Requesting advice!

[thecityinspeech@indieweb.social]

Requesting advice! Friend group is seeking to transition off of Discord and onto a self-hosted alternative. We've got a decent number of folks with IT & software engineering experience, but not a lot of direct experience with hosting tools of this sort. One member previously self-hosted and liked TeamSpeak, but persistent text chat is an absolute must for our gang. What should I be considering as I research options? Are there solutions mature enough to invite less technical users in?

[soleluke@hachyderm.io]

@thecityinspeech

Is there a need for voice and persistent chat to be provided via the same service?

Pretty much everything I can find that is all-in-one seems bad or not mature enough that I want to use it. If you've got a group willing to use a service for each need, then teamspeak/mumble + your pick among matrix/irc/XMPP seems like the "established open source" route. My college gaming group used an IRC server and mumble server hosted by a member and I generally liked the experience. Hexchat worked well enough for the non technical folks to get on irc, and the mumble client is functional, but not sleek and shiny.

I feel like the sell is too hard for my current groups, so I'm holding out hope for Roomy (https://a.roomy.space) or Fluxer (https://fluxer.app) to be viable in the near future. But they also seem to have their own issues.

[kathmandu@stranger.social]

@thecityinspeech

This thread mentions 3 things as alternatives to Discord:

Discourse (with guide to using it), phpBB, and Flarum.

Neatnik (@neatnik@social.lol)

Discourse is another excellent self-hosted alternative to Discord. I’ve just published a guide on how to get it up and running on your own server for less than the cost of a Discord “server boost” (bleh). https://www.neatnik.net/setting-up-a-discourse-server

social.lol (social.lol)

[thecityinspeech@indieweb.social]

@soleluke This is very helpful! Thank you for all of the valuable insight. I think for this particular group, one-service-to-rule-them-all is not strictly necessary, but I do a good deal of community organizing with groups also expressing interest in these types of tools, and for those non-technical audiences, I'm looking to evaluate whatever most closely imitates the ease of use that these folks are accustomed to in their big platform alternatives.

[thecityinspeech@indieweb.social]

@Kathmandu Thank you!

[soleluke@hachyderm.io]

@thecityinspeech

To me, Matrix has the smoothest onboarding experience (assuming you are fine with the main instance - it is pretty analogous to mastodon onboarding in my experience), but it doesnt have built in voice, video or screensharing. It also seems to have a lot of negative things get discovered as people look into it more - both technically and politically/philosophically. I am not an expert on its issues at all, but if you do some poking around on the matrix tag here, you probably can find links to read and make your own determination.

[thecityinspeech@indieweb.social]

@soleluke Thank you, will dig a bit deeper into that protocol with this awareness.

[janvenetor@mastodontti.fi]

@thecityinspeech @Kathmandu I used to self host rocket.chat.

It's mature, a bit clunky.

Now I do nextcloud and am considering nextcloud talk.

Both are huge and venerable.

[josh@social.joshtriplett.org]

I think it may make sense to use a combination of two things.

For persistent text chat with all the trimmings and more, I'd recommend Zulip, which is Open Source, and which you can either self-host or have Zulip host for you; because it's open, you can always move from the latter to the former as needed.

For audio, video, and screen sharing, I think Jitsi is the best available option at the moment. That is *also* Open Source and supports either self-hosting or having them host it for you. And it's integrated with Zulip, so you can hit one button in Zulip and get a voice or video call people can join.