The fastest way to make me not download a particular piece of software is to invite me to join their discord to discuss questions and tech support.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
123 points (93.0% liked)
PC Gaming
8999 readers
1653 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
One of my friend groups does a weird thing that I love. We use Discord for video sharing and TeamSpeak for audio while we watch stuff on a shared site. I like the disconnect because we can hop to different rooms in TeamSpeak while seeing people in discord. Sometimes people will call shots, drawing art, etc. and you’ll just see it while being in something like a “quiet convo” TS room to watch the video without drunk people talking over it. People join and you can wave to them while not having to say anything because you’re in a different room with others. It’s like a real party room kinda vibe where you can see everyone but not hear everyone and you form your little groups organically without talking over each other.
It’s niche, but I wish TS/Discord just had that natively.
TeamSpeak was never “here” in the first place, it certainly had its niche among certain gaming communities, but it - never - had as much traction as Discord does today. I am sure a design refresh is going to lure some older gamers back, but I am unconvinced it’ll even make a dent in Discord usage.
"internet thing from 20 years ago was smaller than big, VC backed social media giant from today. Therefore, thing that was defacto standard 20 years ago was never relevant" is a hell of a take
Even 20 years ago im applications with voice support had hundreds of millions of users. Msn messenger at its peak had 300 million active users.
Pc gaming was a lot smaller back then too. More serious communities all had a vent or teams peak. That only started to die down when xfire came out and brought anothed influx of non pc people (or someone thst only played one game like ever quest) into gaming spaces.
Less centralized services is a good thing. As long as self hosting isn't intentionally worse in some way I see this as a great thing for competition. I don't want discord viewing my data, and I don't want to pay them to be able to share a video over 8mb with what is essentially the new form of group chat for a lot of people.
Deleted that dogshit (dc) eons ago
If it has the power to kill discord, I'm all for it. But paying for servers? I don't think that's it, chief.
You can selfhost the server. If you ain't paying a corpo for something, you are their product.
Sadly, there is no screen share at selfhosted servers (it has to be ts6 servers, which are paywalled for now)
I don't understand how someone makes it to Lemmy without grasping that fundamental concept.
Mumble still exists and isn't proprietary..
Voice only though, doesn't really have chat rooms or streaming support.
Also, Matrix. And for voice/video ... cat /dev/video0 | nc
I like Mumble, it's a simple and effective alternative to TeamSpeak.
And is about as bare bones as you can get. Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it today. People have moved on from ONLY needing VOIP. Sharing images, videos, text, etc. is a big part of gaming communities now. Even small groups will want to share info from time to time that Mumble just can't do well.
Suggesting Mumble is like suggesting someone get a bike when they're asking what type of car they should get. Yea, sure, you can make a bunch of arguments for why a bike is better and why cars are bad, but at the end of the day; if the person is wanting an actual car, your suggestion is not helpful, useful, or appreciated.
I still can't make the server run on Linux for some reason, seems like everything network related (Zerotier, Xlink and Mumble server) that I use for gaming just doesn't work for me on Linux.
It's weird because Jellyfin worked without tinkering.
But yeah, I feel like Mumble sounds better than Discord too.
Revolt looks promising. It's a discord clone but open source, can self host too.
It's rather a lot with 12 docker containers to run, I wonder what the resource usage is like.
I am a fan of self hosting, a year ago revolt was not quite ready to go yet. I might have another look
Is "so back" in the title supposed to be interpreted as a hip slang phrase?
Term popularized with trumps presidency. Lots of blue check accounts tweeting “America is so back” and “We are so back”
Thanks for the context. Guess I never read that crap.
It's streets ahead!
Presumably
TeamSpeak never left for me. I've been running my own server for years now and a couple of friends and me still use it all the time.
I wish Matrix video calls worked better so it could take over
Element call worked great for me for the last year, it lacks integration with clients, that's the real problem.
any opinions on the various clients assuming linux laptop?
Not really. I mostly used Element, but I also tried fractal which seemed decent.
The tough thing is that the supported features are changing rapidly, so what might be a good client one year might be out of date the next year. I also had a lot of issues with Element randomly logging me out on my self-hosted server :/
hey sorry I have another question. Im curious about self-hosted with a chat program. Do you run it 24x7? One of the things with self hosted as far as mbin/lemmy/mastadon is if the instance is down it won't be available so running it from a laptop lets say were it is on and off would seem problematic (maybe its not and I am making it an issue in my head). Chat feels like it might work but im wondering about if someone sends you a message while the host is down. will it be able to get the message when the host is back up the next day? if you know given you may be running yours 24x7.
yes, I run my matrix server 24/7. I'm not really the expert on this, but I believe the way federation works on matrix is that downtime means that users on that instance will not be able to see/write messages, but users on other messages will still be able to write messages, which will later be picked up by the crashed instance when it comes back up. Not sure how it affects rooms.
you know its not like it will hurt to try. thanks for the feedback.
thanks. I would do element X but its seems to be phone only. Ill give element a try.
Ye, they've been working on a not-discord for a while now
Bring back Vent cowards!
Be the change you want to see in the world and run your own server. According to Wikipedia, Vent was updated in 2023, so apparently it's not completely dead, yet.
I was mostly joking but that is actually interesting.
Why not matrix ? (Or even XMPP)
Matrix is text only isint it?
No
No its got voice calls with jitsi implementation along with their own built in "element chat" that has been implemented or is still being tested to be implemented.
That and 1 on 1 calls work out of the box with no jitsi or element chat configuration. (Still need coturn)
Ill be real i could get that going on my end but 99% of my friends wont even try if it doesn’t work out of the box