Yeah sorry, I was mostly just making a joke there.

What do we do now that shitty government policies are forcing us off of Discord? Revolt.

The complaints are definitely fair. It’s noticeably less polished than Discord. But well worth trying out to see if that polish is an issue that will actually matter to you.

I heard about for in the Uk and aussielands, because they are leading the way in subjugating the internet to ai, to id every account

Fwiw Australia’s law quite specifically says they can’t require ID for age verification, requires that if the user does choose to use ID it cannot be used for any other purposes.

Aside from ID, they’re allowed a variety of options for age detection. Most of them seem to have gone with a short of sentiment analysis type technique. They work out you’re over 16 based on the fact that your account is 10+ years old (and not many <6 year olds have accounts) or you’re talking about politics more than Bluey. That’s not collecting any data they didn’t already have.

Matrix does exactly that.

I’ve only used it for private chats, but you can also have a public discoverable chat. And you can sign up at one of many federated servers. The biggest and likely easiest being matrix.org.

Is the third one of these a chat app or a verb?

Yeah the last thing you didn’t bring up was screen share. I’ve found Element’s screen sharing to be rather lacklustre. It’s share whole screen only, rather than having application or game-specific sharing (and Discord’s gamer-specific feature of detecting you’re in a game and immediately surfacing the option to share that is excellent here). And when I’ve used it, I’ve found audio from the game doesn’t make it through, and I’m not sure if it’s possible (I’ve never really tried looking through all the deep options) to send game audio while also having your mic, without using third-party software to mix the two together into one stream—which would necessarily break your choice detection filter.

Wait, there are still ABC stores?

Matrix would be great for that. You just need a single room for that sort of thing, and the video support is pretty great.

Hear hear!

Matrix is an ok alternative to Discord for what Discord does.

Support forums are not an appropriate use of Discord, or of Matrix. Discourse is pretty great open source forum software. NodeBB forums even added ActivityPub support! I never particularly like when companies use Reddit as a primary communication method, and for the same reason I’d rather they didn’t use Lemmy or Piefed, but all of these are vastly better options than Discord, Matrix, or other un-indexable private chats.

Its only available in DMs not groupchats

Oh right, nice catch. Yeah I only use it as a Discord alternative, so no audio calls for me yet.

Anyway, audio calls in that way aren’t quite what I’m after anyway. They’ll work. They’ll do the job. Just like the existing video calls with webcams turned off do the job. But the Discord style chat room with an assumption of audio only on voice detection, with robust screensharing (including PC audio!) capabilities in an otherwise audio-only call is what I’m really after.

They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top

I don’t see that. Video, Threads, Room Info, People is all I have at the top of my rooms.

Like the other replies you’ve gotten, I never really liked “server”. It implies something very different from what it is.

Rooms is pretty obvious and straightforward, I think. And to be honest I rather like Spaces too. It’s a lot less immediately clear, but there’s something ineffable about it that just feels right to me. I’m just glad to see the old Communities feature (which was their now-deprecated first attempt at a Discord-like functionality) is hard to even find out about now. When I first joined I was confused about the difference between Communities and Spaces and had to search to figure out which to use, but when checking now to remember what the old one was called, I found it hard to even find the name of it.

I would have said Matrix is a kind of hybrid. Obviously Matrix has 1 on 1 chats and individual IRC-like rooms, which are not at all like Discord.

But the addition of Spaces is very much positioning itself as an open Discord alternative.

I’ve seen QR-based login before as an option. (Heck, I was an early adopter of SQRL…or tried to be. Sadly that protocol never went anywhere.) But it’s not typically mandatory, and I don’t think most casual users (the kinds of people who just reuse the same password everywhere rather than using a password manager) aren’t likely to be especially comfortable with it.

Oh, it does? I’ve always logged in with username and password.

Discord has E2EE?

I and my group are all just on matrix.org. We didn’t want the risk of dealing with potentially less reliable servers or federation.

We also use Element desktop and Element X for Android. I think I read that the old Element might have supported audio calls? But these days, it’s video only, with the very weird UX of having two different options for video calls (one being, as you say, Jitsi). I assume there’s a historical reason for that, but it doesn’t make much sense as a design today, to me.

Having Discord-style audio rooms built around the idea that people are not broadcasting all the time (as opposed to the more chat-like design of today) would be one of the most impactful comparatively low effort (considering they already have video calls working) things they could do, IMO.

Your 142.x.x.x will be your public IP address. All devices on your network share that public IP. They all have a unique private IP address too, accessible only on your network. It probably starts with 192.168.x.x, but it could be 10.x.x.x or even less likely 172.16–31.x.x.

If you want to operate a web server that users can go to by typing https://youdomain.com/, you’ll need to forward from ports 80 and 443 through to the internal IP address of your server, using the “port forwarding” settings on your router. What port on the internal IP you route to depends on how your server is configured. But a basic default configuration is fairly likely to be 80 and 443, too.

Since you have a reverse proxy, all traffic from your router should go to that. Then you use that to send the appropriate traffic to the appropriate server based on whatever rules you want to apply. (e.g. siteone.mydomain.com goes to server 1, sitetwo.mydomain.com goes to server 2, or mydomain.com/siteone goes to server 1, etc.).

It’s definitely nowhere near as polished as Discord, but it does a good enough job for my small gaming group to have moved over.

The equivalent of a Discord server is a Space, which is made up of Rooms (channels). Unfortunately Rooms are displayed in order of recent activity; admins can’t define a set order to group things by function.

The two weirdest things: there are no audio calls, you have to do a video call and turn off the webcam. And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it’s just strange).

Ah it was Kurzgesagt? Yeah that…really checks out. That dude is sketchy af.

I’ve just gone down a rabbit hole of old Reddit threads. This comment by Brian of Real Engineering is the source for that claim. At the very least, it shows they weren’t interested in putting in effort to grow the platform into the fantastic place it has become since their departure. At worst, Brian’s speculation as to their motives paints them in a very unflattering light.

But it seems it was my mistaken recollection that it was specifically about discussions relating to the “creator-owned” business structure.

You can read further down in that thread for a comment of my own summarising why exactly I described Kurzgesagt as “sketchy af” above. Or for more detail, here’s another thread on the subject where I go back and forth with someone staunchly intent on defending Kurzgesagt despite the overwhelming evidence against him.

I’m pretty sure this is the thread that got me silently banned from all CGP Grey–related subreddits, too. Not a proper ban, but all my comments are silently auto-removed, presumably by Grey’s bot account that mods all his subreddits. I went months cheerfully commenting in Hello Internet (RIP) threads and getting no engagement before I realised I had been banned. Back then I was actually a huge fan of Grey’s in spite of my growing frustrations with some of his content, so that really stung.

Oh and just for fun, here’s another thread I came across with some other people detailing some of the grift-like penny-pinching behaviour from Grey, wherein he treats his audience not as a community but as a resource to be extracted…until it’s no longer useful: https://old.reddit.com/r/JetLagTheGame/comments/1iom4n4/whats_bens_beef_with_cgp_grey/