So... Discord might be going there. I like their offering. I even pay them about $10/month. What they offer works well. People get their own little communities to administer, with the tools to administer them well, with the self-written automations and bots to handle communities from a handful of people to many thousands. Read @isotopp@infosec.exchange’s perspective on Discord.
But the monetization drive is strong. And once the shareholders are in place, pressure for monetization will ramp up even more, I'm sure. How long until it all goes down? Five years?
What are your backup plans?
My backup plan is an IRC backend (ngircd uses about 5M of memory) and two instances of a web front-end called The Lounge. One of them is free for all and connects to my chat server; the other needs registration and offers file uploads and always-on connectivity (it acts as a "bouncer"). The two of them take about 150M of memory. Each registered account gets a little SQLite file with the logs. No other resources required.
You can connect to the IRC backend directly using your favourite IRC client, of course. Emacs comes with two of them. Just saying. 😄
For iOS, there's Colloquy.
For Android, @wandererbill@tabletop.social suggests Revolution IRC.
If you want to try it right now: click here, change the nick if you want, click the "Connect" button, and you're in the `#welcome` channel with the rest of us.
I wrote a bot called Norn that connects to both IRC and Discord.
@phf@tabletop.social suggested Snikket instead. Installation requires a Docker image.
I dislike Docker, not because of what it is but because of what it implies. A virtual machine inside your virtual machine means that it doesn't auto-update. Upgrading will be tricky. It also means individual deployment requires multiple services such that it ended up being easier for them to supply a Docker image instead of supplying good instructions. I always take that to mean that the setup is brittle and underdocumented. Perhaps I’m wrong but that’s the suspicion I have.
Generally speaking, I dislike Docker images for my virtual server server (6G memory, 75g storage, 2 cores) because multiple services packaged in a dockerfile usually mean lots of resources required. Frugal computing means that I am loath to accommodate that. I prefer not to upgrade my virtual machine.
@phf@tabletop.social also suggested Revolt. @wandererbill@tabletop.social created a Grenzland Server on Revolt. @cidney@social.city-of-glass.net noted that it had Discord-like roles and role management for the server owner to hand out, so perhaps it's quite a suitable replacement. Revolt can be self-hosted via Docker or self-building. At least there is a lot of info out there. @cidney@social.city-of-glass.net also found a wiki pages listing only four known instances including the default one, the largest being Andrew Tate's. 🤮
@wandererbill@tabletop.social wanted to give Matrix another spin. There are two server implementations, Synapse and Dendrite.
At an absolute minimum, Dendrite will expect 1GB RAM. For a comfortable day-to-day deployment which can participate in federated rooms for a number of local users, be prepared to assign 2-4 CPU cores and 8GB RAM — more if your user count increases. -- Planning your installation
@kyonshi@tabletop.social suggested Jitsi. I tried to self-host it a few years ago. It worked well! But it also took a lot of resource. During the video call, the virtual machine's load went up to 8. We sometimes use the installation at the Freifunk München for gaming. Thanks, ffmuc! 😍
So, where does that leave is? I don't know. People don't seem to like The Lounge with IRC backend and I seem to be unwilling to upgrade my hosting commitments.
@mc@hackers.town recently recommended a different IRC server called Ergo and a different web front-end called Gamja but it's unclear to me what significant advantages either would offer.
Previously:
So… the situation is bad, but I still use Discord. -- Discord (2022)
@dashdsrdash@tilde.zone wrote in with some interesting feedback. The Zulip part is interesting because I only used it for tiny bit, talking to the maintainers of Antora. Here's what they have to say:
Zulip is great for UI, slightly aggravating to run. It absolutely wants a dedicated server. It has a dice roller as one of the sample bots, and the API is extensive.IRC is extremely easy to setup and relatively easy to write bots for. Interfaces vary from bare bones to not-bad; The Lounge is up on the not-bad end, and also easy to host.Matrix may be the future of federated chat systems, but if you don't need federation, the complexity and ongoing maintenance are not worth it.Jitsi has integrated chat but is video-conferencing-centric; the text chat is actually Prosody (an XMPP/Jabber) server under the hood. Video processing takes up a lot of CPU and bouncing it around takes a lot of bandwidth; otherwise, it's pretty nice.I haven't tried running Revolt but I looked at the docs and I am really not favorably inclined. They have some questionable technology choices and insist on a Docker-first install that in my experience is a likely sign that there are too many moving parts for anyone to be able to diagnose what's going wrong.
My suggestions would be:
IRC is still a solid choiceProsody without the Jitsi video conferencing is pretty nice, albeit a little complex to configure initially.If I felt like spending the money for a medium-large VM at a hosting service dedicated to gaming, Zulip would be nice.
I didn't know about the hosting of Zulip but the rest tracks my experience. IRC is the simplest option.
@randomwizard@vivaldi.net is giving Galène a try. Videoconferencing that might not be as hard to setup correctly as self-hosted Jitsi!
#Snikket #Discord #Revolt #Matrix #Jitsi #IRC #Chat
Internet Relay Chat beat Slack to real-time chat by decades and helped define much of our early online culture, yet way more people use Slack. Why is that? – Picking Up The Slack, by Ernie Smith, for Tedium
In it, there’s a link to Drew DeVault writing about preferring IRC over Slack in 2015:
IRC has been around since forever. You may think that it’s not popular anymore, but there are still tons of people using it. There are 87,762 users *currently online* (at time of writing) on Freenode. There are 10,293 people on OFTC. 22,384 people on Rizon. In other words, it’s still going strong, and I put a lot more faith in something that’s been going full speed ahead since the 80s than in a Silicon Valley fad startup. – Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
And of course, this list if things that IRC does not have:
I failed setting up ZNC when I tried. But *The Lounge* has uploads and persistent sessions (if you register).
Generally speaking, switching just to Ergo without using a new client doesn't offer much of a benefit. Might as well stick with The Lounge and ngircd.
Ergo takes more than twice as much memory than ngircd, according to Monit: nearly 12 MB instead of 5 MB. That is, about as much as Prosody. Compared to all the other protocols out there, this is wonderful. 😄
**Why not Matrix**: Matrix is heavy, both in terms of protocol complexity and in implementation of both client and server software, and it shows in the functionality that randomly fails in a Matrix network of any significant size. some of the problems seem to stem from the design; federation can be brittle, which hurts the point of it.
**Why IRC**: It's simple, it's easy to deploy, and the protocol is very unopinionated regarding clients, of which there are many forms and flavours. IRCv3 is a solid community effort to improve the protocol without breaking the core existing clients and servers. it has benefited from decades of use and an experienced cohort of operators, and administration and moderation tools/options are sufficiently varied, in part because of its reliance on synchronous connections.
**IRC challenges**: There's no one set out of the box experience on the client side, so users have to look around a bit and experiment (or talk to others to get what they want). it does not have an integrated media streaming experience.
**Matrix benefits**: Yet to be observed.
Well said, thanks bss.
This ad hovered right where the send button is on my chat. Remember, I'm a paying customer.
Now all I want to do is cancel.
