  You can't force peers to install software and take the time to train themselves on the new software like you can with an employee.
j1elo 5y ago
It also doesn't help that Mumble has a very bad UI for the average user. I love it, because I'm an engineer and know what all those buttons and sliders do. My friends? they didn't like it at all. Thus making the switchover even harder. This issue has been mentioned in the past already, and I think Mumble devs acknowledged this in the past... having a well polished UI is so important for user adoption! Just throwing all technical choices to the user's face is rarely the right solution.
- andai 5y ago
  Does it still badger you about certificate generation on first launch? I used it with my friend in 2015 as a sort of galactic walkie-talkie on our phones -- he was in another country but we'd just walk around outside and talk to each other. It felt pretty futuristic at the time. After a few minutes of continuous audio transmission though there would be a significant buildup of latency, so we developed the habit of saying "pineapple" to each other to measure the lag. Best record was 12 seconds.
  - j1elo 5y ago
    Yes it does. Or it did circa 2019 when I last logged in for the first time. Nice to see you had been having fun with it. Skype however had been there since a lot earlier, right? I guess that having to exolicitly "call" your friends removed a bit of that "walkie-talkie" feeling, but still...
rowanG077 5y ago
I have long left the online gaming community but this was no issue 10 years ago. We all switched between TeamSpeak 2, 3, ventrillo and mumble seemlessly.

slim 5y ago

What you did was not optimal. You had the opportunity to switch to a better platform and a strong incentive to do so (one member could not participate without it) you should have put the necessary effort to transition. It would have made your community stronger. Generally speaking, the policy of "none left behind" the most powerful bond-building tool available.

ferdowsi 5y ago
This is not the case if setting up and using Mumble would have caused net more friction for the rest of the community. See all the comments about needing to perform constant troubleshooting for mumble users.
supertrope 5y ago
You can't force peers to install software and take the time to train themselves on the new software like you can with an employee.

j1elo 5y ago

It also doesn't help that Mumble has a very bad UI for the average user. I love it, because I'm an engineer and know what all those buttons and sliders do. My friends? they didn't like it at all. Thus making the switchover even harder. This issue has been mentioned in the past already, and I think Mumble devs acknowledged this in the past... having a well polished UI is so important for user adoption! Just throwing all technical choices to the user's face is rarely the right solution.

andai 5y ago
Does it still badger you about certificate generation on first launch? I used it with my friend in 2015 as a sort of galactic walkie-talkie on our phones -- he was in another country but we'd just walk around outside and talk to each other. It felt pretty futuristic at the time. After a few minutes of continuous audio transmission though there would be a significant buildup of latency, so we developed the habit of saying "pineapple" to each other to measure the lag. Best record was 12 seconds.
- j1elo 5y ago
  Yes it does. Or it did circa 2019 when I last logged in for the first time. Nice to see you had been having fun with it. Skype however had been there since a lot earlier, right? I guess that having to exolicitly "call" your friends removed a bit of that "walkie-talkie" feeling, but still...

rowanG077 5y ago

I have long left the online gaming community but this was no issue 10 years ago. We all switched between TeamSpeak 2, 3, ventrillo and mumble seemlessly.