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?
    • Corroded@leminal.spaceEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      The lack of interest in it even amongst tech communities and bridges (they can link Matrix servers and Discord servers) constantly being down has kept me from giving Matrix a second chance.

      I think it was a Linux gaming community last time that got flooded with hate content after the bridge went down and the Matrix side was left to itself.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Eh, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. There is a lot of room for improvement, but it works pretty well today, especially if your rooms are relatively small (e.g. a few dozen people) and you don’t use an overcrowded instance (e.g. not the main Matrix.org one).

          If you can host your own, you can adjust the resources so it works well for you. If you can’t, just avoid the main instance.

    • pisturko@lemy.lolOPEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      My client shouldn’t be bugged when I enter a room with a long history, right? Right?

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Hey, they’re fixing that. Soon. Really. Any day now. For reals!

        (That’s the #1 thing that makes Matrix utterly unusable for me: if there’s more than like, 10 messages, it’s a game of is-it-broken-or-is-it-just-crap.)

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          I’ve found that Conduit handles it a lot better than Synapse does.

        • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Tbf, they actually are. Element X and the sliding sync are ready I think. If the server and client both use it, I think you can use it today. Or maybe the whole matrix 2.0 where that’s all integrated isn’t pushed into main/master yet. Im any case, I read it was ready maybe a few weeks ago.

          • DiabolicalBird@lemmy.caEnglish
            0·
            8 months ago

            Element X is still missing a lot of features, “ready” is an exaggeration I feel

            No Spaces support in particular is a dealbreaker for me

            • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              0·
              8 months ago

              Ahh, good point. I have only been “testing” matrix for a year and haven’t enabled sliding sync so haven’t bothered using element x yet.

              Well then theyre right- one day it might get done. 😄

  • suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    8 months 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.

  • otter@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    8 months 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.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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???

    • Serpentian@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Since Discord was blocked in Russia today, everyone went to revolt, which cannot deal with so many registrations for now

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • Fitik@fedia.io
          0·
          8 months ago

          Your reply sounds pretty xenophobic, ngl Isn’t it better for Russian people to get access to information that Russian government doesn’t control?

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            8 months ago

            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.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Russians are now Nazis?

          Someone needs to read more history, and out down the Book of Pejoratives

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Matrix is probably the closest to Discord overall. If Element is bugging out on you, it might be worth trying other clients. Nheko worked well when I tried it, for example.

    Mumble.info is great for voice. If your text chat needs are pretty basic, it might be a good fit. I don’t think it saves message history.

    XMPP is a protocol, not an app. If you you saw an interface you didn’t like, you could always just use a different app. I don’t usually recommend it, since setting it up with all the features people usually expect is a bit complicated and error-prone, but it would probably be manageable among a small group of friends if one of them has tech skills. I don’t think it offers voice, at least not in any widely-supported way.

    • ProjectPatatoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Our group uses mumble for voice and discord for text and backup voice or external voice. The voice quality is better, free, faster on mumble. Extremely low server requirements. It technically saves chat history but as server logs, not for the client.

  • Serpentian@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    8 months 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

  • Takeshidude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • 14th_cylon@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

  • sag@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

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