Discord is banned in Turkiye. The reason is some data theft, blackmail, AI montage photos, etc. As usual, our government made the easiest and most illogical move :)
I am looking for an alternative platform to talk and chat with my friends. Which platforms do you recommend?
The ones I tried:
- Revolt: Voice chat is not stable. They do not accept new registrations.
- Matrix: Unstable overall.
- TeamSpeak: ancient interface. We can still try it.
- XMPP: It has an old interface like TS. Not sure if it has voice channels.
- Your recommendations?
Theres also zulip, but I havent tried it yet, but its supposedly open source discord, but you have to host the server yourself I think.
I don’t recommend Zulip as Discord alternative. It’s interesting take on slack-ish type of messenger, but not really “polished” experience for now.
Revolt: Voice chat is not stable. They do not accept new registrations.
That’s news to me. Where do they not allow new accounts signing up???
Since Discord was blocked in Russia today, everyone went to revolt, which cannot deal with so many registrations for now
Ah okay, yeah they probably don’t have the backend servers for it as it has grown slowly if at all over the past year. Revolt is meant to be run on independent self hosted backends similar to Lemmy (only without federation) but humans are going to be humans, and simply pile into the one largest, most common Revolt instance and cause huge traffic problems.
So you’re saying revolt is about to have a shitton of russian users, which means it’s about to become a pro-russian war hub. You know what they say about nazis. Allow one nazi into your bar, and he’ll invite his friends. Soon enough, your bar isn’t a bar with a few nazis in it. It’s become a nazi bar.
Same concept, different facists.
Russian users who used banned platforms instead of vkontakte aren’t necessarily warmongers
Ah yes, because all Russians are Nazis apparently
Your reply sounds pretty xenophobic, ngl Isn’t it better for Russian people to get access to information that Russian government doesn’t control?
More like jingoistic, which is rather tiresome anymore. “Nazi” today is a virtually meaningless pejorative, and my dead grandparents are rolling in their graves having escaped real Nazis.
Literal last line of the post:
Same concept, different facists.
Russians are now Nazis?
Someone needs to read more history, and out down the Book of Pejoratives
Literally the last line from the post:
Same concept, different facists.
I believe revolt is self hosted so everyone can make their own bar.
Discord is banned in Turkiye.
Considering the nature of these programs, I think the most important thing to hone in on is: what’s popular in Turkiye? Features and functionality don’t mean squat if no one’s around to enjoy them.
…tad off topic, but this thread is making me miss xFire. That shit was better 10 years ago (maybe more like 15? idk, I’m old) than Discord was at its peak. …litigated out of existence by Yahoo’s frivolous weaponization of our legal system. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Edit - Fuck you, Yahoo.
Eh, I’m honestly trying to give Yahoo another shake now that Google is so terrible. That said, Yahoo still sucks to use, and it lost most of the charm that it had in the 90s. And BTW, the xFire suit was around 20 years ago, so you may be older than you want to admit.
the xFire suit was around 20 years ago, so you may be older than you want to admit.
There comes a point where it kinda just blurs together. I’m old enough that when people ask how old I am, I have to stop and think what year it is, and do some quick head math to figure out the answer.
Dang, that hits too close to home for me too. I have kids, and sometimes I forget how old I am because I care far more about how old they are that it just isn’t as important to me.
xFire was great, didn’t know the whole yahoo thing
Kinda liked the separate applications for voice and chat, we used ventrilo over teamspeak for reasons I don’t recall but all of that is just ancient history at this point (was using that like literally 20 years ago)
Ohhh, xFire, that takes me back. To a time of dedicated servers and not that bullshit service game fuckery.
If you or one of your friends can self-host, my group used mumble before discord. I still don’t really know why we switched.
Matrix is probably the closest to Discord overall. If Element is bugging out on you, it might be worth trying other clients. Nheko worked well when I tried it, for example. Do note that the matrix.org homeserver is sometimes overloaded, so if you’re having responsiveness issues, choosing or running a different homeserver will probably clear them right up.
Mumble.info is great for voice. If your text chat needs are pretty basic, it might be a good fit. I don’t think it saves message history.
XMPP is a protocol, not an app. If you you saw an interface you didn’t like, you could always just use a different client. I don’t usually recommend it, since setting it up with all the features people usually expect is a bit complicated and error-prone, but it would probably be fine among a small group of friends if one of them has tech skills. I don’t think it offers voice, at least not in any widely-supported way.
Our group uses mumble for voice and discord for text and backup voice or external voice. The voice quality is better, free, faster on mumble. Extremely low server requirements. It technically saves chat history but as server logs, not for the client.
What do you do when you want to share your screen?
For that kind of thing I use jitsi, works great and I have access to a sort of private instance that I use occasionally. Works for just voice too but it can be a little unreliable (the last two times I had a weird issue where the others suddenly couldn’t hear me and vice versa but reloading fixed it) so something else might be better for that…
There’s not a great 1:1 replacement. I’d suggest some sort of hybrid approach. Personally, I use mumble for voip and matrix for text. I haven’t experienced any significant stability issues with matrix, but self-hosting probably plays in my favor there.
How about Guilded?
I think that’s most of the alternatives. Revolt is the best of the bunch, if you ask me.
One more is https://tryquiet.org/ but it’s SUPER basic at this time…
IRC: it’s open source, it’s free, its retro
matrix: unstable overall
“Unstable” is an understatement, and this comes from a girl who uses it all day every day.
Isn’t it generally better if you use a smaller instance/host your own? Most of the complaints I’ve heard have been on the busier instances.
That said, I only use it occasionally to catch up on dev updates.
My current instance has ~160 users, and it’s okay. I once used a friend’s instance, where I was the 2nd user. It was very bad. That might in part be the fact that it was running Conduwuit though.
KiwiIRC is a web based IRC client. Does not have voice chat afaik, but since it’s IRC it’s very lightweight and had a low entry barrier.
What did you end up going with?
I use Steam Chat for playing games with family and friends. It has better audio quality than discord in my opinion, and you can make groups (something like Discord servers) too. It doesn’t have all the functionality of servers, but the basic idea is there.
I am actually surprised nobody mentioned it yet Why use some third party application, when you can use the Steam’s one.
It’s not like the OP is concerned about privacy. They were using discord. They didn’t say it has to be open source.
For talking outside of gaming or away from PC, I use signal.
Tried this but it seems to be very badly broken. Couldn’t get hardly anything working…
XMPP/Jabber has whatever interface you choose (determined by the client you use), and does voice pretty darn well.
I’m currently using Jmp.chat as a SIM/data provider, and they provide an XMPP account via Snikket. I can connect to that account with pretty much any XMPP/Jabber client.
To me, XMPP/Jabber is the most flexible, because it’s a protocol, and you choose which parts you want. And you can choose which clients you use. I have 2 clients on my phone and one on my laptop. They all work fine with the same account, with messages showing up at all simultaneously. One client (Snikket) has multiple accounts in it. The thing is XMPP/Jabber as a protocol is like SMTP - it’s a standard, so all clients can communicate with each other, if they support the same features (eg OMEMO encryption, which is popular now).
Alternatively check out:
Teleguard, it’s from the folks at SwissCows. They claim E2E, and from the way you connect devices, and that you can’t recover an account from them, I tend to believe it. Though I haven’t seen a third party evaluation (I belive they’re closed source, unfortunately). So do with that what you will.
Simplex Chat, self hostable, they claim it’s very secure. I’ve used it some, the phone app is a bit heavy on ram use.
There are numerous others out there.
xmpp is a protocol, it doesn’t have interface. you may be thinking about some specific software using xmpp, in that case you have to say what software you are talking about.
Which is exactly what I said. You get the interface you choose.
