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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

This does miss a major feature of Discord and why, imo, it got such an huge following among gamers at first: voice and video chat.

I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s

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Matrix/Element has video rooms as a Lab function and for a while it had voice rooms too. Not sure what happened to them, but either way with MatrixRTC coming out the technical underpinnings are all there, clients just need to put it all together.

Someone mentioned (I believe?) after talking to Element/Matrix at FOSSDEM this year that the organization has been struggling a lot to get this going. Apparently issues with thier project organization forking and funding the last few years has made one of thier primary contributors, who already had fully functional and working video/voice, all but give up on the project because the upstream forming means it's now forked from a commercial/defunct version of the original code(?)

It would be nice if Valve filled in the gaps here. They already got a lot of community features built into Steam.

Steam Group Chats are sort of there; no video chat but text chats and drop-in voice chats like Discord. On the other hand they're basically ephemeral, with messages disappearing from history at some given point.

I also can't figure out a way to access them outside of the Steam client and in DOTA where I believe they're tied to the in-game guild system.

Outside of Dota, it's called "Group Chats" (below your friends list) and it looks very similar to a basic Discord interface. You may have to join a dota guild in order to see it, although everyone in my guild just uses discord.

Steam itself is proprietary, and I imagine they'd expand the existing Steam chat and not do something separate like Proton. I don't think jumping into the arms of another company managing a centralized proprietary social platform is a good idea, even if Valve tend to be "good guys".

Why can't anybody just add a button to host a fully P2P WebRTC call? Like everyone did back when Slack didn't have anything, but in one click?

In the case of voice chat in servers used for gaming, my experience has been that the persistent channels for voice are actually kind of important, it removes any friction from dropping in and out of voice chat, and allows others to easily see 'hey, there is someone in this voice channel, maybe i should join'

But that can be easily faked in client UI. Something like, clicking an empty channel internally hosts a call, hosting/joining the call causes the client to post a hidden "@user is in #call" message, etc.

I did this as a side project awhile ago it was very fun.

https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc

I didn't bother adding much styling to the website because I was only interested in the network side of things.

Yeah it’s so odd that none of the open-source alternatives have this feature. No video calls are not an option. We need video/voice rooms!

Aside from Discord, nobody has gotten this right since Yahoo! Live and Tinychat. Both are dead.

If an option doesn't have that then it's not a Discord alternative for me or many of my friends.

You might be interested in https://kloak.app I believe. It's a privacy-first alternative. It's still in early alpha days, but have most of the things set up. Oh, and we’ve got voice channels with screen sharing in beta too.

How do you plan on funding it? Also, the landing page mentions "You own your community data" but it just looks like you own it and allow us to access it?

Seems to me you're just re-building discord.

"Messages are stored on our servers and are technically accessible at the database level , we won't pretend otherwise. Kloak doesn't require email, phone, or personal info to create an account, your identity isn't tied to your messages the way it would be on other platforms.

Our goal is to implement end-to-end encryption for DMs so that even we can't read message content. But we're not there yet, since after all we need to make sure the platform is safe and not to shield illegal content being sent."

This is a message from one of their founders I found while exploring the app.

Why would they name their software sewer?

Mumble for voice is unironically great. For video, maybe Jitsi. I don't often have a need to video chat, personally.

Yeah I really don't get that. The biggest benefit, by far, of Discord is that it combines both text and voice chat into one! How can one seriously put forth a replacement which can't match the features Discord had on day 1?

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