All this talk about Discord replacements plus my own experience attempting to host a Synapse has got me wondering why it seems so hard to implement voice chat.
Stupid idea: back in 2022 I got an Asterisk server working on a raspberry pi over AREDN without too much trouble. What’s stopping people from just using a PBX like that for voice chat?
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It’s easy. Mumble. Or the thing you used probably still works.
But you see, people never actually seek a discord alternative. They want a discord alternative that includes all the features in one app that is also federated, AND end to end encrypted, and each one makes things vastly more technically challenging and resource intensive and then you want them together.
A little secret: Matrix is much, much easier to host if you disable encryption and federation. Federation to many servers is the main performance killer, and “failed to decrypt message” will all disappear if you disable encryption.
If you go with anything using livekit (stoat/revolt , lasuite meet), voice is not very hard per se (just a bunch of udp ports required).
It’s video that will get your CPU to its knees
Use mumble
Simple 1:1 audio stream is easy.
Groups, screen sharing, noise canceling, NAT traversal, mobile apps, and all those extra features people have come to expect are hard.
Exactly!
people act entitled as if all that you mention was trivial and that somehow FOSS devs “owe” people, but we only see those big corpos make it happen because… well, they’re big corpos, burning VC money on makint it happen and making it happen in a controlled jail.
I have honestly not seen anyone acting like they are “owed” these things by FOSS developers. We just want them.
As for “why is it hard to self-host”, it is only NAT traversal.
TURN, STUN, ICE, etc. are not fun to debug. Not sure if anyone still bothers fiddling with TOS/DSCP on their router. You can build a voice server that just exposes a TCP port, but… latency. And corporate firewalls love to randomly block some UDP port ranges but not others.
Mumble will do all of that except screen sharing. Only the server has to deal with NAT.
Groups: just simple Chanels are fine, password lock them if you want.
Screen sharing: one at a time should be fine. Self hoster can configure max bit rates.
Mobile apps: building your app to be multiplatform is a lot easier than it was a decade ago.
Try mumble if you just need voice. Just fire up a docker container and open a tcp and a udp port. The settings are under-documented so things like auth are tough to set up.
I second mumble, it’s a 5 min job to fire it up and default servers settings are enough to get going out of the box.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation TCP Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #88 for this comm, first seen 13th Feb 2026, 05:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
So as mentioned we have both Mumble and Team Speak if you are looking for a self hosted VC.
Isn’t TeamSpeak still a thing?
Not FOSS or open source in any sense. You could still say it’s self-hosted, but I suspect most people self-hosting care about this.
Yeah, from what I understand, standing up a Teamspeak server is pretty straightforward.
I thought it was only voice though. Not screen share or chat.
It does have screen sharing now! The Linux client currently can’t share system audio, but I think they’re working on that
Yeah, it has chat. Nothing too fancy, at least not back when I last used it (which, granted, is decades ago) but chat it has.
I think they just announced a big new version just in time for Discord to tell us all to fuck off
VDO Ninja is really nice. My friend self hosts it, and it didn’t seam that hard.
It’s not, but the people who are asking are often not tech-savvy, and any amount of self-hosting will be hard for them
Nothing is stopping it, it’s just not particularly convenient because it’s designed around the limitations of the phone system.
SIP could handle it all if you wanted though.
