Teamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.
This is to say nothing of the insanity of public, effectively unmoderated rooms on Matrix.
- Android: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-android
"This app is still in early stages, and not yet ready for production."
Just for others who are evaluating it as an option.
otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
Not sure what forums software you're thinking of but vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse don't have the extra features the author is looking for.
He wrote: >Many of these make heavy use of Discord's voice channels, video chat, and screensharing. These servers have a hard requirement for adequate moderation tools for dealing with any bad actor willing to join the community. [...] Decent Mobile Experience [...]
A lot of admins shut down the forums software and moved to Discord because it didn't have the modern features they wanted. So to migrate off of Discord requires an alternative that duplicates most of what makes Discord valuable. That's what the topic admins wish for but the current options don't give them that.
>otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.
Which I have all kinds of questions for; my Synapse install is the FOSS community release, and pmap -d shows <1.5G of RAM usage even without the paid-org-optimizations. I thought maybe that was including postgres, but that shows only ~2M. This isn't a single-user instance either - I'm running half a dozen bridges, and use Matrix with my fiancee. Not much above single-user, but also less than half the claimed 4Gig at idle.
I do see ~3Gig mapped (still <4), but that hardly feels fair - any process will start to consume unused RAM, and it can be pushed out when under pressure.
The E2EE breaking for OP is something I haven't seen in somewhere between months and years either, which suggests the entire thing was last trialled before (or shortly after) one of the major performance improvement pushes
The point regarding Soatok's blog about the vuln is absolutely not a good look, though I'd want to dig into it a bit more to see if it's "a malicious admin can break the encryption", "a malicious actor can break the encryption", or "a malicious actor can access metadata". Not great whichever the case may be though.
The "social clout" advantage the giant aggregators have gained they are often working to lose a few communities at a time. Building a niche community site outside of the aggregators isn't competing with them in the same way any longer.
Maybe it is a time for building smaller niche sites again?
- if you need aggregation use rss.
I can not emphasise this point enough: it is difficult and unsupported to a degree that Signal can not be considered self-hostable to any remotely useful degree.
It should be in the non-starter category.
Lightweight macOS app / Windows running with Tauri are available and they feel native. But it’s also a Web app that can run on any domain.
Available at prose.org and https://github.com/prose-im/prose-app-web
It also has screen sharing[2], which Stoat doesn't have yet[3], though it doesn't support casting audio yet. Also, the mobile app implementation can't arrive soon enough!
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/FluxerApp/comments/1r8724q/comment/... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1r6muvz/comment/... [3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/stoatchat/comments/1r7tdg4/answerin...
If you want slack - mattermost is pretty great
Nothing else I’ve run across is production quality that isn’t proprietary.
Interesting...
They do have chat-channel features now. I've had a look. Meh.
Matrix is kinda jank but I hope Discord enshittification will speed up client development a bit. I am just really fond of the concept of federated servers and self-owned chat history. Prevents hostage holding of chats in the future. For people who don't want to switch I will run a Discord Bridge for now but I do hope to get my main contacts off this software honestly.
For me anything that visibly looks like Discord is a non-starter because I want a product with an actual vision, not someone trying to slopcode an exact replacement of the Discord UI. Imagine if Discord just looked like Skype did in 2008. Yuck. The Matrix protocol, for all its faults, at least has some form of vision.
Is it totally fair to blame users? Not entirely, as some features are still being pushed into ElementX. But it's a known problem, with a known solution (finish ElementX and/or wait for other clients to catch up), and a weakness of an open ecosystem.
Moxie wasn't wrong when he said that open ecosystems have to move slower, but I believe it's worth it in the long-run.
[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...
