Some time ago when Discord used Surveillance Services to face scan all their users a lot of possible alternatives where thrown around.
- It should be already hosted by someone
- have voice chat
- Be easy to sign up to so that i can convince people
web.fluxer.app is your best choice.
So all they’re doing it making you a "teen’ account if you don’t want to verify. All that means is you can’t join “mature” discords like porn and stuff like that. For gaming with friends it won’t matter.
Element, or whatever Matrix client of choice if you prefer a different one.
We use matrix
Discord is still king. People are way too invested.
Matrix is decent for me. Voice, video, and screen share, works well. Have not had issues with small friend groups
I use matrix with a friend, matrix calls (the one that has the option for video) drop out on their own with no warning and the ring tone is very easy to miss, I wish there was anything to do about those two problems. Other than that it’s great, legacy calls seem more robust
Look at Mumble. It’s FOSS (Free Open Source Software)
Mumble lacks a ton of stuff that Discord has. There’s no persistent text chat, no screen sharing, no video. What it does have is really really easy administration.
It frustrates me that all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at scale. Discord has been in the “be really cool to attract users” phase, and now it’s morphing into the “Oh crap we actually have bills to pay” phase. That’s why you’re seeing ads now, and it’s only going to get worse.
I don’t want a billion concurrent users. I want a place for my small group of friends to hang out that isn’t hard to deploy or manage.
Mumble lacks a ton of stuff
You’re there to voice chat while gaming. It’s not a support forum and it’s not a wiki.
Why ‘systemd’ something simple?
Yeah, and who ever sends text to people they want to game with?!?
The steam voice chat feature really improved and is very intuitive to use now. I’ll frequently use that.
We’ve been using steam for many years for our weekly gaming sessions. Can’t remember why we stopped using discord but it was way before all the photo ID requests. I definitely don’t miss discord downloading like 20 updates every week.
When i play with my brother we use our phones to, get this, call each other. Obviously harder to do with more people but if its just you and a buddy your phone can be used as a phone.
This is what I did years ago. No cell phone, land line. DSL still required a phone line at the time but long distance was included free. Would play Diablo 2 with someone I knew who was about 800 miles away.
I’ve done this before and it works in a pinch.
What’s with your ingame audio?
isn’t that expensive?
Many cell plans, at least in the US, offer unlimited calling.
My phone bill is $40/mo no matter how much I use my phone.
I’ve tried Fluxer but it’s been a bit fiddly for me on Linux. It’s okay, voice chat works, but there are bugs for me with video chatting or screen-sharing. If it starts getting fixed, I’ll stick with it, otherwise I’m gonna keep looking.
Fluxer appears to be the most promising, though it is still very new and they are working furiously to get it up to par with a tiny dev team that consists of two (three?) people. Most basic features are quite usable now, though.
Stoat and Fluxer so far
Stoat desktop feels like it was just put in the oven, especially on Linux. It may get there someday, but I cannot recommend Stoat in good faith.
Still using Discord here. Never sent them a face photo. Can’t say either way for the other people I still talk to on there.
Prior to that I remember using TeamSpeak, which apparently still exists. Still proprietary and monolithic though, which might not be to your preference.
Same, we are planning on ditching when stuff like facial recognition actually kicks in but we are just trying to have fun in the evenings and the ability to easily share text/images/video/streaming with a small group has a lot of inertia.
Also one friend plays on xbox and as far as we know discord is the only one that is cross compatible.
Since you say you’re planning to ditch it when that facial recognition kicks in, I’m genuinely curious: are you okay with, or unaware, that Discord is already monitoring all your activity and messages to determine your age?
I assume absolutely every single app is doing shady shit like that, and to be honest I don’t really care if they are estimating my age off of what I do. I do care about showing my ID, because it has details that I don’t want them to have and is a completely different thing.
I assume absolutely every single app is doing shady shit like that
No. Only the proprietary and/or corporate-controlled ones.
I’m not the person you asked, but honestly, if Discord wants to monitor me and my homies talking about our nerdy ass video game shit, I don’t mind it at all. It’s not like I’m setting up heroin deals on there (or anywhere else). Like, I give a negative amount of fucks if they know that we’re gonna be hardcore raiding from 8pm to midnight on Tuesday and Thursday, with a training session for new members on Saturday morning from 7am to 10am. I could not care less if they read my chats about dungeon strategies and properly optimized endgame gear. If they want to see who won my weekly raffle for 1000 ingame gold, that’s fine by me.
It’s not even like they can use my data for marketing purposes. I play exactly one video game, and I already plan to buy every expansion the game releases until I either die, or the servers shut down. And we have a very strict “no politics” rule in my server, so it’s not like they’re gonna catch us planning some sort of revolution. We’re just some MMORPG nerds nerding out about our MMORPG.
If they ask me to scan my face, or send them a pic of my ID, that’s where I draw the line. I have never, and will never, put a picture of my face on the internet. I’ve never posted any pics of my kids, or my grandkids either.
But nothing I say on Discord is “private”, there are over 600 people on my server, all playing the same game. We only talk about the game, or occasionally what we had for dinner (but that’s only on Foodie Fridays). If Discord knows that I made wet beef sandwiches with loaded fries for dinner, that’s no sweat off my balls. I don’t have conversations on there about anything that I would be afraid to shout in the Public Square.
Here’s my counterpoint: you may think what you do and say is innocuous, and it may very well be innocuous… right now. Who knows what people will think about any given topic in ten years. Who knows who’ll be in charge then, or how much power they may have to deal with “them”. I’m pretty sure I remember the dictator of some central-Asian former Soviet republic going around arresting dentists, so nothing is too absurd to consider IMO. I also don’t do anything I think others would find particularly damning, but I prefer to maintain a healthy buffer between my online self and my meatspace self. But I do genuinely wonder if I’m being unreasonably paranoid sometimes.
I personally think you underestimate what they can achieve with that data, or how much money they can make off it, or what governments can do with it. However, as long as you’re aware and okay with it, power to you.
TeamSpeak or an old fashioned LAN Party
Fluxer for me and my friend group. Signal was actually the primary plan but it doesn’t work for two main reasons for us, both related to the fact that we record ttrpg sessions. Since I don’t think this would affect most people, I’d also recommend Signal, though some people dislike needing a phone number to sign up.
I use a self-hosted TeamSpeak6 server with my friends. My friends use Discord without me afaik. I can’t make people share my principles, but they’re slowly coming around to how bad companies can be with their encroaching data hoarding.
