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.
I have seen lots of people. Mostly not here, but that's because we here know better (I'd hope). Runs along with usual complaints such that they can't move from a platform with 9trillion captive users to a new budding platform, conveniently forgetting that when they began Shitter and stuff also had like 0 users yet people did move.
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.
Tried mumble, worked easy and well, but i realised im not able to do without persistent chat and screen share any more. Now trying to get Matrix to work.
I ran mumble for years, insanely easy setup.
I found out the other day that I had a mumble server still running that I had been tinkering with a year or so ago and just forgot about. Hadn't noticed it was still running this whole time because it's so low in resource usage
Isn't TeamSpeak still a thing?
Yeah, from what I understand, standing up a Teamspeak server is pretty straightforward.
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.
I think they just announced a big new version just in time for Discord to tell us all to fuck off
I thought it was only voice though. Not screen share or chat.
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.
It does have screen sharing now! The Linux client currently can’t share system audio, but I think they’re working on that
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
So as mentioned we have both Mumble and Team Speak if you are looking for a self hosted VC.
This has big XKCD Energy. It almost feels like an exact recreation of the comic but with tech:
I meant the OP more as a lament about it being hard rather than a quip about it being easy.
Though upon reflection it's not the voice chat that's a problem, it's the fact that Discord is a lot of things, a chatroom, a VOIP service, and so on, and recreating all those things on top bolting on federation (which I don't see as a desirable feature in this case) is what makes it so hard.
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.
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.
Use mumble
Not a good discord replacement but setting up nextcloud talk (simple p2p voice chat) and then the high performance backend (better supports video/voice calls between 3+ people) was relatively easy. We use it among my family now to have group calls instead of relying on facebook messenger.
VDO Ninja is really nice. My friend self hosts it, and it didn’t seam that hard.
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 5 acronyms.
[Thread #88 for this comm, first seen 13th Feb 2026, 05:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I have a Jitsi server hosted through a docker container that was pretty easy, and ties into Rocket Chat. Jitsi does voice and video, Rocket Chat does chat.
Update: I got Mumble working without a lot of grief. Their mobile client isn't great though. I might try Stoat.
Federation just complicates things, as it's just for a myself and a few friends.
Look at fluxer it's stoat developed by someone who isn't retarded. Has done more in a fraction of the time and actually has functional features
https://f-droid.org/packages/se.lublin.mumla is not so bad as a mobile client for Mumble.
I'm sure it is but I have an iphone
Oof. There's an entire fdroid ecosystem you've cut yourself off from.
Don’t forget about teamspeak!
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