Any good options recommended for self-hosting something similarly functional that doesn’t take too much effort to get up, audit, maintain? Discovery isn’t really important for me, so federated isn’t really necessary, but a cool extra. I’d love to host something or contribute to hosting for my gaming groups, my class or multiple classes at my school, or otherwise. Voice, chat, screen share, camera, would all be great if possible, but range of options would be good. I’m still using Mumble for gaming…
Haven’t tinkered much with Matrix nor do I know much about Revolt, but I’m curious before I look into it deeper if anyone in the community has experience hosting any communication platforms for small, invitational groups.
Matrix is probably be the best bet atm, although I’m hoping for Spacebar to get more mature as they are aiming for feature parity and compatibility with discord. This way you can host your server with Spacebar, use their client and still be friends with discord users/be in discord servers that haven’t switched yet. Only thing impossible with Spacebar is discord users joining your self hosted server, but once they reach feature maturity (esp in regards to voicechat and videochat) it’ll make switching super seamless.
Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix’ bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it’s neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.
You’ll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you’re a purist).
With some luck Discord’s strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we’ll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.
What should the Matrix developers have prioritized instead? Chat programs are complicated, especially when you’re making them distributed. You’re comparing an organization and a MSP with like $1M/yr revenue with a soon-to-IPO company with $600M/yr in revenue.
What feature is missing from Matrix that is preventing Discord users from joining?
Is this a joke? Even if you ignore the overly fancy stuff like those Forum-like features Matrix can hardly do the basics correctly. The encryption constantly causes issues, Voice feature is still beta, the UX is a mess, the UI is lackluster, basic features are missing (you can’t even set the Voice Activation level, wtf), there are no integrated admin tools and the third-party UIs are either wonky or lackluster, the software (both server and client) is a bloated mess that takes aeons to do anything and is awful to develop (a friend looked at it and quickly decided it’s not worth all the hassle)…
Of course there’s a difference in size, still they could’ve figured things out way better in the last decade. People ask for voice channels since 2017, and not just did they have a working Jitsi integration, there also are WebRTC frameworks ready to use they could’ve picked. And even now with that Beta feature it is more than obvious they do not want it to work as simple as Discord, but more like a professional software for meetings (that or they just really love creating convoluted UI).
There’s no way to get any majority of Discord users to use this mess. We discussed this once in our local hackerspace, and while the general opinion of course was more complex given some people know how complicated the protocol is, there also was a consensus that the software as it is is “not great to use”. And if even hackers / enthusiasts are saying this there’s no way in hell to convince casual users.
Any good options recommended for self-hosting something similarly functional that doesn’t take too much effort to get up, audit, maintain? Discovery isn’t really important for me, so federated isn’t really necessary, but a cool extra. I’d love to host something or contribute to hosting for my gaming groups, my class or multiple classes at my school, or otherwise. Voice, chat, screen share, camera, would all be great if possible, but range of options would be good. I’m still using Mumble for gaming…
Haven’t tinkered much with Matrix nor do I know much about Revolt, but I’m curious before I look into it deeper if anyone in the community has experience hosting any communication platforms for small, invitational groups.
Matrix is probably be the best bet atm, although I’m hoping for Spacebar to get more mature as they are aiming for feature parity and compatibility with discord. This way you can host your server with Spacebar, use their client and still be friends with discord users/be in discord servers that haven’t switched yet. Only thing impossible with Spacebar is discord users joining your self hosted server, but once they reach feature maturity (esp in regards to voicechat and videochat) it’ll make switching super seamless.
Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix’ bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it’s neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.
You’ll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you’re a purist). With some luck Discord’s strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we’ll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.
This just sounds like FUD.
What should the Matrix developers have prioritized instead? Chat programs are complicated, especially when you’re making them distributed. You’re comparing an organization and a MSP with like $1M/yr revenue with a soon-to-IPO company with $600M/yr in revenue.
What feature is missing from Matrix that is preventing Discord users from joining?
Is this a joke? Even if you ignore the overly fancy stuff like those Forum-like features Matrix can hardly do the basics correctly. The encryption constantly causes issues, Voice feature is still beta, the UX is a mess, the UI is lackluster, basic features are missing (you can’t even set the Voice Activation level, wtf), there are no integrated admin tools and the third-party UIs are either wonky or lackluster, the software (both server and client) is a bloated mess that takes aeons to do anything and is awful to develop (a friend looked at it and quickly decided it’s not worth all the hassle)…
Of course there’s a difference in size, still they could’ve figured things out way better in the last decade. People ask for voice channels since 2017, and not just did they have a working Jitsi integration, there also are WebRTC frameworks ready to use they could’ve picked. And even now with that Beta feature it is more than obvious they do not want it to work as simple as Discord, but more like a professional software for meetings (that or they just really love creating convoluted UI).
There’s no way to get any majority of Discord users to use this mess. We discussed this once in our local hackerspace, and while the general opinion of course was more complex given some people know how complicated the protocol is, there also was a consensus that the software as it is is “not great to use”. And if even hackers / enthusiasts are saying this there’s no way in hell to convince casual users.