A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.
Admin of SLRPNK.net
XMPP: [email protected]
I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.
Also @[email protected]
I’ll be sticking with Movim, which is already federated, encrypted, can do group video calls, can even screenshare, and most critically does not have a CLA.
They can’t retroactively close-source the older versions released under AGPL, but if it ever required a community fork to continue the last-known good version, it would be a massive burden for the community to then maintain a separate GPL fork, and it could cause federation to break as the codebase diverges over time, which would create a rift in the community, and you’d have to hope that the users care enough about the license to jump ship to the GPL version, otherwise the GPL version risks not being able to get enough funding to continue, or enough users to convince the larger communities to move over.
As a semi-similar real world example, the pixel-art program Aseprite was once used a FLOSS license, but it was changed to proprietary software at some point. The last GPL version was forked by the community, but it never got much traction, and is now massively behind the closed source version in features and userbase.
Movim would be a good one to try. It’s actually more full featured than Stoat as well, as it offers Encryption, Federation (XMPP), group video/audio calls, and screensharing with application audio! (must use a chromium based browser to pass the audio for now). It is currently missing Discord-like channels with rooms, but the dev is actively working on that.
Stoat currently cannot do video calls or screensharing, and has no plans to implement encryption or federation, AFAIK.
Also @[email protected]
Check out the Movim client for XMPP, it allows it perform group video/audio calls, and even has screen sharing! (though you need to use a chromium browser to share the audio of an application for now). And the dev is currently working on implementing Discord-style channels with collections of rooms.
I have offered to do a lot of education and technical effort surrounding this, e.g. helping groups migrate in some of the circles I’m involved with and all it’s really gotten me is abuse and condescension, bafflingly. No one cares and if they do it’s mostly superficial and they want the easiest way out—someone/something do everything for me, and I mean everything. I don’t want to click more than two buttons and even that is pushing it, buster.
Oh no, a second program!! We are all so dependent on tech in our lives but it seems like so many want nothing to do with being informed about it on any level…I just don’t get it.
I feel this in my soul, and it’s something I’ve noticed a lot on reddit when trying to tell people that lemmy/piefed exist. Some of them will just find any reason whatsoever to not do something, pointing out the most minor of differences or slightest inconveniences as insurmountable obstacles that no human could be expected to overcome, and usually end it with “if It’s not already perfect/better than what I’m currently using (despite the alternative not being actively user-hostile like the thing they’re using and complain about is) I’m not going to bother”.
I’m just going back to xmpp, maybe mumble for voice calls.
With the Movim client (or Dino client), XMPP can do group voice/video calls :D
There’s a bit more to it than just their visual organization. In Discord, a user only needs to join a single community to access all of that community’s rooms (they don’t have to manually join each one to have it in their feed).
The admins of that community can then seamlessly create or delete rooms within that community (the users don’t need to do anything for those changes to be seen and applied on their end), and can independently adjust what the base requirements are to view, enter, or interact with each room, and then give an individual granular permissions of what rooms are visible within that community.
Not yet, unfortunately. It can currently do a group conference audio/video call, but there are no rooms where you can see who’s in the call and just hop in. That is a planned feature in the future, though. Probably after Discord-like rooms are implemented (which won a recent feature poll).
Woah, didn’t know about that, thanks for the heads up. That’s definitely dampening my goodwill toward it.
As an alternative, I’d suggest Movim, which has no CLA, and is already federated.
XMPP can actually do everything, chat, group video calls, and even screen sharing with the Movim client. It’s a one-stop shop.
Movim does, and it’s federated and offers encryption! :D
I think Iambalicious may be confusing terms. AFAIK no XMPP client has discord-like rooms within channels. The Movim client is actively working on implementing that feature (it can also do group video calls and screen sharing), but it’s the only one doing that unless I’m mistaken.
There’s also Movim, which doesn’t even require an email, you can join instantly with just a username and password.
Considering how the world is going at the moment, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of us have been procrastinating in one way or another (I most certainly have ✋).
Aww yeah, we back! 🥳
Thanks for the heads up! Updated the list with that link ^^
That’s certainly unfortunate that it isn’t giving you a useful error. I’m not sure why it says that. I tried creating an account there with a similar username to yours, and it was created no problem on the main movim.eu instance.
Are you using a VPN?
It seems like a cool little project, and I appreciate that it’s GPL licensed, but I’m afraid without federation, it can’t quite fulfill the same role that Discord does, as they would need a sudden dramatic increase of funding to be able to support a large userbase on a centralized server, and having another centralized point of failure is really inadvisable, IMO. A big reason for Lemmy/piefed’s success is distributing resource useage across multiple independent servers, and that model translates quite well to a Discord like app too.
The project is also so new (11 months old) that it hasn’t had adequate time to prove that the codebase could scale to a high user count. It’s in a similar position to Fluxer.app, which is another GPL Discord clone, but one that is open to adding in federation at a later date.
I also think XMPP’s encryption abilities are pretty essential going forward, as governments and corporations are becoming more invasive into monitoring our communications.
Hm, at least on their homepage, they don’t mention the ability to do group video calls or screen sharing, do you know if it’s a complete replacement for Discord’s feature set? The reason I recommend Movim specifically is that the only features its missing compared to discord are the rooms, and it cannot yet share application audio when screen sharing (but should come later).
Movim is also built on the battle proven XMPP framework, which also allows for easy self hosting and access to the wider existing XMPP community.
The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.
Currently the best private (encrypted) and federated Discord alternative is Movim, which I highly recommend people switch to as soon as possible (the Dev is currently working on discord-like channels with rooms).
For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://slrpnk.net/post/23012609
Movim doesn’t cost anything and is federated (just like piefed/lemmy are). It also offers really solid encryption for privacy. I’d say it’s out best long-term option.