- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
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We are all going to have to start figuring out how to socialize face-to-face again.
Sorry guys, the internet broadly is dying for anything but corporate interests and people with rotten agendas trying to manipulate people. It brings you nothing but stress in your personal lives, why stick to it? Who is using it that you need to spend all day in discord to keep them company? Live for a better tomorrow with actual experiences, dust yourself off and start going out and experiencing the world while you still can.
It sucks the entire world turning into a privacy nightmare. Will any country remain the lone hold out against pushing stuff like this on their people?
They’ll get couped and subterfuged by the imperialist powers. Here is the thing, there are no American billionaires, there are no Chinese billionaires, there are no Russian billionaires, there just are billionaires who see the whole world as their footstool and see all of us as pesky slaves and pests.
They will not hesitate to make money and gain power over every single human being they can. And no government or organization will stop them. Only we can, the people who are also all one. And we better get cracking…
Not when $ is involved, fuck everyone, gimme my dolla!
I’ve made Stoat and Matrix accounts.
Matrix because it seems like the most logical choice, largest platform that’s federated and has end-to-end encryption.
Stoat because realistically being more similar to Discord I know more users are going to go there. So I thought I’d hedge my bets.
The one I’ve been seeing crop up a lot these past couple days is Fluxer, which is literally almost a 1:1 discord clone, even more than Stoat. Though E2EE isn’t currently on the solo dev’s roadmap, which is a shame.
Matrix seems like the best bet in terms of privacy and security, but I swear every single client is hot garbage for some reason or another. I can’t imagine non-tech-savvy users will ever be willing to stick to it.
Realistically I think Stoat or Fluxer is going to win out here. I’m setting up all 3 for now, and I plan to ditch discord completely at the end of this month.
Oh yeah I was looking at Fluxer too, though haven’t made an account yet.
In the “What’s coming next” section on the website it mentions opt-in E2EE. So maybe it is actually on the roadmap? Unless the listed features aren’t actually on the roadmap or I’m misunderstanding.
I hope it is anyway, I accepted no E2EE with Discord just because every single person I knew was using it, but I’m crossing my fingers to not have to make that compromise again if possible.
I’ll probably give Fluxer a try as well then and give all three a go and see which one sticks, hell maybe I’ll end up on more than one.
Ah maybe the article I was reading was a bit dated, good to know it might be on the horizon. Honestly I almost worry the dev’s gonna get slapped with a cease and desist because it’s almost literally a discord clone in every single way.
It did rub me the wrong way at first to see paywalled features already, but reading it more closely it seems to be mostly to offset server costs, and a self-hosted server seems to have all the paid upgrades available by default, so that seems fair enough.
After playing with all 3 a bit, I have a feeling Fluxer might be the one that sticks, mostly due to the ease of use and familiarity.
Out of curiosity, does Fluxer have any sort of directory/server list that you’re aware of? I’ve always been very reliant on Disboard to find servers, and both Stoat and Matrix seem to have similar sites but I couldn’t find one for Fluxer. Wonder if I’m just searching poorly or if one hasn’t been made yet.
Aside from wanting to use it to find servers I was curious to get a gauge on how many people are actually using it too.
@camelwize @nfreak there is this _
FluxDiscover: https://fluxer.gg/QRoofKE1
literally almost a 1:1 discord clone
If you read the blog, it’s because the dev studied the Discord code very closely and did their best to mimic it.
Though E2EE isn’t currently on the solo dev’s roadmap
It is on the roadmap. It says it right on the project homepage.
I have decided on Haven, since self-hosting is a requirement (I don’t trust anyone but me), it’s UI is similar, and it can do text, voice, and video. I found it a few months ago when the discord data breach broke, but waited because it doesn’t have a docker image. It does have a Dockerfile and compose file now because of my suggestion and work of a couple different contributors, but no image yet.
Well a week into this and I have been giving issue reports, feature suggestions, and feedback to the dev, and I think it’s the best combo of ‘in control of my data’ with ‘ease of setup’ and genuine, working, features. And the dev seems really excited to see users, and the back and forth on Github is something I don’t expect - just the excitement, the welcoming of ‘can we do this’ and ‘could this be changed to make that easier’.
It’s almost discord, as a web app, controlled by you, and made by just the one dev and a couple contributors. And the differences are easy to understand.
Stoat is locked into google services on Android, hard pass from me.
Actually it’s not because there are third party clients available that you can use without any interactions with google services. I’m using Clerotri on GrapheneOS right now.
There’s also Fluxer https://fluxer.app/ which seems to be halfway between the two you mentioned, and self hostable
Matrix because it seems like the most logical choice - largest platform that’s federated/decentralised and has end-to-end encryption.
Personally I’ve had consistent problems with messages not un-encrypting in Matrix, requiring frequent re-sending of messages. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata is shared across the Matrix network even with encryption, nor am I fan of the group who developed and funded it, or the willingness of the Matrix/Element team to sell their services to law enforcement.
Movim has all of the same features as Matrix without those downsides, if you’d like to give that a try instead.
You seem to be knowledgeable about XMPP… How does XMPP’s E2EE compare to matrix’?
I tried XMPP and Matrix a few days ago. The XMPP experience is SO MUCH BETTER. HOLLY FUCK.
Matrix is so laggy and clunky and slow and annoying. XMPP was just perfect. And the “Conversations” client, for XMPP, is so fucking fast. It is missing a few things, such as swipe to quote/reply to a given message, but damn, is it fast.
As far as I know, XMPP’s OMEMO encryption is modeled off of Signal’s encryption, but modified to function without a centralized server. It’s generally regarded as a very solid, strong encryption, even better than openPGP.
Matrix’s encryption uses Megolm or olm, which I believe is also regarded well, the issue is that Matrix’s inherent design means it’s spreading copies of the metadata of those messages (though the contents of the message itself is encrypted) far and wide to many servers unnessesarily. Seeing as a lot can still be gleaned from metadata (when a message was sent, to who it was sent to), it’s a concerning model considering how big the main Matrix server is, which means that it usually always receives a copy of all metadata activity on the protocol, unless a self-hosted server completely kills federation (which defeats the point of it).
A good comment from an older reddit thread summed it up well:
matrix.org is unique because it hosts so many user accounts. As a result, it becomes a metadata honeypot for the entire matrix network. It’s kind of a design flaw in my eyes. Matrix is great. But it would be even better if it didn’t have this issue.
Xmpp is federated, but you have the option of not sharing chat metadata with other servers on the network. Matrix doesn’t give that option. matrix.org is effectively a central server due to the fact that a majority of accounts are hosted there, AND all metadata associated with those accounts, which includes metadata from other servers they communicate with, accumulates on matrix.org. I would suspect a very high percentage of matrix metadata, ends up on a single server. Xmpp just does not have this problem.
On selling services to law enforcement: I disagree. You would want your E2E encryption platform to be respected and recognized by law enforcement, so they don’t just think “oink oink, only criminals use this service, this guy must be a criminal!”
I recommend this defcon talk if you haven’t watched it (I think its the right one, TOR developer talks about why he teaches federal agencies how to use TOR)
willingness of the Matrix/Element team to sell their services to law enforcement.
They are selling the messing service… of course not the messages… I don’t know whether that is a problem or not. I don’t really think so.
It’s a downside in my opinion, considering the police in most countries assist in maintaining the control of corporations and authoritarian governments. To offer services to them knowing this is a negative ethical marker for a company.
Removed by mod
The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.
Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.
It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.
It doesn’t even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D
For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514
Aren’t they Instagram-style UI/UX? How could this be a discord replacement?
I’ve never used Instagram, so I wouldn’t know how it compares, but Movim looks like this, which is very Discord-like to me.
As I mentioned in my previous comment, the only thing missing from Movim is collections of rooms under a single group/channel, which the developer is actively working on.
I was just playing with an XMPP servers seems fairly straightforward. The container situation is not great that I have seen so far
I already removed my Discord account and you should too. Especially if you see this message.
How did no one see this coming?
I’ve moved my friends to fluxer which has way more features and just works.
Obviously this is tougher for large communities, but as of now Fluxer is much further along and more stable than Stoat and easier to understand and use than Matrix (Commet) for non-techies. It also is the most like discord unlike Teamspeak, Mumble, etc.
It also is going to support self hosted soon with a major refactor, is EU based, and seems to have a sustainable donation based model for long term development. I think it’s going to support federation at some point as well, but don’t quote me on that.
Keep us posted on how Fluxer handles, I read their website/github and it looked fairly undercooked and their documentation needs help. The app probably works fine and the main host is likely in for a shock when with the flood of new users and I worry about them, it looks promising.
