this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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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?
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (5 children)

When it got banned? My Friend is from Turkiye. He still used it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

I would not be surprised if a large chunk of population can evade bans, so no surprise.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

To those suggesting mumble, are there any good guides out there? The website is shockingly bad for introductory information.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble-docker

myself, I run a docker container of mumble in casaOS

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

On one hand, it's cool that you have an excuse to ditch Discord. The platform sucks in several different ways and the more people leave it, the better off the world is.

But on the other - you seem to be aiming for the wrong goal. I know what it's like to have one thing blocked after the other, so I know for sure that migrating every time something gets blocked is just not a sustainable long-term strategy. You might replace Discord for unrelated reasons... But I strongly advise you to look into censorship circumvention methods. Especially stealthy ones, like they use in China. Set it up for your family and friends (maybe distributing the server costs between them). You will need it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (11 children)

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????

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

I think that's most of the alternatives. Revolt is the best of the bunch, if you ask me.

One more is https://tryquiet.org/ but it's SUPER basic at this time...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Theres also zulip, but I havent tried it yet, but its supposedly open source discord, but you have to host the server yourself I think.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

There's not a great 1:1 replacement. I'd suggest some sort of hybrid approach. Personally, I use mumble for voip and matrix for text. I haven't experienced any significant stability issues with matrix, but self-hosting probably plays in my favor there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Your experience with XMPP will vary depending on the client you use. It's not a 1 to 1 replacement for discord, and I'm not sure if there's a client that can do group calls, but It can do 1 on 1 calls and group text chats. I'd recommend Cheogram for mobile, and possibly movim for desktop.

For group audio calls, if you found matrix unstable, then Mumble is likely your best bet, or perhaps Signal, if that's not banned as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I'm in the same boat and also looking for a privacy-respecting platform for communicating with family and friends. So I'd also like to add items that are not yet mentioned to the list of suggestions:

  • Jami
  • Peer Calls - can be selfhosted; you can try it out straight away using their flagship instance located here.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

self-hosting matrix is possible, and after I got it set up, it works fine. That said, push notifications were acting up a lot at first (might have been fixed by an update since that hasn't been an issue in a while), and it is rather annoying to get your desktop and mobile clients set up to not be annoying about not being verified (iOS apps seem more fiddly with verifying than Android apps in my experience)

Despite my annoyances at first, the Element client really is the best and most mature one out there, and I do recommend it. Don't bother with any of the other ones; despite what the fluffychat settings want you to think, Element is the only client that can do any kind of audio/video calling, and most of the other clients only have web apps, so there's no hope for getting push notifications on mobile.

Ultimately it has worked for me, but my demands are three humans in a voice call once a week, no screenshare (use Parsec for that), and occasional text messages.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

The Element X is supposed to be the best client, but I can’t find a way to join rooms within a chat. So for now I use Fluffy to join rooms, then back to Element X for actual usage. Kind of bothersome but I’m sure they’ll figure it out since the original Element app has the ability to join rooms.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Revolt seems to be the best for now. Today they got a lot of money and I hope, they'll make their best to make it a reasonable discord alternative

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Discord was based off of Slack and Microsoft Teams is a trash knockoff. All depends what you intend to use it for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Tried this but it seems to be very badly broken. Couldn't get hardly anything working...

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