No discussion on voice/video channels? [LWN.net]

No discussion on voice/video channels?

Posted Feb 25, 2026 20:32 UTC (Wed) by tbelaire (subscriber, #141140)
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

It's interesting what LWN's article writer considered important in these comparisons, compared to what the discord migration discussion I have personally seen compared.

In particular, being able to screenshare and voice chat at similar levels to Discord were table stakes level, while federation is not important to that group at all. So Mumble, Vent, and Teamspeak were considered, along with Stoat and Root.

I even looked into selfhosting Jitsi, alongside a text chat.

to post comments

No discussion on voice/video channels?

Posted Feb 25, 2026 21:09 UTC (Wed) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (1 responses)

... this might be my aversion to video calls showing up as a bit of a bias. My hobby communities have been having the Discord migration discussion as well, but we don't tend to use video or voice chats at all, so it wasn't at the top of my mind.

Zulip has a Jitsi integration that allows one to start a Jitsi call via a configured server directly from a Zulip chat. Matrix has native VoIP, although one has to configure an appropriate STUN server and client support is limited. There's also an XMPP extension for voice and video calls, but client support is a problem there too.

No discussion on voice/video channels?

Posted Feb 27, 2026 11:30 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

FWIW I prioritized text over voice or video just like you did since I can barely remember the last time I used Discord for either and in general only used it a handful of times in the 10 years or so on there.

No discussion on voice/video channels?

Posted Feb 27, 2026 9:37 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (3 responses)

In one of the communities I am in, we use Mattermost for chat, and BigBluebutton (BBB) for voice chat. This works quite nicely, with one caveat: people tend to use the ephemeral (lost when the session ends) text chat within BBB when we are voice chatting, while in many cases the text chatting would be more appropriate on Mattermost: If it's about the discussion topic, Mattermost is better, whereas for questions concerning the voice chat ("do you hear me?") the BBB chat is better.

BBB also provides Etherpad (shared document editing), but in our experience it's better to post different text/code variants on Mattermost, so that we can go back and forth, compare, and pick and choose, rather than having just one version with Etherpad; copying and editing in Mattermost is hardly harder then editing in Etherpad.

No discussion on voice/video channels?

Posted Feb 28, 2026 3:28 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

This sounds like the terrible Google Meet in-call messaging that is ephemeral. It'd be really nice if it were possible to just stick it as a thread in an existing space instead of making it go away so easily when all participants are part of the same workspace.

The Direct Message chats it opens for meetings are also terrible: no thread support and cannot be converted to their own spaces. So the conversation *also* gets stuck in a purgatory. But at least search can find it again.

No discussion on voice/video channels?

Posted Mar 2, 2026 8:57 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually they changed the Google Meet one now so it turns into a Google Chat channel you can refer to afterwards.

No discussion on voice/video channels?

Posted Mar 2, 2026 11:05 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

It's definitely not automatic at least. Or we haven't gotten the rollout applied.

Does it capture all chat or just what the person doing the conversion has in their history (because when the network drops, I tend to lose the chat history too)?