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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.
The problem with decentralised alternatives to Discord isn't just the set up time.
Me and some of my friend group are pretty technical and we're willing to jump through all the hoops and difficulties to make our own little cluster of federated self-hosted servers.
The problems start occurring when we actually look at what these open source alternatives are actually capable of. And... Uh... It looks bad. Voice chatting and streaming and text channels on the same client are an absolute must.
XMPP can actually do everything, chat, group video calls, and even screen sharing with the Movim client. It's a one-stop shop.
@Tattorack@lemmy.world
Apparently you can self-host TeamSpeak
Kind of, they give everyone a free 1 server 32 slot license.
That isn't guaranteed to be there forever and they could decide in the future that you need to buy that license.
However, if you install a Mumble server then it can't be taken away from you. The hosting process is largely the same from an administrative perspective so I'd prefer the 'free forever' to the 'free, limit 32, while supplies last' license-wise.
TeamSpeak only supports 32 simultaneous users, you must purchase a license to support more than that.
Yeah, this bit was all I needei to know:
Besides all of that, if you'd rather not chat to randoms who also happen to have an unhealthy obsession with Arc Raiders, you'll likely need to pay an admittedly small subscription fee to rent your own ten-person community voice server. By that point, you're handing over card details and essentially fulfilling an age assurance check anyway. If you'd rather limit how much info your chat platform of choice has about you, there are arguably better options out there.
How does CC details qualify as age verification? It's WAY better than gov ID or face scan.
I just mean this type of business model is ripe for enshittification.
Face scan is actually much easier to defeat than CC details.
Nowadays with VISA '3D Secure' and the equivalent on Mastercard you have to validate your legal name attached to the credit card, this is done via third-party which can request details your bank has on file (often your home address or mobile number), and even while those details are not supposed to be shared with the merchant (we know how careful banks are about keeping control of PII), the core detail - your legal name, is confirmed. It is not hard to tie a user to other data via data brokers once you have their legal name, and credit card number, and any other details they may share with the service (email, phone, etc).
Face scan is actually much easier to defeat than CC details.
I don't understand. You don't need to "defeat" CC details.
They do not contain your age or your govt documents. Even if they did, a child is likely just going to use their parents' CC. So it's not a form of age verification at all.
That's 32 connected users to voice, not total server users isn't it?
Correct. 32 people connected to voice simultaneously, but there isn't persistent text chat. So really, only 32 users at a time, at all. The lack of text made me set up a Matrix homeserver instead.
Been on IRC for like 3-decades and is where I get my media content, mostly. Highly recommended if you give zero shits about fancy text!
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"
Matrix has the best architecture by far. The only feature it lacks is high fps screenshare with audio. Right now its only acceptable for like a powerpoint presentation.
When the update fixing that comes it will finally be ready to fully replace discord.
For-profit companies cannot be relied on for this kinda thing (for anything at all). TeamSpeak is good now, maybe, but there's nothing actually protecting it from turning to shit the very instant management changes.
True. However TS has been around for a very very long time and have a proven record of not shitting on users. The free server and client have remained free all this time.
That doesn't mean things will always be good though.
TS also has a straightforward charge for server hosting.
This is free on Discord, but we all know nothing is actually free.
Was looking at moving over, but among other things their mobile client is paid, and poorly reviewed. My main discord community is 1100 members, it's already going to be hard to get most of them to jump to another platform without it costing all of them for phone access.
Yeah no. There was a reason we all abandoned TeamSpeak years ago.
Bring back Ventrilo. Get on Vent or I'll have you bent
Ventrilo has innate delay and is proprietary.
Mumble is open source and has lowest latency of all the apps.
VENT or nothing!
I said that the other day and I got back "noone is going to use that windows XP lookin shit."
:)
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.
We’re setting up our own Matrix/Element CE and mulling over the non-technical folks’ fumbling trying to figure it out.
Commet might be more helpful there than Element, as it tries to replicate Discord's UI and UX, making for an easier transition.
I don't know what they're even doing. TeamSpeak/Mumble is not a replacement for Discord. There's no separate text channels in addition to the voice ones. It's just a VOIP program. If you move from Discord to one of those you're either in addition fundamentally changing your way of thinking or you're in for disappointment.
For one there's no "public communities" as with Discord. Here are the biggest servers from mumist.eu:
I know Teamspeak 6 is in beta, so I get it. But boy when I tried it, it was just awful. It took me literal minutes just to figure out how to disconnect from the voice server. They desperately need to hire someone for UX who has actual experience in, you know, design.
And getting Matrix (Synapse) to run is about as teeth-pulling as getting an Oracle database system to run back in 2001.
I don't like what Discord is doing. And I'll likely find some alternative if I can convince others to also join me, but there simply is no viable alternative that gives the exact level of experience that Discord does (from a feature point of view and a UI/UX point of view).
And yes, I've tried Fluxer. It's a good start, but still needs a lot of work, which the maintainer says is ongoing (work such as making self-hosting viable, etc). While I like the UI/UX of Fluxer, I am concerned that its UI is effectively a direct copy of Discord from a few years ago and I don't know if Discord would be legally able to do something about this. Perhaps it's all fine, and if so, I wish Fluxer immense success at being that viable Discord alternative, and I will keep an eye on this project.
Does anyone know if their self hosted version has caught up to their client version? (In terms of features)