With the recent news about discord asking for face or ID scan, what other alternatives are there that we can recommend to our less tech-savvy friends?
With the recent news about discord asking for face or ID scan, what other alternatives are there that we can recommend to our less tech-savvy friends?
Stoat would be nice except its still a silo, you can self host your own silo but it doesnt federate, cant even use their offical app with self hosted instances. Upryzing seems like it might be going in a good direction but too early to know for sure.
Xmpp or matrix are the only truely decentralized options and neither is up for doing all the tasks discord gets used for.
The problem is many folks dont grasp the concept of doing one thing well over doing lots of things just sort of okay.
My suggestion to friends is figure out what discord features you actually care about and find apps that do those things. Muble for audio, obs to screen share, xmpp or matrix to chat, etc.
Like 90% of users, I care about voice chatting with my friends, having persistent chat sessions, being able to share videos and links, being able to share files, being able to share screens, and stream to my friends.
Yes. ALL of these features are important. Not “oh but you can chat using this app, and share files with this app, and stream with this other app”. No. All those features listed. In a single app.
Until an alternative pops up that offers all of that, I refuse to accept the other “alternatives” listed as viable. They are not. There is a reason people moved from things like mumble and teamspeak to discord. Because discord offered more services at a higher level of convenience. I despise what discord is doing, but pretending like having to use multiple different programs to try and poorly accomplish what discord offers on its own would somehow be appealing to the majority of users is insane.
“Oh but these are decentraliz-” I. Do. Not. Give. A. Shit. Nor do the vast majority of discord users. Decentralization is fine and good, but it is so far down the list of priorities that it’s worthless to talk about.
This attitude is exactly why you and most people will be continuing to repeate this cycle of enshittification every 5 years or so.
You went from using multiple apps to a big clunky web browser that only connects to one service and you trust that service not to screw you over one day.
This is why we cant have nice things.
Man, people really prioritize convenience over all else, huh? We are fucking doomed.
Dont some of these alternatives check all of those boxes? Eg Stoat and Matrix have persistent chat, file sharing, screensharing, and streaming dont they?
stoat aims for that but isn’t stable. matrix needs jitsi for screen sharing and streaming, that’s not like the smooth experience with discord. also i’m unsure about persistent chat in the long term, i’ve used matrix for a while and the rooms tend to not last for long amd get ‘upgraded’ or something (had to click on some button that said something around ‘this chatroom has moved’… and couldn’t search from the old chatlog properly)
Agree with the sentiment, but OBS to screen share? How does one do that?
OBS allows you to stream video (hence its ubiquitous use by streamers on sites like Twitch), so you could simply configure OBS to stream for a smaller audience (your friends) instead using whatever web hook or additional program needed.
Are you suggesting I should be setting up “private” streams via Twitch or YouTube when I want to do a pair programming session?
That’s not a solution.
For a private screen you can use a web based solution like mirotalk or jitsi. Pretty much all web browsers support screenshare via an extension these days so its mostly just a matter of finding a server with low latency (or running your own)
I tend to stream directly to peertube so thats what i was thinking of for obs but its true that obs isnt ideal for smaller private sessions.
It was specifically the OBS aspect I couldn’t get my head around.
No, what I am saying because that functionality exists within OBS, it can be redirected/repurposed to directly stream the video through another application/protocol entirely (although if that’s already release ready is up for debate).
The proof of capability is there from the pre-existing Youtube/Twitch use cases, but there’s no reason that OBS couldn’t work as well for something like Matrix (but the groundwork may not be ready yet).
discord screen shares are very low latency and well integrated… is it possible to do something similar with obs? genuinely asking.
I would imagine the limiting factors would be bandwidth and compute - I imagine discord offloads some of the processing on their servers to make sharing such a smooth experience, while services like Twitch intentionally introduce delay to make stream sniping more difficult.
So for OBS, the most difficult part of having a low latency stream to another person is having a strong, speedy connection, and a beefy enough gpu/cpu to handle the encoding quality necessary.
have tried running am rtmp server, for some reason even on my local network and very low res/quality it was awfully slow sadly… :/