- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I’ve been working really hard to research and rank messaging apps by their privacy. The more green boxes the better.
I plan to turn PrivacySpreadsheet.com into a place for privacy data on everything from cars to video games. It’s all open source too on GitHub.
Not trying to advertise, I just put a lot of time into researching all this, and I want to share it since I think others could benefit.
Adding to sibling… Discord is used in a couple of different ways at present for communities. If you mean voice coms for gaming or otherwise, Mumble should be in your repository. If it’s more of a of a Slack-like business chat, self-hosted Mattermost is actually pretty nice. If it’s just text chat, IRCv3 & XMPP have that covered & scale massively even on a home PC. If it’s voice calls, Jitsi or Jami can work. If you are posting updates or things that should be forum topics, you shouldn’t be using chat anyways where Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, & other Fediverse options or even Atom feeds can suffice. If you want integrated chat, community updates/posts, voice/video calls (unsure if conference calls are support) Movim is a good option–and if you don’t mind the rough UI edges, Libervia can do similar but also integrates a calendar for events. Bear in mind as well that a lot of these technologies can be bridged between one another to avoid some of the lock-in, but I would hesitate to force everyone’s chat to be piped & logged thru Discord’s servers. It’s also not bad to say “we use these 2 services” rather than requiring a kitchen sink communications application.
Very thorough response thanks. This shows me about how many things discord covers, which is a good and bad thing, makes migrating away much more difficult.
Define covers… With something like Mumble for instance, you can host a server (real server, not Discord ’servers“), have low-latency real-time chat with noise cancelation algorithms, directional audio, etc. & it comes with a chat you can use, it’s just not very robust. But there’s also a decent chance your group or whatever isn’t using all of the features & could be happy with IRCv3 & XMPP since you can share text, image, videos. My biggest gripe tho is that some communities use it as a replacement for forums or Atom like you were supposed to read & follow every thread because they want to shoehorn Discord as the one-size-fits-all tool. The other issue is not treating that sort of chat as ephemeral–opting to assume users want or need the entire history (which reminds me that I should do a better job with my bookmarks & note taking than relying on search); but also while the history is ‘permanent’ it’s not publicly accessible in the cases where community decisions should be seen (such as making roadmap for an open source programming language) where those not present for the conversation may have missed it, have trouble referring to it, & the search engines can’t find it since it was locked behind Discord’s walled garden.
In a lot of communities historically & still operate in a manner where important discussions & long-lived threads live on the forums, and real-time chat is treated as social or one-off questions/tips. Operating your community with two different tools here is okay… even a third for say video conferencing if it’s not something you do often, especially if it means one or more cogs in that wheel of communication can be non-proprietary.
Additionally I missed adding mailing lists as an option as well as Zulip for forums/chat.