Yup, I'm pretty active on the game dev server on stoat. Anyone lurking here, come check it out!

EDIT>> And apparently I'm not the only one who may have issues with their current methodologies for using docker compose: https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted/issues/176

EDIT 2>> I tried Stoat using their hosted service (not self-hosting), and it leaves a lot to be desired as it relates to roles/permissions. I figure it's a good six months or more away from being a viable alternative to Discord. It's a good start, though.

Thanks for the reminder of that!

I've heard of it, but hadn't yet looked into it much. I see this: https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted . It seems promising, I just wish it was a simple docker compose file with parameters (such as domain name/config file volume path/etc), so I can easily run it on UnRAID. But it's requesting I run a shell script to generate some configuration file which could have been simple docker compose parameters. Therefore, in its current form, it requires I run docker compose via a shell that has the repo cloned.

And in order to do it a more proper way, in my opinion, I'd have to alter the compose file to change the "volumes" for many of the defined services to point to UnRAID's appdata location. Every bit of this could have simply been environment variables within the compose file. And it would be ideal if the compose file could be set up to allow for external docker services that already exist (such as mongodb, redis, and rabbitmq). And it should expect reverse proxy hosting by default, not be the exception, again in my opinion.

I get that it's open source and I could submit a pull request to do all I'd want, I'm just looking for a quick alternative to Discord without this level of effort. None seem to exist currently, at least for self-hosting. So I'll continue looking into this when I decide to put in the effort for it. But I do appreciate your suggestion and may indeed go down this path soon.

The fact you can’t use the desktop client with a self hosted server and that there is no public iOS app right now are dealbreakers for me

Tangentially related: Fuck Arc raiders.

Nice, what's the link?

True. However TS has been around for a very very long time and have a proven record of not shitting on users. The free server and client have remained free all this time.

That doesn't mean things will always be good though.

https://stoat.chat/server/01JN4QAT47NYTWGB2X0Z7Z1RB5/channel/01JN4QAT47NJP17DD59XCATPC4/01KHMV1GTBETH51GWEVNSN51C9

lemme know if that doesn't work!

It’s all about friction. As long as the user has to pick an instance they will always hesitate to pick any federated service. The average user will always choose the path of least resistance.

Proprietary services spend a lot of time trying to reduce friction, and it works.

The only solution I can think of would be a three part one:

1. The main app of a federated service automatically rotates between a pool or reliable, reputable, non-extremist instances where the user can log in with an email and password.
2. The federated service makes it trivial to migrate accounts amongst instances.
3. the user can log into their instance threw any other instance perhaps threw oauth.

This would of course require some federated account login system. Hard but not impossible. It could be some sort of Casandra style ring based account service where nodes are part of the ring.

This eliminates the new user friction.

1. Download app
2. Sign up
3. Login

It works anywhere any time with corpo style low friction. You don’t need to think about instances at all till you are ready to.

Bring back Ventrilo. Get on Vent or I'll have you bent

Americans People will do anything but just setup XMPP, this is literally what it was invented for.

XMPP!

Stoat is dead in the water due to dependency on the UK and not an easy solution to deploy yet.

Fluxer is dead in the water due to license.

Hey guys, stop moving on to the next commercial service who will do the exact same thing once they get up to critical mass.

Yes, commercial services are easier to setup. The cost you pay is all of your privacy and your loss of control over the service that you're building your communities on.

Stop making this same mistake OVER and OVER and OVER.

Take the time to find the IT workers or tech nerds in your community, take donations to rent server space and administer it yourself. Moving from Discord to Teamspeak isn't an improvement, you're just selecting the next group of people who will sell you out the moment that it becomes profitable.

Use Free and Open Source solutions, that your community hosts themselves. You have Mumble (https://www.mumble.info/) for voice, XMPP (https://xmpp.org/software/?category=servers) for text chat, Discourse (https://github.com/discourse/discourse) for forums, or even setup a Lemmy instance.

None of these things are difficult to use and the administrative side of things is simple (most are simply pre-made and hardened Docker containers). Even if you don't want to deal with that yourself, there are managed hosts available for all of these pieces of software. If you don't want to administer a Mumble server you can just rent one for less than the cost of a single Discord subscription. There are similar managed hosts for all of the other software.

Every game that I've ever played as part of a large community has had forum software and voice chat that we've hosted ourselves. Discord killed all of that because they offered the same service for free and made it easier.

Well, it wasn't free, they've been steadily enshittfying and profiting off of the users. The prices keep increasing and they're depending on the Network Effect ("I can't leave because everyone uses it!") to keep you trapped on their services.

Sure, but I see no need to host when so many cool nerds will gladly host your space for you. Different strokes, I guess.

time repeats itself.

I don't get why so many people are saying this. Afaik, it doesn't have channels within servers like Discord and Slack, which I feel is a defining feature in the text chat part of the apps.

The official self-hosted guide is actually quite simple and straightforward. I had it set up and going in a half hour or so, and that's even with removing Caddy and using my existing nginx reverse proxy. It's intimidating at first-glance, yeah.

That being said, the official self-host guide is also 5 months out of date. The alternative you linked requires jumping through a bunch of hoops because it's just a small community of enthusiasts hacking together the current version of Stoat for self-hosting.

So I acknowledge that self-hosting current version of Stoat with voice is rather complicated and frustrating right now, but hopefully it becomes as simple as the official self-hosting guide eventually.

Im seeing a huge increase in people using stoat. And its been fun.

If anyone is interested in Retro Games: https://stt.gg/GJh5JHy2

Oh dang. Why?

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_Raiders#AI_use

Oh. Fuck Arc Raiders.

dude hell yeah count me in

coo see you there!

TS also has a straightforward charge for server hosting.
This is free on Discord, but we all know nothing is actually free.

Their client runs on top of the ts3 server, so I assume it should just work. Set up the server and you can choose from the old or new clients.

Kind of, they give everyone a free 1 server 32 slot license.

That isn't guaranteed to be there forever and they could decide in the future that you need to buy that license.

However, if you install a Mumble server then it can't be taken away from you. The hosting process is largely the same from an administrative perspective so I'd prefer the 'free forever' to the 'free, limit 32, while supplies last' license-wise.

It looks like its not working for me.

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

You only need these services as part of a gaming community.

I think you'd have a hard time finding a gaming community that didn't contain at least a few people who could handle installing a docker container on a VPS.

The trade off, to save minimal administrative overhead (compared to moderation and such), you give up complete control over how your system is run, how your data is divulged and any control over future cost increases.

Everyone should be self-hosting (and also running Linux, but we'll beat that horse later) if they're running a gaming community.

For me, it wasn't about the AI. It's that early development of the game was all PvE play. PVP was something that was added at launch, and the game is tagged as PvE, along with PvP on steam. Stupid me thought there would be PvE only lobbies and I was clearly mistaken. I tried playing it, I put 100 hours in. The entire game was me grinding the easy map, to level up and craft/buy better guns, only to be shot on sight by someone and have everything I worked for taken. I would solo down bastions, leapers, and bombdiers to have someone run up and shoot me on site, without asking if I would share loot. (I would rather share than lose everything.) Events in the game also reward PvP play by awarding cred. People are making smurf accounts so they can end up in friendly matches to dominate people that don't want to pvp. Enemy spawns are fucked up too. I've downed arc only for the corpses to despawn as I attempt to loot it. I've walked into clear areas, only to have bombadiers spawn on top of me out of nowhere. The worst part of the game is being dropped into a map/match after 10 minutes has elapsed, which means anything decent has already been looted and you're more likely to run into people camping extraction points. They have a temp event running that rewards PvE cooperative play, and I've still gotten killed on site, although less frequently. After the event is over, I'll probably uninstall the game again.

channels within servers

Oh that is like the second most common thing on XMPP! It's rooms/chats/conversations on servers/conferences/salons, etc. Like, come on, even IRC has that and that was made before I was born.

The one thing that's complex, or at least bad in the UI I've seen for most XMPP clients, is that searchability of rooms is not very good. Like, discoverability is, but to my knowledge there's no way to actually filter for rooms based on a keyword, you either get the whole roomlist for a server or nothing.

The problem with decentralised alternatives to Discord isn't just the set up time.

Me and some of my friend group are pretty technical and we're willing to jump through all the hoops and difficulties to make our own little cluster of federated self-hosted servers.

The problems start occurring when we actually look at what these open source alternatives are actually capable of. And... Uh... It looks bad. Voice chatting and streaming and text channels on the same client are an absolute must.

Stoat has no voice chat and streaming.

Voice chatting and streaming and text channels on the same client are an absolute must.

Yes, those are certainly a convenience that would be nice to have.

I just don't think they're "Be subjected to Discord" nice anymore.

I'll take on the burden of launching two executables and clicking two different windows in order to not be subjected to the endless monetization and privacy violations.

Not everyone agrees, that that's fine too. Using Discord (or Signal if your group is small and care more about privacy than open source) isn't wrong, but some people see the downsides as outweighing the benefits.

Everyone needs at least one friend who's willing to break their own brain about tech, so they can host all the neat shit! Plus if everyone chips in it's pretty cheap

I don't know what they're even doing. TeamSpeak/Mumble is not a replacement for Discord. There's no separate text channels in addition to the voice ones. It's just a VOIP program. If you move from Discord to one of those you're either in addition fundamentally changing your way of thinking or you're in for disappointment.

For one there's no "public communities" as with Discord. Here are the biggest servers from mumist.eu:

Shit, thanks for your insight. I was somewhat interested in the game just because of the world it's set in, but, gah that sounds awful.

I just spent a week trying to set up my own server and good lord it was such a battle I gave up. Matrix? Up in like half an hour. Shame because my friends are so much more interested in Revolt lmao. Just gonna give them some time to sort out their business before trying again.

Oh shoot, is it? I'm using Cheogram and Conversations on my phone and I can't figure it out. I guess it depends on the client?? I'm a bit confused.

We sit here on Ventrilo playing some DotA

teamspeak 6 has group chats and private messagimg

There's also Movim, which doesn't even require an email, you can join instantly with just a username and password.

I think Iambalicious may be confusing terms. AFAIK no XMPP client has discord-like rooms within channels. The Movim client is actively working on implementing that feature (it can also do group video calls and screen sharing), but it's the only one doing that unless I'm mistaken.

Movim does, and it's federated and offers encryption! :D

XMPP can actually do everything, chat, group video calls, and even screen sharing with the Movim client. It's a one-stop shop.

@Tattorack@lemmy.world

EDIT: The Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!

Woah, didn't know about that, thanks for the heads up. That's definitely dampening my goodwill toward it.

As an alternative, I'd suggest Movim, which has no CLA, and is already federated.

Ventrilo has innate delay and is proprietary.

Mumble is open source and has lowest latency of all the apps.

Oh, that looks pretty nice, thanks for the recommendation.

I'll have to throw up an XMPP setup and give it a shot. It looks like they have a podman container setup available: https://github.com/movim/movim

We’re setting up our own Matrix/Element CE and mulling over the non-technical folks’ fumbling trying to figure it out. Going to have to test a lot. Stoat is promising since it has a familiar UI, but we have a large amount of mobile-only friends.

Not even looking at the non-free stuff. This is the shove we needed to finally move off that type of crap.

Forgot about XMPP until reading earlier comments. Will have to put that on the list.

I tried to get friends into Matrix before and they were confused by it. So can confirm it's not that simple for everyone.

Though to be fair, one of them wasn't able to post without including an emoji in their message, that shit confused me too.

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.

Isn't that just a problem for contributors to worry about though?

Like, it's not like they can remove (or change the license of) the code that's already out there (their CLA says existing source code releases stay licensed as-is), nor does this affect forks. So I don't really see the harm to the consumer.

any distributed version that includes your contribution remains properly licensed under the project license(s) that applied when you contributed.