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I completely understand why gaming communities centralized on Discord. It has the most convenient and obvious interface for managing little communities of mult

by Taywee 5y ago

I completely understand why gaming communities centralized on Discord. It has the most convenient and obvious interface for managing little communities of multiple related rooms, and the drop-in drop-out voice chat room system is obvious. I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around why so many tech and programming (especially FOSS) communities still flock to Discord, especially given how programmer-hostile the company is. Matrix is more than good enough to manage it now. The only things about Matrix that bother me right now is that presence is still disabled on the matrix.org homeserver, and the phone call metaphor for group voice and video chat rooms is clunky.

toastal 5y ago
When I still did online gaming, we'd tried a couple of different tools but the last one we settled on making everyone, even the non-tech-savvy, happy was Mumble because it was lightweight, no frills, low-lag with good audio and decent detection for auto enabling and disabling voice for people (like me) that didn't like extra buttons for push-to-talk.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Mumble has long since falling out of favour. It’s missing most of what people consider critical features now including mobile support, good IM support, and the ability to instantly create new communities without dealing with hosting. I’d say it’s likely that most discord users are mobile or at least half.
  - toastal 5y ago
    I won’t disagree. My anecdote was from 4–5 years ago. We’d assessed that Discord was too much for us specifically. I had used the Mumble Android app from F-Droid a time or two to communicate while on the go just to chat. As for the hosting, at the time I also had dynamic DNS and actual ISP and it was lightweight enough to self-host a room with a couple of people without issue. I think not dealing with hosting probably is a big issue for a lot of people. Monetarily the difference is small, but philosophically free vs. $2/mo is massive.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  Mumble is great for voice chat! It’s just bad at everything else, sadly. I think modern telephony significantly profits from the ability to use video and screen share, which you just can’t do with Mumble. This is why any telephony solution I’d build would probably be based on Jitsi Meet. In case anyone’s bored: A channel based UI (similar to Mumble) for it would be rad.
solarkraft 5y ago
I’m not a fan of Discord for many aspects, but everything else is even worse. Matrix, even after all these years, is still a massive pain to use. It doesn’t have a way of putting together multiple related channels (I’m aware it’s coming), which is a Discord core feature. It also doesn’t have voice rooms, which may not be central to the FOSS community’s use of it, yet extremely useful for it. There are other organization chat solutions like Slack (proprietary), Mattermost and Zulip (I’m trying out the latter with an organization). Those are the real alternatives to Discord, not Matrix (... yet ...). Neither of them (besides maybe Slack?) has an integration for voice channels (not “calls”).
- Hendrikto 5y ago
  RocketChat is pretty much self-hosted Slack, and it works great.
- andrewshadura 5y ago
  Matrix has communities which are nested channels.
- Arathorn 5y ago
  Matrix has had Spaces since May to let you group channels (rooms) together: https://element.io/blog/spaces-blast-out-of-beta/ https://element.io/blog/spaces-blast-out-of-beta/ Voice rooms are coming soon fwiw.
- itake 5y ago
  https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/ Used to be popular for OSS. Not sure what happened to them but I haven’t seen them actively used in forever.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Hype. to be followed by disappointment (discord is terrible as an archive)
nootropicat 5y ago
Matrix doesn't even support custom emojis last I looked. There are some preloaded emoji packs and no clear way to add new ones in a server. Server specific pepe emojis are absolutely essential.

by Taywee 5y ago

toastal 5y ago

When I still did online gaming, we'd tried a couple of different tools but the last one we settled on making everyone, even the non-tech-savvy, happy was Mumble because it was lightweight, no frills, low-lag with good audio and decent detection for auto enabling and disabling voice for people (like me) that didn't like extra buttons for push-to-talk.

Gigachad 5y ago
Mumble has long since falling out of favour. It’s missing most of what people consider critical features now including mobile support, good IM support, and the ability to instantly create new communities without dealing with hosting. I’d say it’s likely that most discord users are mobile or at least half.
- toastal 5y ago
  I won’t disagree. My anecdote was from 4–5 years ago. We’d assessed that Discord was too much for us specifically. I had used the Mumble Android app from F-Droid a time or two to communicate while on the go just to chat. As for the hosting, at the time I also had dynamic DNS and actual ISP and it was lightweight enough to self-host a room with a couple of people without issue. I think not dealing with hosting probably is a big issue for a lot of people. Monetarily the difference is small, but philosophically free vs. $2/mo is massive.
solarkraft 5y ago
Mumble is great for voice chat! It’s just bad at everything else, sadly. I think modern telephony significantly profits from the ability to use video and screen share, which you just can’t do with Mumble. This is why any telephony solution I’d build would probably be based on Jitsi Meet. In case anyone’s bored: A channel based UI (similar to Mumble) for it would be rad.

solarkraft 5y ago

I’m not a fan of Discord for many aspects, but everything else is even worse. Matrix, even after all these years, is still a massive pain to use. It doesn’t have a way of putting together multiple related channels (I’m aware it’s coming), which is a Discord core feature. It also doesn’t have voice rooms, which may not be central to the FOSS community’s use of it, yet extremely useful for it. There are other organization chat solutions like Slack (proprietary), Mattermost and Zulip (I’m trying out the latter with an organization). Those are the real alternatives to Discord, not Matrix (... yet ...). Neither of them (besides maybe Slack?) has an integration for voice channels (not “calls”).

Hendrikto 5y ago
RocketChat is pretty much self-hosted Slack, and it works great.
andrewshadura 5y ago
Matrix has communities which are nested channels.
Arathorn 5y ago
Matrix has had Spaces since May to let you group channels (rooms) together: https://element.io/blog/spaces-blast-out-of-beta/ https://element.io/blog/spaces-blast-out-of-beta/ Voice rooms are coming soon fwiw.
itake 5y ago
https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/ Used to be popular for OSS. Not sure what happened to them but I haven’t seen them actively used in forever.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Hype. to be followed by disappointment (discord is terrible as an archive)

nootropicat 5y ago

Matrix doesn't even support custom emojis last I looked. There are some preloaded emoji packs and no clear way to add new ones in a server. Server specific pepe emojis are absolutely essential.