TeamSpeak only supports 32 simultaneous users, you must purchase a license to support more than that.

Does anyone know if their self hosted version has caught up to their client version? (In terms of features)

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.

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.

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.

i got the server up and running on my linux mini pc.

the voice quality is great, and the video streaming is good, someone mentioned the resolution looked super smeared when they joined, but it corrected itself before i could ally tab look at it.

i have found that an important detail is that the text chat is either directly attached to the voice channel, and to see/manipulate it you must jump into that channel, or there are global chats that are separate entities from the channel, even if handled by the same ui. once you find your friend server, make sure to book mark it as it’s not an automatic thing.

also right now hosting your own server is preferable, as the explosion of users maxed out the us located servers, and japan is not an acceptable server spot.

For a room to chat or to talk with mic or webcam? I never used Teamspeak before.

Can we all not move to another proprietary paid service again? Good god.

Stoat has been wonderfully simple so far and is free and open source. It’s got voice chat. It’s only been about a week of using it so far so please correct me if I’m wrong or point out issues that I haven’t seen or mentioned.

It seems like the most realistic option to me since I doubt the masses wanna get into self hosting.

In context, defeating the privacy exposure of requiring to use CC details would be by getting an anonymous credit card, which in most countries are now either very difficult to obtain or simply no longer offered (outlawed).

Hope that helps.

(Edit: spelllering)

For anything, is my understanding. If they try to open it, they're just represented with a "server full" notification.

Only the person who creates the room have to pay or everyone who want to join a room that is bigger than the limit?

Whoever hosts the server

Yeah honestly. Running the teamspeak server executable is hardly selfhosting, and they're just another closed source proprietary service. Cool they're still around after all these years I guess but they shouldn't even be considered as a migration option.

Stoat and Fluxer are both open source, very straightforward and familiar, and I believe self-hostable. Much easier for casual users than Matrix too.

I'm unsure what is difficult about Matrix.

I've had several "casual" friends register and join my space on their own.

That's 32 connected users to voice, not total server users isn't it?

I don't know. They call them "slots" without elaborating and tell you to contact them for more details.

It is the same effectiveness of scanning an ID since that could also be their parent's.

The point of scanning the ID is (supposedly) to verify the age of the user, not their parents.

Using a credit card or an ID are both just using a physical item to 'verify' an age of someone who may or may not be that person. Getting a credit card has a minimum age, so the end goal of age 'verification' is met either way although the ID has way more personally identifiable information like skin color, actual birth date, gender, etc.

It isn't like scanning an ID verifies that the person scanning the ID is the person on the computer.

Getting a credit card has a minimum age

Not true, anyone can become a "verified user" on another's account. That's what my parents did when I was a kid.

• Signup can be tricky.
• Managing your encryption keys is tricky for normal people (I know someone who signed up for it on incognito because they weren't sure about it yet then got a bunch of confusing popups when they signed on with their phone).
• Room organization is missing a layer used on discord (server->room instead of list of rooms) leading to confusing moderation structures and nearly required manual organization of rooms if you're in more than 10.
• notifications rules can be obtuse.
• having different commands based on the clients used can lead to confusion.
• most clients have security related popups that just confuse people (This person reset their identity!).
• people can struggle with how to properly interact over federation, much like in the fediverse
• screensharing tools just aren't there yet

Things have been getting better fast for matrix, but its just not ready for the masses IMO. I still suggest it when I can when the use case makes sense.

You are a verified user for their account. That is literally using their card with extra steps.

Also, there is frequently an age 13 requirement to be an authorized user which would count for everything except porn.

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.

You are a verified user for their account.

Right, which is different from the user's account, and thus does not verify their age.

there is frequently an age 13 requirement to be an authorized user which would count for everything except porn.

Discord doesn't have a 13 age group. It's just adults and children.

Stoat, both its app and website refuse to open on my mobile data. I doubt it's only happening to me. Teamspeak at least lets people host and have control of their own servers.

Weird it works perfectly fine on my mobile data.

Yeah, I get "address not found" regardless of browser.
I'll probably be keeping a closer eye on fluxer.

Best of luck in migrating! I wish I had a solution for you

Oof that's a no-go

I'm not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.

Yeah honestly. Like I work in IT, have my own home server, run linux on everything, etc etc etc, but even I found Matrix to be a convoluted mess, and most clients have their own issues. I can't imagine trying to get someone who's not tech-savvy to try it out.

Yeah no. There was a reason we all abandoned TeamSpeak years ago.

You can self host stoat.

Hosting it is far from simple

Using Stoat's main server raises a privacy concern because it’s UK-based and AFAIK lacks E2EE—UK authorities could seize server data without our knowledge. That effectively means private use requires self-hosting.

Issue with self-hosting Stoat is, it's currently more complicated than Matrix. This user created a detailed GitHub guide that documents their research and pitfalls for getting Stoat working with voice/video: https://github.com/javif89/stoat-selfhost

The official self-hosted guide (https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted) looks simple at first, but if you look at the compose file, it requires FOURTEEN containers to run and doesn’t yet include voice/video support which will increase complexity.

By contrast, TeamSpeak’s self-hosting appeal is its simplicity: only two services (or one with SQLite) and it works out of the box today.

But I agree — moving from one closed-source silo to another isn’t ideal. I just wish Stoat were easier to run behind the scenes.

For me, a combination of matrix for text chat and mumble for voice is the simplest and most privacy respecting way to self-host a discord alternative.

Fluxer feels more full-featured to me

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.

One thing that worries me a little about fluxer is this:

Finally, we can offer commercial licences to companies that want to run Fluxer internally without being bound by the AGPLv3 copyleft terms. This is enabled via a contributor-friendly CLA, but it doesn't create a separate "enterprise edition". It's still the same Fluxer software everyone else uses.

• https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/

They have a CLA on contributions. So while today Fluxer is licensed as AGPLv3, tomorrow they can pull the rug and change the license, just like everyone else has been doing.

Stoat seems pretty close to where it needs to be. Plus it's open source and self-hostable.

Yeah... I hate watching people make the same mistake over and over. I guess we just have to take the lead and build the communities that we need over on Stoat and Matrix.

I had problems logging in the other day, which I assume was the server getting hammered.

That's a separate issue from what I'm having. It only doesn't work on my verizon cell service. Unfortunately it makes stoat not an option for me.