Can we all not move to another proprietary paid service again? Good god.
Stoat has been wonderfully simple so far and is free and open source. It’s got voice chat. It’s only been about a week of using it so far so please correct me if I’m wrong or point out issues that I haven’t seen or mentioned.
It seems like the most realistic option to me since I doubt the masses wanna get into self hosting.
I just spent a week trying to set up my own server and good lord it was such a battle I gave up. Matrix? Up in like half an hour. Shame because my friends are so much more interested in Revolt lmao. Just gonna give them some time to sort out their business before trying again.
It’s all about friction. As long as the user has to pick an instance they will always hesitate to pick any federated service. The average user will always choose the path of least resistance.
Proprietary services spend a lot of time trying to reduce friction, and it works.
The only solution I can think of would be a three part one:
The main app of a federated service automatically rotates between a pool or reliable, reputable, non-extremist instances where the user can log in with an email and password.
The federated service makes it trivial to migrate accounts amongst instances.
the user can log into their instance threw any other instance perhaps threw oauth.
This would of course require some federated account login system. Hard but not impossible. It could be some sort of Casandra style ring based account service where nodes are part of the ring.
This eliminates the new user friction.
Download app
Sign up
Login
It works anywhere any time with corpo style low friction. You don’t need to think about instances at all till you are ready to.
Using Stoat’s main server raises a privacy concern because it’s UK-based and AFAIK lacks E2EE—UK authorities could seize server data without our knowledge. That effectively means private use requires self-hosting.
Issue with self-hosting Stoat is, it’s currently more complicated than Matrix. This user created a detailed GitHub guide that documents their research and pitfalls for getting Stoat working with voice/video: https://github.com/javif89/stoat-selfhost
The official self-hosted guide (https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted) looks simple at first, but if you look at the compose file, it requires FOURTEEN containers to run and doesn’t yet include voice/video support which will increase complexity.
By contrast, TeamSpeak’s self-hosting appeal is its simplicity: only two services (or one with SQLite) and it works out of the box today.
But I agree — moving from one closed-source silo to another isn’t ideal. I just wish Stoat were easier to run behind the scenes.
For me, a combination of matrix for text chat and mumble for voice is the simplest and most privacy respecting way to self-host a discord alternative.
The official self-hosted guide is actually quite simple and straightforward. I had it set up and going in a half hour or so, and that’s even with removing Caddy and using my existing nginx reverse proxy. It’s intimidating at first-glance, yeah.
That being said, the official self-host guide is also 5 months out of date. The alternative you linked requires jumping through a bunch of hoops because it’s just a small community of enthusiasts hacking together the current version of Stoat for self-hosting.
So I acknowledge that self-hosting current version of Stoat with voice is rather complicated and frustrating right now, but hopefully it becomes as simple as the official self-hosting guide eventually.
This is actually a good point for fluxer. Stoat being UK based isn’t great, I’ll agree with that and it’s something I didn’t even think about until now.
Maybe fluxer being based in sweden (I think) is better? On the surface, I think it is but my knowledge of swedish privacy laws is pretty surface level.
That said, fluxer asks for a date of birth when signing up and also has like pricing tiers and stuff which instantly gives me the ick. Stoat is just like “name and email please” and you’re done lol
It seems like the most realistic option to me since I doubt the masses wanna get into self hosting.
You only need these services as part of a gaming community.
I think you’d have a hard time finding a gaming community that didn’t contain at least a few people who could handle installing a docker container on a VPS.
The trade off, to save minimal administrative overhead (compared to moderation and such), you give up complete control over how your system is run, how your data is divulged and any control over future cost increases.
Everyone should be self-hosting (and also running Linux, but we’ll beat that horse later) if they’re running a gaming community.
I’ll agree we should all self host and be running Linux. While I use Stoat, I’d much prefer if everyone went to matrix too, don’t get me wrong! I use Matrix but don’t know anyone else who does. I know a couple other people who use Stoat though.
Yeah honestly. Running the teamspeak server executable is hardly selfhosting, and they’re just another closed source proprietary service. Cool they’re still around after all these years I guess but they shouldn’t even be considered as a migration option.
Stoat and Fluxer are both open source, very straightforward and familiar, and I believe self-hostable. Much easier for casual users than Matrix too.
I know folks like the other commenter mention that Matrix is simple and all but I think for the average person that’s just wrong.
Maybe in the fediverse our vision of what the average person can do/understand with/about tech is skewed but trying to get some of my friends onto Matrix would be an absolute nightmare.
Not to mention the VAST majority of people don’t like playing tech detective to figure things out, even if they could, and just wanna sign up and move on with their lives. That is something stoat as offered so far while remaining free and open source.
Yeah honestly. Like I work in IT, have my own home server, run linux on everything, etc etc etc, but even I found Matrix to be a convoluted mess, and most clients have their own issues. I can’t imagine trying to get someone who’s not tech-savvy to try it out.
Ok, I don’t feel to bad now lol I also found Matrix to just kinda be a mess. I don’t run home servers or anything but I’m a fairly experienced linux user and like to poke around tech and all that. I felt kinda dumb for not figuring it out tbh haha
Managing your encryption keys is tricky for normal people (I know someone who signed up for it on incognito because they weren’t sure about it yet then got a bunch of confusing popups when they signed on with their phone).
Room organization is missing a layer used on discord (server->room instead of list of rooms) leading to confusing moderation structures and nearly required manual organization of rooms if you’re in more than 10.
notifications rules can be obtuse.
having different commands based on the clients used can lead to confusion.
most clients have security related popups that just confuse people (This person reset their identity!).
people can struggle with how to properly interact over federation, much like in the fediverse
screensharing tools just aren’t there yet
Things have been getting better fast for matrix, but its just not ready for the masses IMO. I still suggest it when I can when the use case makes sense.
Everyone needs at least one friend who’s willing to break their own brain about tech, so they can host all the neat shit! Plus if everyone chips in it’s pretty cheap
I don’t get why so many people are saying this. Afaik, it doesn’t have channels within servers like Discord and Slack, which I feel is a defining feature in the text chat part of the apps.
Oh that is like the second most common thing on XMPP! It’s rooms/chats/conversations on servers/conferences/salons, etc. Like, come on, even IRC has that and that was made before I was born.
The one thing that’s complex, or at least bad in the UI I’ve seen for most XMPP clients, is that searchability of rooms is not very good. Like, discoverability is, but to my knowledge there’s no way to actually filter for rooms based on a keyword, you either get the whole roomlist for a server or nothing.
Me either tbh so I did a bit of digging and found that stoat has been around a bit longer and (I know this is a dumb metric for this) seems to have more stars and forks on their github which indicates to me it’ll be around longer.
That said, fluxer has nicer UI imo and I think it has a few more features so it might outdo stoat in the future idk.
Ultimately, I think both are great and likely to be around for a while so just pick one and go with it. They both are open source, use the same license and all that. So you can’t go wrong.
One thing that worries me a little about fluxer is this:
Finally, we can offer commercial licences to companies that want to run Fluxer internally without being bound by the AGPLv3 copyleft terms. This is enabled via a contributor-friendly CLA, but it doesn’t create a separate “enterprise edition”. It’s still the same Fluxer software everyone else uses.
They have a CLA on contributions. So while today Fluxer is licensed as AGPLv3, tomorrow they can pull the rug and change the license, just like everyone else has been doing.
Yeah… I hate watching people make the same mistake over and over. I guess we just have to take the lead and build the communities that we need over on Stoat and Matrix.
Stoat, both its app and website refuse to open on my mobile data. I doubt it’s only happening to me. Teamspeak at least lets people host and have control of their own servers.
Can we all not move to another proprietary paid service again? Good god.
Stoat has been wonderfully simple so far and is free and open source. It’s got voice chat. It’s only been about a week of using it so far so please correct me if I’m wrong or point out issues that I haven’t seen or mentioned.
It seems like the most realistic option to me since I doubt the masses wanna get into self hosting.
I just spent a week trying to set up my own server and good lord it was such a battle I gave up. Matrix? Up in like half an hour. Shame because my friends are so much more interested in Revolt lmao. Just gonna give them some time to sort out their business before trying again.
Stoat has no voice chat and streaming.
It’s all about friction. As long as the user has to pick an instance they will always hesitate to pick any federated service. The average user will always choose the path of least resistance.
Proprietary services spend a lot of time trying to reduce friction, and it works.
The only solution I can think of would be a three part one:
This would of course require some federated account login system. Hard but not impossible. It could be some sort of Casandra style ring based account service where nodes are part of the ring.
This eliminates the new user friction.
It works anywhere any time with corpo style low friction. You don’t need to think about instances at all till you are ready to.
Im seeing a huge increase in people using stoat. And its been fun.
If anyone is interested in Retro Games: https://stt.gg/GJh5JHy2
dude hell yeah count me in
coo see you there!
Using Stoat’s main server raises a privacy concern because it’s UK-based and AFAIK lacks E2EE—UK authorities could seize server data without our knowledge. That effectively means private use requires self-hosting.
Issue with self-hosting Stoat is, it’s currently more complicated than Matrix. This user created a detailed GitHub guide that documents their research and pitfalls for getting Stoat working with voice/video: https://github.com/javif89/stoat-selfhost
The official self-hosted guide (https://github.com/stoatchat/self-hosted) looks simple at first, but if you look at the compose file, it requires FOURTEEN containers to run and doesn’t yet include voice/video support which will increase complexity.
By contrast, TeamSpeak’s self-hosting appeal is its simplicity: only two services (or one with SQLite) and it works out of the box today.
But I agree — moving from one closed-source silo to another isn’t ideal. I just wish Stoat were easier to run behind the scenes.
For me, a combination of matrix for text chat and mumble for voice is the simplest and most privacy respecting way to self-host a discord alternative.
The official self-hosted guide is actually quite simple and straightforward. I had it set up and going in a half hour or so, and that’s even with removing Caddy and using my existing nginx reverse proxy. It’s intimidating at first-glance, yeah.
That being said, the official self-host guide is also 5 months out of date. The alternative you linked requires jumping through a bunch of hoops because it’s just a small community of enthusiasts hacking together the current version of Stoat for self-hosting.
So I acknowledge that self-hosting current version of Stoat with voice is rather complicated and frustrating right now, but hopefully it becomes as simple as the official self-hosting guide eventually.
This is actually a good point for fluxer. Stoat being UK based isn’t great, I’ll agree with that and it’s something I didn’t even think about until now.
Maybe fluxer being based in sweden (I think) is better? On the surface, I think it is but my knowledge of swedish privacy laws is pretty surface level.
That said, fluxer asks for a date of birth when signing up and also has like pricing tiers and stuff which instantly gives me the ick. Stoat is just like “name and email please” and you’re done lol
You only need these services as part of a gaming community.
I think you’d have a hard time finding a gaming community that didn’t contain at least a few people who could handle installing a docker container on a VPS.
The trade off, to save minimal administrative overhead (compared to moderation and such), you give up complete control over how your system is run, how your data is divulged and any control over future cost increases.
Everyone should be self-hosting (and also running Linux, but we’ll beat that horse later) if they’re running a gaming community.
I’ll agree we should all self host and be running Linux. While I use Stoat, I’d much prefer if everyone went to matrix too, don’t get me wrong! I use Matrix but don’t know anyone else who does. I know a couple other people who use Stoat though.
Yeah honestly. Running the teamspeak server executable is hardly selfhosting, and they’re just another closed source proprietary service. Cool they’re still around after all these years I guess but they shouldn’t even be considered as a migration option.
Stoat and Fluxer are both open source, very straightforward and familiar, and I believe self-hostable. Much easier for casual users than Matrix too.
I know folks like the other commenter mention that Matrix is simple and all but I think for the average person that’s just wrong.
Maybe in the fediverse our vision of what the average person can do/understand with/about tech is skewed but trying to get some of my friends onto Matrix would be an absolute nightmare.
Not to mention the VAST majority of people don’t like playing tech detective to figure things out, even if they could, and just wanna sign up and move on with their lives. That is something stoat as offered so far while remaining free and open source.
This doe a much better job at saying what I was trying to say haha
Yeah honestly. Like I work in IT, have my own home server, run linux on everything, etc etc etc, but even I found Matrix to be a convoluted mess, and most clients have their own issues. I can’t imagine trying to get someone who’s not tech-savvy to try it out.
Ok, I don’t feel to bad now lol I also found Matrix to just kinda be a mess. I don’t run home servers or anything but I’m a fairly experienced linux user and like to poke around tech and all that. I felt kinda dumb for not figuring it out tbh haha
I’m unsure what is difficult about Matrix.
I’ve had several “casual” friends register and join my space on their own.
Things have been getting better fast for matrix, but its just not ready for the masses IMO. I still suggest it when I can when the use case makes sense.
Hosting it is far from simple
Sure, but I see no need to host when so many cool nerds will gladly host your space for you. Different strokes, I guess.
Everyone needs at least one friend who’s willing to break their own brain about tech, so they can host all the neat shit! Plus if everyone chips in it’s pretty cheap
I’m not sure which horse to bet on Stoat or fluxer.app.
XMPP!
Stoat is dead in the water due to dependency on the UK and not an easy solution to deploy yet.
Fluxer is dead in the water due to license.
I don’t get why so many people are saying this. Afaik, it doesn’t have channels within servers like Discord and Slack, which I feel is a defining feature in the text chat part of the apps.
Oh that is like the second most common thing on XMPP! It’s rooms/chats/conversations on servers/conferences/salons, etc. Like, come on, even IRC has that and that was made before I was born.
The one thing that’s complex, or at least bad in the UI I’ve seen for most XMPP clients, is that searchability of rooms is not very good. Like, discoverability is, but to my knowledge there’s no way to actually filter for rooms based on a keyword, you either get the whole roomlist for a server or nothing.
Me either tbh so I did a bit of digging and found that stoat has been around a bit longer and (I know this is a dumb metric for this) seems to have more stars and forks on their github which indicates to me it’ll be around longer.
That said, fluxer has nicer UI imo and I think it has a few more features so it might outdo stoat in the future idk.
Ultimately, I think both are great and likely to be around for a while so just pick one and go with it. They both are open source, use the same license and all that. So you can’t go wrong.
One thing that worries me a little about fluxer is this:
They have a CLA on contributions. So while today Fluxer is licensed as AGPLv3, tomorrow they can pull the rug and change the license, just like everyone else has been doing.
yeah, I don’t love that
Fluxer feels more full-featured to me
Yeah… I hate watching people make the same mistake over and over. I guess we just have to take the lead and build the communities that we need over on Stoat and Matrix.
Yup, I’m pretty active on the game dev server on stoat. Anyone lurking here, come check it out!
Nice, what’s the link?
https://stoat.chat/server/01JN4QAT47NYTWGB2X0Z7Z1RB5/channel/01JN4QAT47NJP17DD59XCATPC4/01KHMV1GTBETH51GWEVNSN51C9
lemme know if that doesn’t work!
It looks like its not working for me.
AmericansPeople will do anything but just setup XMPP, this is literally what it was invented for.Stoat, both its app and website refuse to open on my mobile data. I doubt it’s only happening to me. Teamspeak at least lets people host and have control of their own servers.
Weird it works perfectly fine on my mobile data.
Yeah, I get “address not found” regardless of browser. I’ll probably be keeping a closer eye on fluxer.
Best of luck in migrating! I wish I had a solution for you
I had problems logging in the other day, which I assume was the server getting hammered.
That’s a separate issue from what I’m having. It only doesn’t work on my verizon cell service. Unfortunately it makes stoat not an option for me.
You can self host stoat.
The fact you can’t use the desktop client with a self hosted server and that there is no public iOS app right now are dealbreakers for me