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?
Jitsi meet is what I use for calls with my friends. You can continue using revolt or matrix or something for the text channels.
Calyx Jitsi instance has been down for months though. 🤔
Ah ok. I didn’t check but that’s the one I’ve used in the past. meet.jit.si I believe still works but you might need to make an account.
self-hosting matrix is possible, and after I got it set up, it works fine. That said, push notifications were acting up a lot at first (might have been fixed by an update since that hasn’t been an issue in a while), and it is rather annoying to get your desktop and mobile clients set up to not be annoying about not being verified (iOS apps seem more fiddly with verifying than Android apps in my experience)
Despite my annoyances at first, the Element client really is the best and most mature one out there, and I do recommend it. Don’t bother with any of the other ones; despite what the fluffychat settings want you to think, Element is the only client that can do any kind of audio/video calling, and most of the other clients only have web apps, so there’s no hope for getting push notifications on mobile.
Ultimately it has worked for me, but my demands are three humans in a voice call once a week, no screenshare (use Parsec for that), and occasional text messages.
The Element X is supposed to be the best client, but I can’t find a way to join rooms within a chat. So for now I use Fluffy to join rooms, then back to Element X for actual usage. Kind of bothersome but I’m sure they’ll figure it out since the original Element app has the ability to join rooms.
It surely ain’t very obvious but if anyone else ran this design quirk, you’ve search rooms by starting a new chat
How about Guilded?
Guilded is really similar to Discord, but Roblox bought them so you need a Roblox account to use it. It’s great for voice chat.
I don’t think it’s great to change one walled garden for another. If you are willing to change, better switch to a protocol instead. Even if there’s something wrong with the server, witching between different instances is much easier than between entirely different products.
I agree, but after I tried three FOSS ones that were hard to set up and had very bad voice quality I gave up and tried Guilded which is working great. The most important feature I need is ability to locally mute people which not many apps have for some reason. What would you recommend I use?
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…
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.
Is Telegram available?
Revolt seems to be the best for now. Today they got a lot of money and I hope, they’ll make their best to make it a reasonable discord alternative
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.
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.
IRC.
irssi for cli, hexchat for gui
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
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.
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.
Ah yes, because all Russians are Nazis apparently
I believe revolt is self hosted so everyone can make their own bar.
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.
Russian users who used banned platforms instead of vkontakte aren’t necessarily warmongers
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.
In fact matrix is great
How? A few weeks back I had to deal with getting spammed with invites to CSAM rooms. I’ve also been harassed many times on it. And not to mention lack of moderation tools and state issues.
Do not have really the problems you mentioned,but sadly it’s more a problem of community than service …
Mfw state resets (problem in server) is actually just because of the users
Tried this but it seems to be very badly broken. Couldn’t get hardly anything working…
I’m in the same boat and also looking for a privacy-respecting platform for communicating with family and friends. So I’d also like to add items that are not yet mentioned to the list of suggestions:
- Jami
- Peer Calls - can be selfhosted; you can try it out straight away using their flagship instance located here.
