Please understand that I’m not a programmer and so this is probably a really dumb question, but Mumble works so great for voice chat and it already has text chat capabilities. It could just do with a UI refresh and maybe some added functionality to really provide a much better alternative to Discord. Any thoughts?
They definitely got the Discord aesthetic down. Unfortunately, it seems to be both self-hostable and unfederated, which means that the userbase is going to be split up between a bunch of small and quiet instances with no convenient way to interact with the larger ecosystem. Their FAQ suggests that while it’s not in the roadmap currently, they’re still open to the idea, so maybe we should let them know that this would be a desirable thing.
Yes, hopefully they can solve it where so many haven’t. I’ve never met a federated messenger/protocol with reliable voice and video chat between servers as TURN is costly it seems and things like JAMI are ime unreliable, though that’s more distributed than federated.
I think that only centralised messengers are capable of providing such features reliably as I’ve yet to see any evidence to the contrary.
I did find out recently that the team behind the Element Matrix client made Element Call and integrated it into their apps recently, but I’ve never used it personally. Have you used it? How was it?
I used it when it was a seperate thing and it had frequent disconnects or at least moments where I couldn’t hear the other person.
However, I don’t tend to use Element for Matrix as it’s large, slow, bloated, has a bad UI and UX, and ironically despite all that doesn’t have all the features I want or need (such as spoilers, multi account in one app/window or easy custom emoji/stickers).
Not sure I’d count Element Call as ‘between servers’ though, maybe it is but I will have to look into it to make sure.
Hm, hopefully Discord takes awhile to enshittify. Sounds like the current solutions need time to polish up.
Yeah. Though we have never used discord due to its lack of e2ee in text messages, requiring a phone number in some circumstances, that shitty nitro thing and personally because we don’t like group chats that much unless they are small and only people we already know.
Plus ioo it has already enshitified with an LLM, and other things that cannot be turned off.