I’ve checked out Stoat and Fluxer. Both seem like they would be the easiest to convince your friends to move.
Fluxer in particular seems a little ahead of Stoat with screen sharing and video calls. Both have the main Discord features, text and voice channels, etc.
I’m rooting for Fluxer now though because they’re AGPLv3 without a CLA. So the code will be free forever.
I tried out Matrix as well with Element. It was a complete disaster. The few friends I convinced to try it hated it, the UI was buggy AF, the whole the thing was slow, and we couldn’t even see our chats because something, something encryption. They quickly retreated back to Discord.
Slack has the same issues as Discord, so that’s automatically discarded.
Mattermost and Zulip I don’t know too much about. I think Mattermost is open core, which is lame. So that’s out.
Fluxer in particular seems a little ahead of Stoat with screen sharing and video calls
That is surprising since Fluxer started last month (and its wikipedia article was started today) while Stoat has been around since 2021 (it was called Revolt until it renamed last year).
Stoat does have voice and video and screensharing in their desktop+web clients at least, but as of this comment in August it still wasn’t implemented in mobile clients. And also it wasn’t/isn’t enabled on their flagship instance due to the high cost of running a free video relay.
I’m rooting for Fluxer now though because they’re AGPLv3 without a CLA. So the code will be free forever.
Stoat is also AGPLv3; do they require copyright assignment? From a quick look I didn’t see any indication that they do.
Ah, yeah. I guess he created the official repo for this in January of this year. According to him, he’s been working on this for 5 years. The very first commit he has in the repo is huge. It seems like he already had most of the code working already.
Personally, I don’t think that’s weird. I have several projects in private git repos. If I were to make any of those public, I would for sure copy stuff over to a new repo and ditch the old one.
Stoat does have voice and video and screensharing in their desktop+web clients at least, but as of this comment in August it still wasn’t implemented in mobile clients
Ah, I didn’t know. Cool!
And also it wasn’t/isn’t enabled on their flagship instance due to the high cost of running a free video relay.
This makes sense. They need more money to keep the project going. That’s why I don’t totally mind Fluxer selling Plutonium. Open Source can’t (fully) run on hopes and dreams. Actually, seems like Stoat doesn’t have a donate button anywhere. Even just getting enough donations to rent a faster VPS would help. The main instance is slow. Which I understand why. It’s just unfortunately that if someone compares them with Fluxer, Fluxer is gonna be faster. :/
Stoat is also AGPLv3; do they require copyright assignment?
I don’t know when you tried it, but Element has come a long way. I had an experience simple to yours when I first tried it but now it’s pretty functional. We don’t do much with video, but so far everyone I’ve convinced to start switching from Discord has successfully switched to Matrix and only one of them has had any trouble.
I’ve checked out Stoat and Fluxer. Both seem like they would be the easiest to convince your friends to move.
Fluxer in particular seems a little ahead of Stoat with screen sharing and video calls. Both have the main Discord features, text and voice channels, etc.
I’m rooting for Fluxer now though because they’re AGPLv3 without a CLA. So the code will be free forever.
I tried out Matrix as well with Element. It was a complete disaster. The few friends I convinced to try it hated it, the UI was buggy AF, the whole the thing was slow, and we couldn’t even see our chats because something, something encryption. They quickly retreated back to Discord.
Slack has the same issues as Discord, so that’s automatically discarded.
Mattermost and Zulip I don’t know too much about. I think Mattermost is open core, which is lame. So that’s out.
Really, the only options are Stoat or Fluxer.
That is surprising since Fluxer started last month (and its wikipedia article was started today) while Stoat has been around since 2021 (it was called Revolt until it renamed last year).
Stoat does have voice and video and screensharing in their desktop+web clients at least, but as of this comment in August it still wasn’t implemented in mobile clients. And also it wasn’t/isn’t enabled on their flagship instance due to the high cost of running a free video relay.
Stoat is also AGPLv3; do they require copyright assignment? From a quick look I didn’t see any indication that they do.
Ah, yeah. I guess he created the official repo for this in January of this year. According to him, he’s been working on this for 5 years. The very first commit he has in the repo is huge. It seems like he already had most of the code working already.
Personally, I don’t think that’s weird. I have several projects in private git repos. If I were to make any of those public, I would for sure copy stuff over to a new repo and ditch the old one.
Ah, I didn’t know. Cool!
This makes sense. They need more money to keep the project going. That’s why I don’t totally mind Fluxer selling Plutonium. Open Source can’t (fully) run on hopes and dreams. Actually, seems like Stoat doesn’t have a donate button anywhere. Even just getting enough donations to rent a faster VPS would help. The main instance is slow. Which I understand why. It’s just unfortunately that if someone compares them with Fluxer, Fluxer is gonna be faster. :/
Yeah, Stoat is also AGPLv3! I think they required a CLA when they were revolt. But not sure about today.
I don’t know when you tried it, but Element has come a long way. I had an experience simple to yours when I first tried it but now it’s pretty functional. We don’t do much with video, but so far everyone I’ve convinced to start switching from Discord has successfully switched to Matrix and only one of them has had any trouble.