We’ve started using Jitsi for video/screen-sharing and that’s going well so far - but it’s based very much around the “corporate meeting” concept, rather than “playing D&D with mates” or “online gaming with people”.
Mumble is decent enough for voice comms, but of course lacks video, which for my friend group is a deal-breaker. While the audio quality is noticably better most of the time, its noise suppression is not as good as Discord. It does have text chat, but lacks the utility of Discord’s chat - which we use in D&D for sharing information, images, note-taking, etc.
Things do game tracking/voice like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc. but then each only supports their own platforms and services - whereas Discord is common to all.
I think what DIscord does well is bring together a few really established, tried and tested technologies, under one roof and integrates them seamlessly. There is definitely value in that, and I would be really interested in an open source/self-hosted equivalent.
My main concerns with Discord are:
They inevitably ramp up income earning opportunities and therefore eventually compromise the system.
It can’t be catalogued/searched easily.
It seems like a near-perfect platform for harvesting data for ML (and the platform has some traction with the ML community already).
Revolt is a FOSS discord clone, where its possible to self host a server. They’re very small though, something like 120K users and the devs are uni students. Funnily, they just moved to the Discrim model.
Currently only available through web and windows store though.
Are there any good alternatives?
We’ve started using Jitsi for video/screen-sharing and that’s going well so far - but it’s based very much around the “corporate meeting” concept, rather than “playing D&D with mates” or “online gaming with people”.
Mumble is decent enough for voice comms, but of course lacks video, which for my friend group is a deal-breaker. While the audio quality is noticably better most of the time, its noise suppression is not as good as Discord. It does have text chat, but lacks the utility of Discord’s chat - which we use in D&D for sharing information, images, note-taking, etc.
Things do game tracking/voice like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc. but then each only supports their own platforms and services - whereas Discord is common to all.
I think what DIscord does well is bring together a few really established, tried and tested technologies, under one roof and integrates them seamlessly. There is definitely value in that, and I would be really interested in an open source/self-hosted equivalent.
My main concerns with Discord are:
Revolt is a FOSS discord clone, where its possible to self host a server. They’re very small though, something like 120K users and the devs are uni students. Funnily, they just moved to the Discrim model.
Currently only available through web and windows store though.
Its also available on Linux through flathub and Android through Google Play or F-Droid.
But its currently lacking Proper Voice and Video Chat.