Discord is banned in Turkiye. The reason is some data theft, blackmail, AI montage photos, etc. As usual, our government made the easiest and most illogical move :)
I am looking for an alternative platform to talk and chat with my friends. Which platforms do you recommend?
The ones I tried:
- Revolt: Voice chat is not stable. They do not accept new registrations.
- Matrix: Unstable overall.
- TeamSpeak: ancient interface. We can still try it.
- XMPP: It has an old interface like TS. Not sure if it has voice channels.
- Your recommendations?
Jitsi meet is what I use for calls with my friends. You can continue using revolt or matrix or something for the text channels.
Calyx Jitsi instance has been down for months though. 🤔
Ah ok. I didn’t check but that’s the one I’ve used in the past. meet.jit.si I believe still works but you might need to make an account.
XMPP/Jabber has whatever interface you choose (determined by the client you use), and does voice pretty darn well.
I’m currently using Jmp.chat as a SIM/data provider, and they provide an XMPP account via Snikket. I can connect to that account with pretty much any XMPP/Jabber client.
To me, XMPP/Jabber is the most flexible, because it’s a protocol, and you choose which parts you want. And you can choose which clients you use. I have 2 clients on my phone and one on my laptop. They all work fine with the same account, with messages showing up at all simultaneously. One client (Snikket) has multiple accounts in it. The thing is XMPP/Jabber as a protocol is like SMTP - it’s a standard, so all clients can communicate with each other, if they support the same features (eg OMEMO encryption, which is popular now).
Alternatively check out:
Teleguard, it’s from the folks at SwissCows. They claim E2E, and from the way you connect devices, and that you can’t recover an account from them, I tend to believe it. Though I haven’t seen a third party evaluation (I belive they’re closed source, unfortunately). So do with that what you will.
Simplex Chat, self hostable, they claim it’s very secure. I’ve used it some, the phone app is a bit heavy on ram use.
There are numerous others out there.
xmpp is a protocol, it doesn’t have interface. you may be thinking about some specific software using xmpp, in that case you have to say what software you are talking about.
Which is exactly what I said. You get the interface you choose.
Guilded is really similar to Discord, but Roblox bought them so you need a Roblox account to use it. It’s great for voice chat.
I don’t think it’s great to change one walled garden for another. If you are willing to change, better switch to a protocol instead. Even if there’s something wrong with the server, witching between different instances is much easier than between entirely different products.
If you or one of your friends can self-host, my group used mumble before discord. I still don’t really know why we switched.
There isn’t a full replacement for Discord out there, it’ll have to be old school with multiple things together.
Teamspeak is great for voice comms (or Mumble). And you could use Matrix or XMPP for text chat. Matrix should be a lot better if you either self-host or join a smaller server that isn’t so overloaded all the time.
For game streaming Broadcast Box paired with OBS Studio seems like a good option for low latency streaming.
How about Guilded?
IRC: it’s open source, it’s free, its retro
KiwiIRC is a web based IRC client. Does not have voice chat afaik, but since it’s IRC it’s very lightweight and had a low entry barrier.
matrix: unstable overall
“Unstable” is an understatement, and this comes from a girl who uses it all day every day.
Isn’t it generally better if you use a smaller instance/host your own? Most of the complaints I’ve heard have been on the busier instances.
That said, I only use it occasionally to catch up on dev updates.
IRC.
irssi for cli, hexchat for gui
Teamspeak 3 is ancient, but works.
However there is a new version of Teamspeak (TS5) which is much closer to Discord and looks much nicer. You could give that a try
There was a TS4?
There’s guilded, have an old guild leader in tech that always tries to get us to be guinea pigs for different voips, and that one isn’t terrible if discord isn’t available.
Ventrilo, is that even around anymore?
Mumble wasn’t too bad,
Revolt: Voice chat is not stable. They do not accept new registrations.
That’s news to me. Where do they not allow new accounts signing up???
Since Discord was blocked in Russia today, everyone went to revolt, which cannot deal with so many registrations for now
Ah okay, yeah they probably don’t have the backend servers for it as it has grown slowly if at all over the past year. Revolt is meant to be run on independent self hosted backends similar to Lemmy (only without federation) but humans are going to be humans, and simply pile into the one largest, most common Revolt instance and cause huge traffic problems.
So you’re saying revolt is about to have a shitton of russian users, which means it’s about to become a pro-russian war hub. You know what they say about nazis. Allow one nazi into your bar, and he’ll invite his friends. Soon enough, your bar isn’t a bar with a few nazis in it. It’s become a nazi bar.
Same concept, different facists.
Your reply sounds pretty xenophobic, ngl Isn’t it better for Russian people to get access to information that Russian government doesn’t control?
More like jingoistic, which is rather tiresome anymore. “Nazi” today is a virtually meaningless pejorative, and my dead grandparents are rolling in their graves having escaped real Nazis.
Literal last line of the post:
Same concept, different facists.
Russian users who used banned platforms instead of vkontakte aren’t necessarily warmongers
Russians are now Nazis?
Someone needs to read more history, and out down the Book of Pejoratives
Literally the last line from the post:
Same concept, different facists.
Ah yes, because all Russians are Nazis apparently
When it got banned? My Friend is from Turkiye. He still used it.
I would not be surprised if a large chunk of population can evade bans, so no surprise.
Todays news
https://www.turkiyetoday.com/turkiye/turkiye-bans-discord-amid-concerns-over-platform-safety-62896/
For now, Discord users in Türkiye face limited access to the platform, though it remains unclear whether a full ban will be implemented in the coming days.
Still working for my on hotel wifi.
Oh Thanks for info
Some groups have allegedly used the “901” tag in their usernames to identify themselves, raising alarms among officials and parents alike
What does this mean? I can’t seem to find info on what a 901 tag even is.
Looks like a gang, similar to the 764 gang in the US.
I use Steam Chat for playing games with family and friends. It has better audio quality than discord in my opinion, and you can make groups (something like Discord servers) too. It doesn’t have all the functionality of servers, but the basic idea is there.
I am actually surprised nobody mentioned it yet Why use some third party application, when you can use the Steam’s one.
It’s not like the OP is concerned about privacy. They were using discord. They didn’t say it has to be open source.
For talking outside of gaming or away from PC, I use signal.
I setup a Mattermost server for me and the boys. It’s more slack than discord. But chat, rooms and voice all worked. Push notifications worked on android and Apple. But, I had to admit defeat. No one wants to leave discord because they all have at least 1 friend who won’t leave it.
I tried to self hosted matrix, but it suffered the same feigned interest.
We need client compatibility with discord
Discord is a closed source system. Matrix with a discord bridge would work. You just use your matrix server and a bot to send and receive on your behalf. There is functionality between but technically the two systems are independent. I also see issues with it not being 100% all the time. Typical of something bridging to a closed system.
What compatibility are you looking for? A non discord application connected directly to a discord server and can send text, audio and visual via discord infrastructure? Nah, probably won’t happen. Bridging is the closest right now.
