Teamspeak 5 to be based on the Matrix protocol | Hacker News Reader

Teamspeak 5 to be based on the Matrix protocol

community.teamspeak.com

541 pointscircularfoyers224 comments

Not to be negative, but teamspeak and ventrilo represent some of the biggest failures of 'getting stuck in your lane' ever. They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat. Ventrilo still has no official ios/android app (lol). Both remind me of craigslist, actually- Except that craigslist is still going strong (for now).

Both still exist, granted- And many still use them. Its just that discord really shouldnt exist, it should have been one of these players. The head start they had should have been insurmountable.

Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix) - Its just I so rarely hear about TS/Vent that I thought it worth me shouting into the ether my disappointment I am not talking to all my friends on vent/ts in 2021.

It remains to be seen if Discord has a long term viable business model or whether it will get dumped like Skype, AIM, etc. when they need to monetise it and users get put off by the attempts.

That said, the move will likely be to the next highly funded product in that case, not back to TS/Mumble.

Id be willing to bet discord makes more gross profit from nitro sales in one week than TS/Vent make in a year, combined.

I highly doubt it - what are you basing this on? I personally don't know a single person who actually pays for discord. Most people I know who use Teamspeak pay for it. That being said, Discord is way more popular than Teamspeak, it does remain to be seen if they can heavily monetize.

Go to any public discord server with hundreds of users and you'll see them. I got my friends to pitch in to boost the server so that we can stream to each other in 60 fps but turns out our internet connections cannot handle it

Majority of people I speak with on Discord do infact pay, nitro and server boosting, etc. Both our examples are anecdotal, though.

Any person who uses animated emotes/reacts is paying for discord nitro. It's not just the people who pay for server boosts, that's a higher tier.

I don't know a single person who uses Teamspeak, and every discord server I'm on has at least one person boosting it. I was paying for discord for a while until I did a trim of my budget - but it gets you a shiny icon, you get to use more emojis, and other little things. You may call me a chump, but Discord is a product I value (like public radio ;) ) and so I tossed a coin to them.

you're under 20, right?

Please, go on and tell me how my comment led you a conclusion about my age.

They probably need it, using someone else's computer is not cheap.

Does anyone know how efficient / cheaply they can use their servers? I'm guessing the chat part of the service save for file / image hosting is probably pretty cheap, but the low latency voice chats might be pretty costly, even if they can efficiently host them on virtual servers.

Discord's voice chats have no apparent upper limit in how many concurrent users they support - they basically say "the upper limit is how many your client device is able to support without crapping out".

I haven't read into this but it seems like they're doing peer-to-peer for audio or the server load is INCREDIBLY efficient, given this.

It's not P2P. Here's a technical overview: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-mi...

This is observable to still be the case as an end user. When the discord servers are having issues, people's voices become inaudible. This can be resolved by moving the server to a different, less loaded region, even if that region should have worse connectivity to the users in the voice chat. For example, my raid group often have to bounce our server from Europe to the US to workaround reliability issues on the EU servers.

> It's not P2P. Here's a technical overview

> link describe a P2P WebRTC implementation

what am i missing?

edit: found it. they use a SFU forwarder. That's the cheap version of going full centralization (MCU) benefits. they probably have a better deal on bandwidth than CPU to justify that, or all their use cases work fine with only one person transmitting at once, which gives you the same benefit of a MCU with less cpu usage...

Discord might have a lot of Nitro sales, but that's probably dwarfed by their CDN and bandwidth costs of all the streaming that goes on with it. The infrastructure to relay massive scale of streams (even without transcoding) is not cheap. There's only so many streaming minutes at 720p that a single $9.99 nitro sub can support.

They also do gif transcoding and a bunch of other things that do take actual compute resources that cost money.

They already have plenty. Personal user data and metadata. Remember this is the child of OpenFeint.

No one cares unfortunately. I consider conversations with my friends private. So I do not use discord.

We use Discord in a professional context as a kind of virtual office, with voice channels set up for team offices and meeting rooms. The persistent voice channel is the absolutely crucial benefit above and beyond the "click-to-start-a-call" UX on other platforms.

We only pay $75/month, for two levels of server boosting. It's so underpriced for the corporate usecase, it's practically criminal. We'd probably be willing to pay four or five times as much, especially if it would allow us to host video/screen-shares with more people.

I appreciate that Discord is gamer-focused branding, but their inability to launch more or less the same product under a professional brand is astounding. They're leaving huge sums of money on the table. For example, being able to run a public Discord instance for customer support, with individual rooms per customer, and customer screen sharing and get anybody in the company to leave their team office on the private instance and join the support call in two clicks is mind-blowing.

It's basically a Slack with more useful features and no bullshit.

Isn’t there a bit of a privacy concern though? Seems like a corporate nightmare.

I don't see more issues than with Slack

Less so than with Slack. a) If you're willing to accept using a SaaS for corporate communications, then Discord is no different than Slack. You run the risk that the vendor is recording what you do on the other end of that connection. For what it's worth, such a security stance also requires you to run your own email servers. The IT workload to run all of the above is extremely high, prohibitively so for startups and small companies. Even if, from a security perspective, it would be ideal to host it yourself - for most companies it's simply economically impractical.

b) Granted that you accept the risk of your vendor recording your communications, the odds of those communications being recorded are much, much lower for voice communications than they are for text communications, for the sheer cost of storing voice and video data. Running the audio through speech-to-text before discarding the audio may be a threat, but not for users whose office lingua franca is in a language not supported by contemporary speech-to-text tools, let alone automatically deciphering which language the users in a given voice channel are speaking without it being defined ahead of time.

In short, as long as you're not buying communication services from a competitor, you're probably fine.

Text is recorded, it has to if you want persistant chat.

Audio maybe - but stored indefinitly? No.

By recorded I mean keeping a separate copy, i.e if somebody deletes a message or file in the UI then the malicious vendor doesn't delete their copy of the message or file. That's eminently more feasible for text communications as the costs of storage are so much smaller.

This is the common use of "delete". Just a flag in the db to hide that specific message.

I am similarly astounded that Discord hasn't tried to reach for the enterprise market — if they had good multi-account support, and the ability to have audit logging on corp accounts, I think it would be hands down better than Slack for that use case. It's already better than Slack for personal use cases IMO.

I hope they monetize in that direction rather than ads (Discord seems to still be pretty reliant on VC funding, which makes sense to me since Nitro is pretty cheap and not particularly necessary to use the product) — it seems less soul-eating. They've been dialing back the gamer branding at least, which could help reach a broader audience.

Yes, let's all centralize and commercialize everything and stop making software that you can self host.

Why not both?

Due to network effects, users are a tragedy-of-the-commons resource. The more people use one type of solution, the less people there are to use another. We have to choose, as a society as well as individual agents, which types of solutions we use on principle, not merely what's most popular in the moment, lest we find ourselves stuck in local optima.

Are you familiar with Matrix though? Its very design is intended to mitigate this effect. You can use Matrix and still communicate via a bridge with users on other platforms.

https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction

Well they never were for a seamless purpose. We would mesh Ventrilo and IRC into a real awesome tool but I think we were the intended audience. There weren't millions of us there were tens of thousands of us.

It wasn't till there was millions of users that Discord started targeting them. First there was Curse that got bought out by Twitch and then Discord jumped in.

I still am the cranky guy who thinks IRC is the best communication tool out there and get mad looking at my Slacker screen.

I used IRC regularly for ~20 years and still don't miss it compared to Slack.

I miss the people and the tone of the conversations and some of the aesthetic of clients like BitchX but as a technology, I don't really care.

Wow!! I haven’t thought of BitchX in about 15 years. I wonder if my eggdrops are still up?

Basically this. IRCv3 never really took off and it's not really feature-comparable to the modern chat clients. I still connect to IRC for one project I'm on, but I think IRC will likely be just the last few holdouts from here on out as it's way too late to pull people back in.

Where I live, craigslist has all but been replaced by facebook marketplace. There are too many scammers and too much spam on craigslist.

Doesn't help that Craiglist haven't updated their UI for years, isn't the most user friendly site.

Also having fixed locations isn't great, esp. in the UK. Cities are covered but smaller towns are chopped off under bigger city 'communities'.

As a part-time reseller most of the scams and headaches come from platforms other than CL (FB, Mercari, OfferUp, Poshmark, etc).

Maybe it's just the Bay Area, but CL is almost always better for me. If it's a niche item I'll try Reddit or eBay and have pretty much written off the others.

I disagree. WebRTC is utter nonsense. You neither want to implement nor use it. You never know if it's working. With Mumble (TCP and UDP, both can be used for voice) and Teamspeak you know that when you connect to a server, your connection is working. With WebRTC you only have a vague idea, since HTTP is working, but that doesn't mean much.

I've met the owner of Ventrilo a few times at Quakecon a few years back. Super nice guy, pretty smart and nerdy in a good way. Seems to me the guy got pretty wealthy off Ventrilo in its heyday, and was happy with it. Because as people can go search, Ventrilo is essentially abandonware.

Discord's main benefits are the persistent chat with "slack-like" link embeds, emojis, and whatnot; as well as easier role management; and finally, federated identity.

If Mumble, for instance, could make their chat interface more appealing, and if someone had a lightweight user directory for it and friend management, it might have a chance of competing. But Discord has really taken over.

Good for him. Not every business needs to last and grow forever. That's a mandate that can't be met without selling your soul to VC.

Discord also has a big lead in video support that, IMO, now exceeds anything else. It has flexible group based video chat that naturally extends voice chat. It has broadcasting support so you can stream your gameplay to each other, as well as player-in-player, pop out support, and side-by-side view. Almost all of these features work on mobile as well, including PIP/broadcasting (e.g. I streamed Genshin Impact directly off my phone.)

These may seem like gimmicks, but I use all these features extensively in a server of ~8 regulars to the point we reflexively broadcast to each other and regularly watch each others gameplay, comment, or just use it to hang out. I think this stuff will probably significantly solidify Discord's lead, especially considering the technical infrastructure necessary for features like this.

Before all that though, the slack-like features, and definitely the moderation features for bigger channels, were - still are! - major attractions.

Completely forgot about seamless video conferencing and screensharing.

Yeah, it became obvious around 2010 that Ventrilo was dead and that no further development was going to happen. That's when my group moved to Mumble, which was significantly better (and cheaper for hosting costs) but in the end Discord ended up being a significantly better product in pretty much every way.

In both cases, I feel like they just stopped moving altogether. It wasn't even that they didn't innovate or add new features, they stopped even improving the features they had.

I feel like there's huge market space for an application like Ventrilo that just does a simple voice server really well, without all the frills and bulk that more fully-featured app like Discord has.

I know that we aren't entitled to software support from devs who get what they want out of their software and then move on... but I'm right there with you in being sad that vent/ts haven't stayed the test of time. Discord saw the stagnancy in the market and just ate it right up.

I think Mumble tries to be what you're describing: https://www.mumble.info/

I've used it and it does indeed work well, but I think it struggles with adoption in part because—it turns out—all those frilly features do in fact drive engagement, help suck users into the ecosystem, etc. Basically it's a repeat of IRC->Slack; people tend to migrate away from things that are easy to migrate away from toward things that are hard to migrate away from.

Yea, you hit the nail on the head. Mumble is super functional, but ui/ux is tough to chew.

Engagement is so interesting to me. The notion that an app can be functionally better but practically worse in a marketplace because it doesn't have enough psychological hooks to keep users engaged. What an interesting software development challenge to face.

Agree! As an interesting counterexample to the trend, see video conferencing platforms over the past year: despite contact lists, calendar integration, cross platform whatever and decades of brand recognition, it wasn't Meet and Skype that got all the initial mindshare around pandemic WFH video calling— it was relative newcomer Zoom, whose killer feature was that you could just click a link and be in the meeting.

On the other hand, once Meet finally ripped off that feature, I basically switched to using it all the time. So maybe Zoom's ease-of-entry was an initial winner, but ultimately there was nothing keeping me there when Google offered the same but without the freemium time limits. Perhaps there is a parallel here with a service like Mumble?

Meet had that feature long before the pandemic? Certainly was using it when it was just branded "Hangouts" (no relation to the end user Hangouts) in like 2018.

Google's loss was that they had pushed Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet, formerly "Hangouts, no the other Hangouts") as a business only thing while they were pushing Allo/Duo as the consumer apps and chasing the whatsapp/imessage market that year because of their addiction to launching a new chat app every year.

(Hangouts anecdote: In the early days, hangouts.google.com went to the more well known hangouts for users app which had a contact list UI and a different video call interface. There was another link on the same domain to go to the meeting listing/creation screen now at meet.google.com. I don't think there was any way from one to the other in the UI, Google had a g.co/hangouts link to get to it and I think the unshortened URL just had an extra underscore component in the path. I guess they were still on the fence over whether to launch Meet as its own thing or as part of old Hangouts, before they decided to shut down old hangouts)

I had used Meet in a Gapps context pre-pandemic, and perhaps due to the confusion you describe was unable to create a meeting in my GMail account and get a link for people to click on to join— the closest I could do was send them a calendar invite, and that was unacceptable.

Later on, it became possible to just go to meet.google.com and click "Start a Meeting".

Yeah, the interface with "Start A Meeting" was always there, but as far as I can tell, you had to know the special URL to bring it up - we found out about it on the google branded instructions on our hardware devices in the meeting room.

I can't understand the argument that Mumble is functionally better. I used Vent/TS/Mumble/Skype for years while playing WoW and within 2 minutes of downloading Discord it clearly blew all of them out of the water. Joining a new server was frictionless, channels and settings were clear and understandable. It combined everything from those 4 services into 1 and did it better. I wouldn't call that "frilly features" it's just a flat out superior product.

Oh yeah, that reminds me of the one time I wanted to join a TeamSpeak server, but my "security level" was not high enough. My CPU had to calculate some stuff for 2 minutes to get that required security level, it's apparently an anti Spammer measurement.

Discord is easier to use, no doubt about it. However that ease of use has been achieved by ruthlessly cutting control. Mumble options have I think literally 100 dials you can turn to tweak audio. Discord has like three. The Mumble options require a lot of knowledge to even comprehend, which is why they're not good for popularity. However these options are a godsend when you run into a weird audio issue.

Teamspeak and those tools currently have cross-channel communication which is very useful for large squad games. They are definitely a minority as most games are like 5 players per team.

So they have their niche uses (mumble too). guilded.gg is trying to fix that issue.

Having said all that, TS is definitely not a freemium business model. And they did well for themselves. But they are certainly stuck in their old ways.

Craigslist had many attempts to modernize. Turns out... people like the minimalistic nature of it. There are like a billion competitors, and they all failed.

I wouldn’t say that all the Craigslist competitors failed. Dozens of successful startups represent the unbundling of a single category on Craigslist into a more feature rich experience.

> unbundling

and re-bundling:

https://acrowdedspace.com/post/166470695392/the-re-bundling-...

I'm a member of several squad gaming communities on discord. We always do our briefings in teamspeak for the better audio codecs and features for ducking and crowd control.

Teamspeak Server seems to be free for 32 players now.

No idea why you wouldn't just use Discord though.

For bigger groups it is actually quite good. Its also a more lightweight experience as opposed to Discord with all the chat ect. functionality. And I have found it to be more ressourceful than Discord.

That being said nowadays I use Discord 95% of the time.

I don't know if it's actively maintained anymore because it's been a while since I played, but there was a mod for Arma 2 that simulated real radio physics and depended on Teamspeak.

Still maintained: https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2

It looks like progress is being made on Mumble support: https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2/pull/980

> They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat.

> Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix)

As a former developer of a chat app that used Matrix, I'm actually thinking that this is a good direction for Teamspeak and has the potential to make it a viable alternative to Discord. Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases.

And this is of course something the world badly needs right now.

> Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases.

As an ex-heavy user of teamspeak I can tell you that nobody cared about that.

Yes, I think I joined a TS server twice in my life when it wasn't part of a guild or clan or something for online gaming.

So it 100% did what it should do. These days most people seem to use Discord which also works fine for up to 30 people (didn't try more) or Mumble (works fine for hundreds), in my filter bubble

It matters. In some parts of competitive gaming scene, Teamspeak requires a VPN because of DDoS attacks. Discord doesn't suffer from this, neither does Matrix.

How so? That seems like an extraordinary claim.

There is nothing extraordinary about this claim. Without using a VPN you can get DDoSed. A DDoS is very cheap and easy. This happens in competitive gaming. Had it happen to myself and peers multiple times. Also, your voice server can get DDoSed as well. Seen that occur as well.

You can get DDOSed with and without a VPN. Your IP does not change. You probably leak your IP somewhere and people then DDOS that.

> You probably leak your IP somewhere

I probably leaked my home address somewhere as well. Doesn't mean you got it.

Which is why you do use the VPN for gaming-related purposes such as a voice chat service, while when you visit Hacker News a VPN isn't necessary.

VPNs work adequately for this purpose. They work terrific to avoid civil lawsuits as well. What they're terrible for is avoiding law enforcement. But that isn't what we're discussing here.

>Which is why you do use the VPN for gaming-related purposes such as a voice chat service, while when you visit Hacker News a VPN isn't necessary.

No you usually don't. Games and voice chat don't usually leak your IP to someone else. P2P in games is very rare, as is voice chat. Discord/Mumble/Teamspeak don't reveal your IP to a random user. Now if you join a Mumble/Teamspeak server, the admin can of course see your IP. But if you get ddosed right after you join such a server ... you know who is responsible.

>VPNs work adequately for this purpose. They work terrific to avoid civil lawsuits as well. What they're terrible for is avoiding law enforcement. But that isn't what we're discussing here.

True

You're talking about casual gaming on public Team Speak / Ventrilo servers.

I'm talking about gaming where the voice chat server is owned or administrated by a clan/group/guild/team (or whatever nomenclature). If you're half serious gaming, you don't use public servers. Their reliability is comparable to Discord, minus the profiling.

Then where do you leak the IP that will get you ddosed?

I wasn't talking about public vs "private" servers. The fact that the admin can see your IP applies to all.

Corrupt admin on a private, rival server.

Avoidable (why should I go there if I have my own?) and easily detectable (I only get ddosed after joining that server).

Because you got a match against them? Because you have friends in their group? Or peers? In the game I played, the top players knew each other.

Actually, you got a good idea who does the DDoS; "supporters" (hooligans) of group X, who got your IP from admin of voice chat server of group X.

>Because you got a match against them? Because you have friends in their group? Or peers? In the game I played, the top players knew each other.

So it's avoidable. Just use another server which maybe you, or a neutral party controls. Doesn't matter if they know eachother. Having a match against them is not a factor, if you play vs. them you don't need to be in voice chat with your enemy to begin with, but maybe you have an example of a game where this is common.

>Actually, you got a good idea who does the DDoS; "supporters" (hooligans) of group X, who got your IP from admin of voice chat server of group X.

Then don't join group X. It's simple really. Or you gather evidence, seems simple enough if you just write timestamps.

You don't know beforehand who is going to DDoS you, or when. So, re: avoidable, a sensible solution is to just use a VPN for that specific purpose. Its easy to set up, cheap, and the added latency for voice chat is negligible.

Yes, but you know it afterwards. It's the overkill solution to a (probably) very small problem.

You don't have to route 0/0 through the VPN...

Then it's even more useless. Just use tethering.

Instead Discord goes down globally if Cloudflare has a problem, which already happened multiple times.

If Cloudflare have problems, so does a large part of WWW.

Not Teamspeak (or Mumble) servers.

Much more susceptible to DDoS than Cloudflare.

You can just chose another server. Can't do with Cloudflare (or Discord).

Discord "server" admins can set a different region for their server to work around some types of outages. I've had to do this once.

I am not talking about public servers. If your team/clan's voice server is being DDoSed. Bonus points if a member hosts the Mumble or TS server.

There is not much difference. If your team's voice server is getting ddosed (for whatever reason), there are lots of public servers that allow channel creation.

Yeah, and there's Discord, which also has group chat with history, and a decent interface.

What Team Speak, Mumble, and especially Ventrilo have going for it is that they are more lightweight. However, Ventrilo has a strange latency which cannot be solved (except by moving on). Team Speak, Mumble, and Discord don't suffer from this. Also, Ventrilo cannot be self-hosted (while Team Speak and Mumble can).

What year was this? Nobody cared about censorship when Teamspeak was in its prime. Many definitely do now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

> Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything "right" and still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market.

Here is a more official-looking statement: https://community.teamspeak.com/t/beta-signup/13749/50

> We use the Matrix protocol only for the messenger part. The rest does not require a different TeamSpeak server.

interesting, I am speechless

This is rather unusual for a commercial service

What part of it? Lots of commercial services are built on open protocols. HTTP is probably the most prominent example, but even in the IM world it is (was?) not that odd to see a commercial service use IRC under the hood.

Facebook and Google talk used to use xmpp

Google Talk's usage of XMPP was more of an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish than _actual_ adoption.

It may have been. But I wouldn't be surprised if the people who started it actually wanted a properly federated standardized XMPP.

Of course then leadership got to it :'(

There were a few months more than 10 years ago when you could use one XMPP client for all your various social/chat accounts. I want to say around 2008 ?

Yes... I remember using pidgin for that, and I believe there was some kind of proxy I used to link up IRC too. Those were the days.

same, that was the golden era of IM, using Pidgin for MSN, fb, google,...

More than a few months, I used that for years. Even after Google announced the shutting down of their XMPP service, it worked for years.

> Google Talk's usage of XMPP was more of an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish than _actual_ adoption.

That would have been an actual strategy, and probably would have worked, but from what I could tell they just sort of fumbled around without really committing.

As I recall, the Embrace was half-hearted, the implementation was pretty standard with no Extensions, and they never really got around to an Extinguish phase, they eventually just phased out support for XMPP clients at all.

The only way I think Google's incoherence of multiple overlapping stabs at messaging over many years makes sense is as internal maneuvering and jockeying for position among execs playing chess with the various engineering teams and end users as pawns.

They extinguished their own service by killing Google Talk and replacing it with Hangouts. They never dropped XMPP from Talk, they just never implemented it in Hangouts. Talk and Wave really started Google's churn of messaging apps, which has seemed to just hurt themselves.

> They never dropped XMPP from Talk, they just never implemented it in Hangouts.

ISTR that they did back off of XMPP support in Google Talk to some extent a bit before that last move. Something about not allowing incoming connection requests from non-Google accounts by default IIRC.

WhatsApp is, or used to be, based on a heavily modified version of ejabberd, which is a XMPP server written in Erlang.

In the continuation of this. Open source gets a lot of credit, but it deserves even more - companies, governments, institutions need to acknowledge it. Open source is jet fuel for the IT/technology industries, the ultimate commoditization of portable software.

Discord uses IRC for it's chat

Can you connect to Discord using a standard IRC client?

Is that true?

It was, for very early revisions of Discord.

It has some IRC stylings in the UI with the #channels etc. but it's not IRC.

Are you sure you're not thinking of Twitch?

I think Discord has always used it's own thing (or at least I've never heard of this).

Twitch, on the other hand, did used to use a very heavily customized version of IRC for it's chat. Not sure if it still does.

It did as of last year.

I used to use custom desktop clients where the chat was basically just an irc client that automatically joined whichever Twitch Stream I was watching.

Maybe on the backend. But maybe you mistake it for Twitch? They use IRC and you can use normal IRC clients to connect.

Ah so it's only for the chat.. So they don't use Jitsi for voice by the sounds of it (which is what Matrix uses for voice).

Makes sense but it would have been nice to have been fully open source-based.

> which is what Matrix uses for voice

Matrix also has its own voice/video, but it's not considered entirely ready for prime time yet, hence the Jitsi embeds.

Matrix uses its own voice/video for 1:1, which is very nearly ready for prime time (we've been iterating a lot on it over the last few months, and are about to declare it open for business).

We embed Jitsi for voice/video conferences, but we're experimenting more and more with native Matrix conferencing over the course of this year.

Aha I wasn't aware of that, thanks for enlightening me! I didn't know there was built-in conferencing at all. This is great!

Thank god.

That would have removed a large piece of the competitive edge for them. You don't swap out your core advantage.

I'm glad to see TeamSpeak is still out there. I totally dropped it as soon as Discord became popular, not because I didn't like it - but literally everyone moved over, I didn't want to be left behind.

Totally can see how some folks out here value their data a lot more and want to keep things private! That's where TeamSpeak will always thrive!

Here's a little bit of a story-time anecdote: Back when I was in school, we used TeamSpeak to talk after hours, it was like the equivalent of people double (or 1.5x) my age spending hours and hours on the phone and their parents yelling "GET OFF THE PHONE". It was a win win situation because with ADSL (3mbps lol) I could be connected all day and not hog the phone line, additionally the in-built chat to whisper things was good enough that we could exchange links for funny images/flash games etc.

The voice quality was never bad, it took a little server configuration to get it just right, and the ability to record your voice and the conversation made for some hilarious clips compilation throughout the years, sometimes we still share some of those clips to remember what it was like to have a squeaky teenage voice.

I spent thousands of hours on TeamSpeak and also tried Ventrilo/Mumble - but I was defo a team TeamSpeak kid...Also I really liked the fact that TeamSpeak had a public servers list that we could just join when someone forgot to pay the bill for our own server. Yep we rotated...so it wouldn't be the burden of 1 person paying for everyone!

Speaking of paying the bill, it was always just a couple of dollars PayPal'd over to someone who had a larger servers, basically sub-renting a whole room and subrooms...made us feel like adults paying our own bills :)

Thanks for allowing me to drive down memory lane!

I have a personal TeamSpeak server for my friend group since forever. I don't know if it's nostalgia, or I'm just old (31) but I can't imagine replacing it ever. Initially for gaming sessions, it became a place to hangout when you're on the computer, whatever you are doing.

It's light weight, usable on my phone, self-hosted, no emoji-fiesta, can send the one-off chat message that I NEVER need history of. It just works and it's OURS. Once in a while when it's down all of my friends panic.

I always thought there was a missing consumer app for my use case. There was/is Houseparty but I thought that video is too much. Clubhouse seems like it's doing something right but still not on point re. dropping in to a "familiar" place and hanging.

Discord on the other hand just feels so alienating to me.

This is great news for Matrix also. With a widely known project like Teamspeak adopting it as a protocol, others might follow.

Speaking of Teamspeak 5 - I hope the new client doesn't hog multiple gigabytes of RAM. Being lightweight is one of the reasons I prefer Teamspeak over Discord.

The current beta uses 7 processes with a total RAM of 139MB, so not as bad as some electron apps.

Old TS3 client uses 60MB.

And then we end up with unfederated networks which matrix is supposed to be all about.

The point of an open source federated communications tool is that you can make your own federation if you want to, with your own policy.

Yeah, but it clashes with the mail analogy that is used to promote federation.

But what makes me wonder is the choice of words "based on matrix" instead of "using matrix". So even if you wanted you couldn't federate.

Assuming they do wish to maintain interoperability, you can use matrix while extending the base "events" that are sent to clients. So it may be that essentially Teamspeaks client/server will support the main specification "m.room" events, such as joining, leaving, adding/editing titles, etc, while also exposing their own "com.teamspeak.event" addons (which might be invites to voice channels or recordings or something specific like that), which so long as the client says "oh hey, I know those, speak them to me" will work fine, and any other client could still get the basic chat functionality.

I'm not sure how exactly this works with server <-> server federation, I've never actually looked at that spec.

https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.6.1#types-of-r...

Reminds me of Jabber and how GTalk was first able to talk to anyone out there before they locked it down with their custom modifications to the protocol.

> Being lightweight is one of the reasons I prefer Teamspeak over Discord.

Any reason you prefer teamspeak over mumble?

Imho no, except for the network effect from when you have lazy friends/users who don't want to migrate away from the product they are already using.

I just happened to setup a Teamspeak server instead of Mumble long time ago. Now it's hard enough to get friends use Teamspeak over Discord :)

For my group it was mumble's voice normalisation and the inability to boost or lower the volume of individual users.

The big question is if they will federate with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem or keep it closed.

It's positive for matrix either way, but federation would be great.

All sources of this guy

https://community.teamspeak.com/u/erkinalp/activity

point to a comment from a developer where word "matrix" is in DNS SRV record name

https://community.teamspeak.com/t/teamspeak-development-stat...

All other sources in Google are reddit and Facebook posts.

That is a name I have not seen in a long time. I remember when I use to game with Ventrilo/Teamspeak/Mumble about a decade ago.

For anyone who still uses Teamspeak today, what do you use it for?

I still use it for voice communication while gaming.

A lot of Tibia's gamers use it in Poland

I host my own TS3 server. It uses significantly less resources than the Discord client, has better audio (at least my friends sound better) and data is not going to Discord for whatever they're using data for. In case there's an issues with my Teamspeak server, I can solve it, instead of waiting for Discord.

Same thing I've always used it for, talking to people I play games with.

Teamspeak never stopped working so there was never a reason to switch to anything else.

> Teamspeak never stopped working

Ah, so your circle of friends does not include people with messed up audio. Teamspeak happily passes on whatever it got as input. Discord does quite a bit of filtering, able to salvage legibility of some of my friends.

And.. why would solving the problem on server level instead of client level be favorable?

This is just another point for TS, frankly

It isn't a matter of server-side vs client-side (I have no clue what Discord does, but it does eat quite a bit of compute client-side), but of what we get out of the box.

There are various options in the client for this.

> Teamspeak never stopped working

Hah, I have a different experience: my Teamspeak server literally stopped working once they started requiring a license key even for self-hosted instances. I scrapped the server entirely and switched to Mumble.

My group of friends still uses Mumble for talking to each other. It is hosted on our own server. It has transports to all sorts of messengers.

I use discord for some things, but only from a browser. Wouldn't want to use it professionally, although it is relatively decent.

Speech quality is far better on mumble with less latency, because the server is in near proximity.

edit: Don't know about Mumbles text chat, it is rarely used.

Talking to people who say they won't switch to Discord.

Both of them aren't probably going to use this either because <insert random tech tradeoff they believe is worth dying over>.

I play games with my friends and girlfriend sometimes, I host a TS3 server to talk to each other for several reasons -

1) Voice data stays with us, not yet again some other company 2) The TS Client is slim, lightweight and uses little resources while the Discord client is absolutely horrid, sluggish and quite the memory hog 3) TS has far superior voice quality (subjectively) and latency (due to the server being close)

If you have complex communication needs then this generation of voice software is still the best you can get.

For example, I play a good amount of Eve Online and we have a lot of ACL shenanigans. First, you have your fleet's main channel where most of the membership is going to be. So far so good.

At the top of the list are leadership channels. These guys can talk to and hear their own fleet but with can also instantly page other people in leadership (corp leadership and also other fleet commanders).

Then at the bottom of the list are specific group sub-channels. For example, your scouts and your logistics players need a good amount of coordination with each other, so they will have a lil room where they can talk at each other without tying up comms for the main fleet or distracting leadership with stuff that isn't actionable to them.

Then you can add in a whole extra layer of complexity if you are part of an alliance with multiple corps in it.

You basically can't do that in discord unless you want to have to switch between different channels the entire time. It might sound overkill but if you have 90+ players in your fleet you cannot get away with 'just put everyone in a big room'.

My friends have a Teamspeak server so that's what I use when playing games with them. I prefer it over Discord because it's lightweight in comparison. Also for whatever reason, I can't seem to get the microphone sensitivity right in Discord the last few times I used it.

Sorry Teamspeak, but you lost me already. Back about 7 years ago when I spent more time online with friends in school, we tried to use Teamspeak multiple times, but the audio quality was always awful. We didn't like Skype either, but the audio was still better, so we dealt with the bloat. Discord is king in my mind, without question. Being electron based makes it a bit heavy, but I can spare 200MB on my machine for some damn good chat and call.

Could've just been a network issue, or simply because it was 7 years ago. I've been using Teamspeak daily with my friends for 6 years, hosted on a 5$ digitalocean droplet and the audio is far superior compared to anything else.

Discord is pretty sweet too, with screensharing, videos, better chat etc. But once more than 2 people talk at once in a channel, even with Nitro/whatever, it starts cutting people up. We can really feel the difference when going back to TS after a Discord call.

TeamSpeak supports Opus and I don't remember quality being an issue. I actually distinctly remember Discord's audio being worse than the best TeamSpeak settings when Discord launched and my friends switched over.

You probably had the audio codec configured improperly. Back then, TS used Speex in different bitrates. Today it is OPUS Voice (or OPUS Music), which has absolutely great audio quality. Combine this with very low latency if the server is in your proximity and you've got something that sounds and performs better than anything else - Slack, Discord, etc.

"Damn good" chat might be true, but call? Only if you appreciate mediocre voice quality, a suboptimal RTC protocol and a good big chunk of latency.

Discord feels sluggish, bloated and heavy compared to TS, and it's not just because it's Electron-based.

Not at my PC to check ATM but I'm pretty sure Discord uses Opus codecs as well.

Yeah, but on top of WebRTC = choppy, packet loss

TS has always had better audio than Discord. Did you change the codecs?

I think Teamspeak defaults to a fairly average codec bitrate choice, it's not great but not awful. You can easily change it to be significantly better than what Discord offers though.

And because it's not running in electron TS voice is a lot more stable under packet loss situations.

I hope that Mumble does the same, to be honest. It's long overdue.

Uhm, why exactly? It does what it is designed to do, with low latency and good quality. Speaking from "Desktop" perspective here.

Text chat that doesn't suck. Right now Mumble condenses all text messages in a single box.

Guess why it's called Mumble? TBH, on contemporary hardware it is so minimal, that I don't see a problem in using another program for texting in parallel that is more fitting for your needs, if those of Mumble don't suffice.

Guess what people do in voice chats. They come and go, post links or sometimes write when not being able to talk right now. Privately and in the current channel (seperate things).

Having server messages combined with user messages and channel messages is not sane. This has nothing to do with "better suits your needs". Teamspeak (and others) solve this with tabs.

I didn't use TS because at the times I compared it with Mumble, it looked better(but only initially), but also felt more heavy. Both client and server. Also not open-source, so no go for exotic platforms. What I can say for Mumble is that you can customise it. I couldn't care less about redundant server messages spamming me with the rejoins from someone with a bad connection, for instance. Furthermore you can have different users colored differently. Emulation layers for running TS would have eliminated Mumbles rather minimal resource usage.

So...shrug ?

There is no customization that adds tabs. All the things you mentioned don't change the textbox behaviour.

I didn't mention tabs.

But I did.

I noticed.

Then why shift the topic to something that can't fix the problem?

Remember this is the problem:

>Text chat that doesn't suck. Right now Mumble condenses all text messages in a single box.

Unf. Because it is no problem for me!

Mischnix needz teletubbytoyz.

That doesn't make the problem go away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulvgWoChvBU

That also doesn't contribute.

https://youtu.be/GHhD4PD75zY?t=157

Still no. You don't seem to get it. Mumbles text problem exists, independently of you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXYTReBASsw

Still not relevant. Maybe you should stop posting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdccTOcX7o4

Maybe you should stop nagging. My initial question was why? You said because text chat sucks in comparison to TS which has tabs. I said I don't care because "works for me", and anyways you can configure it to be less annoying. You accused me of moving goal posts while I didn't even feel like having joined your game, not to speak of not even caring about rules, thus total disregard for position of goals.

Furthermore I suggested just using another text chat option parallel to Mumble which better suits your needs, because why not?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDwb9jOVRtU

That is all.

>I said I don't care because "works for me"

I know. But then I wonder why you ask the question if you don't care about the answers.

>and anyways you can configure it to be less annoying

which was and is plain wrong. Since it doesn't change the textbox behaviour at all. It's still all in one box. That makes me wonder if you even use Mumble.

>Furthermore I suggested just using another text chat option parallel to Mumble which better suits your needs, because why not?

Because running multiple programs is not the solution to this. Say somebody wants to join your Mumble server. Now in order to send text messages, that person also has to join/download/install another application. While Mumble itself could be sufficient.

Maybe we have different usage patterns? For instance the main thing is an IRC client connected to several servers and channels, while voice chat is only optionally in use? "On demand", so to speak.

As a user of mumble I care about waste of limited developer (time) resources spent for features I don't need, and maybe even degrading performance.

edit: ...makes me wonder... makes ME wonder if you ever used custom layout? OFC still no tabs, still single box, but filtered/disabled almost all server messages/rejoin spam.

>As a user of mumble I care about waste of limited developer (time) resources spent for features I don't need, and maybe even degrading performance.

You don't, but many others do.

>edit: ...makes me wonder... makes ME wonder if you ever used custom layout? OFC still no tabs, still single box, but filtered/disabled almost all server messages/rejoin spam.

I have. I don't want to have to filter them. Sometimes they are useful.

Yah...shrug. Are we clear now?

At least Mumble is already open source.

By the way, Teamspeak is only changing the messenger (text chat) part to Matrix.

I saw that forum post earlier yesterday. What makes it credible?

It's a post by a very recent account, that didn't write that much to begin with.

With that said, screenshots look similar to the Element Matrix client: https://community.teamspeak.com/t/wishlist/1436/283

Even if TS5 was to be based on a Matrix client, that doesn't imply it supports the official Client-Server nor Server-Server APIs.

I've argued that Matrix was a good fit for integrating into Mumble, I am still of that opinion.

Regarding Matrix+Mumble, here was my plea: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/1813#issuecomme...

Currently, I am envisioning posting `mumble:` links in matrix channels, maybe pinning the message, together with a bit more info in custom events.

If a Matrix client doesn't integrate mumble client functionality, you could still click on links. If it does, there could be some further integration with authentication.

Would like to see more messaging services jump in on Matrix protocol. Signal would be huge.

I would hate to see Signal replace the elegant, carefully designed protocol they use with the bloated, carelessly designed, "IM-over-HTTP" mess that is Matrix.

Binary transport is already on the roadmap.

Heh, Matrix is starting to remind me of the giant shitshow that is Lync/Skype for Business and now known as Microsoft Teams with a new skin. Lync is a scary scary thing.

They work quite differently under the hood: Microsoft Teams is thick client/thin server, Matrix is thin client/thick server.

Huge for matrix, yes. For signal to jump on the matrix train, matrix first needs to get their act together with respect to encryption.

Try getting non-techsavy folk to set up multiple devices, the process is nowhere near viable right now

>Try getting non-techsavy folk to set up multiple devices, the process is nowhere near viable right now

The process of setting up e2e on a new device these days is basically "scan this QR code and push a button" though.

I'm not installing another messaging app until it's federated.

I've told everyone sending me signal invites that they can email or sms me.

It would be more appropriate for signal to open up to the xmpp fediverse

Why more appropriate?

Note that this is only for chat functionality, not voice transmission.

The new teamspeak application is clearly targeting Discord and I'll be happy to see some competition. I like the differences in the UI that are visible in their demo screenshots and the ability to host my own server would be nice.

The biggest difficulty teamspeak is going to face is that users are now firmly entrenched in discord, just as twitch users are firmly entrenched in that product. Why would users switch? I am certainly going to try out the new TS and see how it fares because I just like trying out all of my options before settling on one. Quite a few others that I know would largely prefer to just stay put though.

Nice! Increasing our reliance on open protocols instead of platforms is the best way towards a freer better internet.

Teamspeak is still the best when it comes to chatting when gaming, it is usable with voice activation, push to talk and it has so good echo cancellation that it works when both of us are on speakers.

Though the current version uses almost a full core on my machine, it's still worth it in my opinion and you can find many free servers you can connect to.

We switched to Mumble way back when I played Cod2 competitively. It was better in every way.

Ventrilo was "meh" (probably between the two).

Edit: Fixed product names.

I tried Mumble but it was lacking in something, maybe the push to talk did not work properly or the echo cancellation was not working? I can't really remember now.

Teamspeak used to be the best. I used it for a decade. It's only within the last couple years as they've tried to become Discord that it's started going downhill. Teamspeak 3 was solid enough but soon they implemented the artificial lifetime, you had to re-authenticate your server every year (and sometimes more often). Then they got rid of the old forums and wiped everything clean. It hasn't been the same. I stopped using TS recently.

I do use matrix, but only because of the pandemic. And matrix itself only does 1-to-1 voice. For multiple it has a system to shunt you over to jitsi and autoconfigure the room. So I don't see how TS5 is going to use matrix.

I haven’t seen groups in the games I play use Teamspeak or Ventrilo in probably 5-10 years. There was a push to Mumble a few years back and it seems like as soon as Discord hit the market it just took over.

Do certain games still lean towards these? Perhaps older MMOs? I’m curious to hear which games are using it.

Will this be end-to-end-encrypted?

As a developer of an application wich had end-to-end encryption for a decade now, I'm so sick of people constantly demanding e2ee without fully understanding what it is and what are the downsides of it.

The big irony is that strong promise of really good encryption works for them better than really good encryption and all the drawbacks in usability it brings.

Out of curiosity, how do you know the poster you are replying to is 'demanding e2ee without fully understanding'? Also wondering what you mean by 'really good' encryption?

Because such posters are always the same and make similar requests all the time. Say, someone makes a group chat product for 10000 people. They always pop up: 'but does it have e2ee? no? meh'. Not understanding that real e2ee makes no sense if you just blindly trust everyone without fingerprint verification, which is clearly impossible if you plan to use a product with thousands of people whom you've never met before.

By 'really good' encryption I mean encryption where you do mutual fingerprint verification - a tiresome process that few users really do because they don't want all this hassle. Most people would be more happy with a big green button with a nice lock which says, 'You are really safe now' after pressing.

On HN, of all places, I personally prefer to give posters the benefit of the doubt that when asking for E2EE, they have some notion of what it is and entails. Your past few comments here are really rather condescending, assuming that no one (except yourself, of course) really understands what they mean when they ask for E2EE.

>real e2ee

>By 'really good' encryption

These are descriptive terms I've not encountered in an academic setting when discussing all types of encryption. Is there a formal definition of 'real' vs. 'fake' E2EE?

Didn't even realise Teamspeak was still running! Throw back to old MMO days

I would prefer TeamSpeak over Discord if they would bring back non profit licenses. I mean that I could host one myself but without making profit with enough slots.

What is the Matrix?

Last time I tried to set up a ts server I couldn’t because they don’t provide arm binaries. Everybody is on discord now. Better close shop already, frankly.

yeah close that stable company, that offers a good selfhosted solution for a fair price and jump ship to a VC funded startup that is backed by Tencent. \s

Yes too many open-source projects sponsor Discord too by using it :( Like Home Assistant. It's a shame when there's so many good open systems available.

Yeah clise shop because you tried to run it on hobby hardware.

Arm is not hobby hardware. I was running it on a scaleway instance (they have phased out arm instances ever since).

Guess why.

Last time I checked I still had well over a dozen users on my ts3 server during the daytime. It'd be really sad to lose the community.

I don't think this is true, sorry. TS5 is definitely not built on Matrix.

EDIT: Am wrong, see below! Maybe we can update the original post to one of the links below.

Hmm, their developers seem to imply otherwise:

> TS.ChrisR - TeamSpeak Staff - 30d

> We use the Matrix protocol only for the messenger part.

https://community.teamspeak.com/t/beta-signup/13749/50

Other mentions of it here:

https://community.teamspeak.com/t/teamspeak-development-stat...

Matrix themselves talked about it: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/09/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...

Oh real interesting! Didn't realize that was the case - and the source linked was just a new account O:

Discord API is currently thick server and thick client, as far as I understand. Have you had a chance to review the current state of the Matrix protocol, which is thin client and would be useful as an inspiration for the next API revision of Discord.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com