• recklessengagement@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    2 months ago

    This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.

    I’m becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be “one of the good ones”.

    I really hope we find and establish a “low executive cost” solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.

    But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.

    • sep@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      Matrix+elements is very easy to selfhost in any homelab. works well enough for goverments. Federated and easy end to end encryption. And one can easily set up a web archive bridge forvarchiveable rooms.

      That beeing said i still think IRC is the best for pure text chat.

        • sep@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          I do not know what you talk about. I use screen sharing and voice chat daily on elements with our own hosted matrix server.

          Edit: i felt wrong saying “voice chat” what even is that. I make regular calls and video calls with screen sharing in elements ;)

          • recklessengagement@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 month ago

            That is interesting, the last time i tried Element/matrix it did not have these features. Can I ask, is your screen sharing of a quality that you can stream videos and games at equivilant frame rates?

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.

      this is unironically such a big problem, there are great voice chatting solutions, mumble, and the handful of other ones that exist out there.

      There are basically 0 good usable video conferencing/sharing softwares out there. The same goes for desktop streaming. If we just focused like, a little bit more of our energy on these two things, i think the world would unironically get better. It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?

      The ones that do exist are likely to be web based, and thus, webRTC, the dreaded behemoth of both web support and also, generally poor implementation. I just want mumble but with support for video streaming, how hard is it >:(

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 month ago

        It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?

        It’s not about the hardware. (Not like it’s that ubiquitous anyway; I’m daily driving a machine from 2017)

        I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.

        And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.

        The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.

        In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time. For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.

        In the end, something like a simple jabber-like chatroom is far easier and more productive to work on, even before we get to the coding part.

        Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.