PC Gaming

I’ll stick to Matrix thanks

whatever happened to meeting up with your mom's house on a bunch of folding tables in the living room

why go from one corporate property to another when enshitification is the problem and libre options are available??

tomorrow's headline: "Teamspeak CEO excited to be working with Discord"

Is mumble still a thing? It was the best for low latency and automatic mic pickup/ nouse cancelling back in the day.

This feels like it's happening way too soon. Sure, at the current pace I would expect an exodus from discord eventually, but I didn't believe that there was so many proactive people on the platform.

Anyway, TeamSpeak has always been great. Discord voice can be rather unstable as you add more people to a chat, or depending on the locations of the people in it.

stoat.chat seems like a good alternative.

VENT or nothing!

Teamspeak is not a good replacement lol

We’re setting up our own Matrix/Element CE and mulling over the non-technical folks’ fumbling trying to figure it out. Going to have to test a lot. Stoat is promising since it has a familiar UI, but we have a large amount of mobile-only friends.

Not even looking at the non-free stuff. This is the shove we needed to finally move off that type of crap.

Forgot about XMPP until reading earlier comments. Will have to put that on the list.

Hey guys, stop moving on to the next commercial service who will do the exact same thing once they get up to critical mass.

Yes, commercial services are easier to setup. The cost you pay is all of your privacy and your loss of control over the service that you're building your communities on.

Stop making this same mistake OVER and OVER and OVER.

Take the time to find the IT workers or tech nerds in your community, take donations to rent server space and administer it yourself. Moving from Discord to Teamspeak isn't an improvement, you're just selecting the next group of people who will sell you out the moment that it becomes profitable.

Use Free and Open Source solutions, that your community hosts themselves. You have Mumble (https://www.mumble.info/) for voice, XMPP (https://xmpp.org/software/?category=servers) for text chat, Discourse (https://github.com/discourse/discourse) for forums, or even setup a Lemmy instance.

None of these things are difficult to use and the administrative side of things is simple (most are simply pre-made and hardened Docker containers). Even if you don't want to deal with that yourself, there are managed hosts available for all of these pieces of software. If you don't want to administer a Mumble server you can just rent one for less than the cost of a single Discord subscription. There are similar managed hosts for all of the other software.

Every game that I've ever played as part of a large community has had forum software and voice chat that we've hosted ourselves. Discord killed all of that because they offered the same service for free and made it easier.

Well, it wasn't free, they've been steadily enshittfying and profiting off of the users. The prices keep increasing and they're depending on the Network Effect ("I can't leave because everyone uses it!") to keep you trapped on their services.