From the first moment I first went online in 1996, forums were the main place to hang out. In fact the very first thing I did was join an online forum run by the Greek magazine "PC Master" so I could directly to my favourite game reviewers (for me it was Tsourinakis, for those old [...]
  • recklessengagement@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month 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.worldEnglish
      0·
      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.

        • toastal@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.

          Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).

          • sep@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            30 days ago

            In what way are matrix expencive? You do not have to self host it. You can just make an account on any public matrix server.