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

No discussion on voice/video channels?

Posted Feb 27, 2026 9:37 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: No discussion on voice/video channels? by tbelaire
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

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.

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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)?