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Is there a #FOSS self-hosted version of discord?

What about something similar to twitch that does streaming?

One of the reasons twitch is popular is because it's easy to have your audience help support the cost of running your channel. So, systems for micropayment are also an area for possible future expansion.

Or are there technical hurdles or cost hurdles to building such things?
#OSS

#foss #oss
This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to myrmepropagandist

For Twitch, there's Owncast, which aims to be a Federated personal streaming platform. I haven't used it myself (crippling social anxiety makes streaming a no-go) but I've heard mixed-to-good reviews, which is honestly pretty good for OSS.
Payments are a problem because any time you touch real money you're dealing with 8000lb gorillas (Visa, MasterCard, Thiel's PayPal, Canada's 6 banks, etc) or with bogus "money" you're dealing with Nazis and other crypto grifters.
in reply to Mx. Eddie R

@silvermoon82

You can do crypto transfers with python, it's very code-able, but none of the coins are stable enough to make this viable. And, of course, how do you get money into and out of the system?

I do think the payment network problem is important for the alternative web. Using patreon or paypay isn't great.

What about partnering with a credit union?

The problem with money is as soon as you make systems that do anything with money you are swarmed by grifters and need to be perfect.

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

But if we don't think about money all of these FOSS tools will remain toys for middle class people who don't mind spending a few of their own dimes on keeping them running. It's a barrier to entry. Can it be lowered or knocked down?
This entry was edited (3 days ago)

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82 I've been trying to work out where GNU Taler sits in this zone: banks have KYC requirements which preclude some innovative stuff.

Maybe the trick would be to set up a fiscal edge node: i.e. a credit union which had the situational awareness and expertise to handle integrating and also working with free software people.

And that'd be a great hobby to do with all our free time and money! /s

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82

#Wero might become the next best thing?

www.wero-wallet.eu

It's kinda Paypal done by European banks (🇩🇪🇫🇷🇧🇪🇳🇱), without any fees.

Not sure if it will be available internationally.

But the two major German coop banking groups are on board, so that might be as good as it gets from a "power to the people" perspective.

in reply to Billiglarper

@billiglarper
In Canada we have Interac email transfers. To and from any (?) Canadian bank account, low or no fee (some small banks still charge $5, I think?), but still subject to opinions of the 6 apex banks so have to be careful about sex and drugs and such.
in reply to Mx. Eddie R

@silvermoon82 @billiglarper

That is so civilized. Meanwhile in the US they just eliminated the free electronic way to do your taxes.

Not to save money. So that you either have to do the form by hand OR pay one of the many "services" to do your taxes.

Why doesn't that make more people as angry as it makes me? I suppose most people still use the services. And it's just $100 bucks or so, going to whoever and NOT the government.

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

@billiglarper
Yeah, the tax-paying situation is ridiculous here, too. Not as bad, but bad.
Then there's the Nordic countries, where once a year you get a form from the revenue service that says "This look right? Anything to add? Sign here" and your taxes are done.
in reply to myrmepropagandist

"Why doesn't that make more people as angry as it makes me?"

What are you going to do, if you support the idea of a state? Once you accept a state you accept that it can do whatever it wants, in practice, because the alternative is no state and you don't want that.

In this case it's like the state wants you to pay $100 in taxes to a state crony. So yes, historically all states are corrupt. It's a better use of your taxes than funding the military.

in reply to Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝

@richpuchalsky

Sometimes when the state does things people get angry about it. I don't see how this answers the question.

Are you saying it can't be changed? That isn't true. There is a great deal of inertia and other issues that compete for attention and time. But, there is a principle here:

There should not be third party fee for basic government services and interactions.

I am wondering if this value exists for many people.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

"Sometimes when the state does things people get angry about it."

I think that this gets absorbed into the general, and politically not fruitful, anger that people always feel about paying taxes.

I don't see any principle in this case at all. The state can do whatever it wants, like commit genocide. Since people don't care or can't do anything about the genocide why stand on principle about some corruption.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82 @billiglarper It sure makes me angry, too. Every year it makes my blood boil that the “best” option I have is to pay Intuit $100 every spring to file my taxes, and only lose 4 hours of my life doing it. Infuriating. Same with our goddam “healthcare” system. Maybe someday we throw all those leeches and fat cats out, and make the world we deserve 🙏🙏🙏
in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82 @billiglarper If it's fulfilling an essential government function (paying taxes) it is an additional tax that is going into private pockets in a way that has zero accountability to the people.
in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82 @billiglarper not to upset you more but here in za for the last 3 years i haven't even done my returns. i get a notice from the tax man they're ready for review, i have a quick look, and then do nothing. a few days later the refund is in my bank account

reshared this

in reply to cuan_knaggs

@mensrea @silvermoon82 @billiglarper

There is *no reason* why it couldn't work this way in the US. Or rather there is no rational reason other than a deliberate ongoing pressure to make all government services and interactions terrible lest the people start liking anything about the process.

And the people who say "we need to privatize* it" are often behind the poor service, and deliberate Obfuscation.

*Think of the last time you were on hold. Are private companies "better"? No.

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

@mensrea @silvermoon82 @billiglarper no reason except for lobbying. propublica.org/article/inside-…

NZ being a mostly reasonable country also has the "we'll tell you what your taxes are" approach.

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

There should be a Federal tax boycott.

1. Fed taxes are the financial foundation of the oppression machine now.

2. Every service we pay taxes *for* is being dismantled.

3. The regime stupidly crippled the IRS and its ability to go after tax evaders, let 300 million at once.

And now they're making it harder to pay taxes anyway. So fuck 'em.

This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82 It's always struck me that peer to peer is the way to distribute hosting costs, but it is technically challenging to implement such tools, and you also then have third parties connecting to your PC which is a lot more suss nowardays than it used to be. The real issue IMO is keeping the software maintained by developer(s) who are able to fully focus on maintaining that platform ( which means money, again - which FOSS is not great at... )
in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82

I have thought GNU Taler could be interesting for payment handling.

taler.net/en/index.html

It's a system designed to provide a digital cash like protocol, in use it might actually be kind of like poker chips. It using a form of cryptography to implement it, but it's not a proof of work system like the right wing cryptocurrencies.

Customers would buy tokens from an issuer with some currency, be able to anonymously purchase items from vendors using those tokens, who then can deposit the tokens with a transaction log, and be able to redeem them for the original currency.

The developers have done some test deployments at an EU university and they've got some prototype django websites and android apps available.

I suspect the next actions are doing security review of the code, find a pool of people interested, and figure out governance and business organization issues.

I think doing modest purchases like the prices for I see for quick art commissions or donations (<$40) to a stream probably could be set up with a small business

But to really roll it out my guess would be to found a credit union, and then that could offer issuing taler tokens to it's community

Here's the NCUA documentation on founding a credit union, and they recommended figuring out your community and raising about $500,000 USD to be able to start.

ncua.gov/regulation-supervisio…

in reply to Diane

@alienghic @silvermoon82

This is so cool! I've never even considered the concept of a local non-profit credit union ... you know not for old people. The focus should be digital payment independence.

I assume if you try to do this someone from Mastercard comes to your house and beats you up. But I just found my old bike lock and it is very heavy.

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

@alienghic @silvermoon82

I think key to making this work would be having many limits on size of accounts and to keep it local so you know who is in it.

And never lend any money.

hmmm

in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82

I absolutely think something like my work campus's stored value card would be a great use case for Taler.

For a while we could deposit money on our ID cards and then spend it at stuff like the coffee shop or the library photocopiers.

I think that's a good low risk situation to experiment with Taler.

Also one their, demos included issuing a fictitious currency "Kudos" which you could spend on FOSS projects.

So I bet one could also make up an ARG game that uses fake currency issued via Taler as digital playing pieces, for a really low risk way of experimenting.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

@alienghic @silvermoon82

>But I just found my old bike lock and it is very heavy.

LOL, your family and online friends are very lucky to have you.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82

When my mom became interested in bitcoin I decided to learn about it because the way that my mom works is if she wants to know about something she will get into it and you can do it with her... or she will do it on her own. I wanted to keep her safe.

So I learned how the whole thing works. I had some bitcoin left over from years ago and set up a wallet for her. We did transfers with my own code in terminal.

Fun mother-daughter bonding!

in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82

We had to use coinbase to get the money out and that annoyed me. The alternative was going on facebook and using shady "cash for bitcoin in person" groups. *shudder*

But I can see why people had utopian ideas about the technology.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

Yeah, kinda the same here. No personal.interest in it, but I had a dayjob that years ago started as a cryptocoin scam and accidentally also did something useful, but while it was still trying to be a cryptocoin company I had to use Ethereum for some dev and testing. After a couple years the $5 I'd put into ETH was worth $15 or so, but again I had to use Coinbase to turn it back into dollars. Now I have to do tax paperwork every year on a historic $7 "profit" apparently forever?

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82 USDC is stable enough and Solana is maybe an OK solution.

Getting it in and out though, THAT is a huge problem in the USA. First, you have to use an exchange unless you want to find someone that'll trade money for coin (very possibly a criminal). They are all owned and run by terrible people. Then there's the KYC process, which is entirely automated by AI.

Could maybe partner to create a better USDC option for people. Something with real customer support and shit.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

@silvermoon82 Probably. I'm not sure what, if any regulations are around USDC. Circle is the company that is mainly behind that one.

Theoretically anyone could take in USD and put out a token they promise can be cashed for USD. Getting people to accept it though...

I would really like an actual bank account that held USDC but the choices there are VERY limited in the US. You may need to get e-residency somewhere for that, though I did find a CU a couple hund miles away that may

in reply to myrmepropagandist

I looked into streaming some months ago, and some #Peertube instances seem to allow it. There is also #Owncast , but that looked like too much effort for my purposes.

I don't know of any #Fediverse equivalent of #Discord , however.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

Discord is e.g. Matrix/synapse and streaming, e.g. via peertube. Monetization is really a problem. I know it too. The FOSS community doesn't want that because they want everything to remain free. I understand that. But I make music, for example, and you have to be very idealistic to do that here.

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

There is Revolt for a self-hosted Discord replacement. Still in beta, but seems to have basic functionality.
in reply to myrmepropagandist

I don't know about alternatives. But discord should be "easy" to replace.
The problem with twitch is the enormous bandwidth and computing power needed to distribute the stream all over the world in close to real time. Chat-interaction seems to bring many people to the platform. And that gets increasingly difficult the longer the delay between streamer and viewer becomes. Open P2P platforms start with an extreme disadvantage in that regard.

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in reply to Gib 🐒🌈🇺🇦

@Gib 🐒🌈🇺🇦 @myrmepropagandist I disagree with your initial assessment. Discord's value proposition isn't its IRC-like channel feature or built-in video/audio chat, but the seamless Single Sign-On experience once you've created your account when you want to join an additional server. Until this is possible with Revolt (and this post in the same thread suggests it isn't yet), Discord won't be easy to replace.


ive got experience with this. frankly, most of the other replies are not good

for discord, matrix and revolt. revolt is an attempt at a discord clone directly, but isnt federated or e2ee iirc. matrix is, and supports video calls; but it's not a 1:1 copy, is a pain to host, provides little in the way of moderation tools. for matrix, the best client is cinny for a discord-like experience

for twitch, people will suggest owncast and openstreamingplatform - theyre woefully inadequate if you want a twitch-like experience unless you're ready to make lots of changes. that said, there is a new attempt at a federated twitch alternative i saw the other day. ill try to find it again


in reply to myrmepropagandist

any Twitch equivalent would suffer from a serious chicken-egg problem regarding audience. That said, I love the idea of a Twitch alternative that supports micropayments. Could be valuable for more established streamers or people who tend to be kicked off Twitch but have an audience.
in reply to myrmepropagandist

ive got experience with this. frankly, most of the other replies are not good

for discord, matrix and revolt. revolt is an attempt at a discord clone directly, but isnt federated or e2ee iirc. matrix is, and supports video calls; but it's not a 1:1 copy, is a pain to host, provides little in the way of moderation tools. for matrix, the best client is cinny for a discord-like experience

for twitch, people will suggest owncast and openstreamingplatform - theyre woefully inadequate if you want a twitch-like experience unless you're ready to make lots of changes. that said, there is a new attempt at a federated twitch alternative i saw the other day. ill try to find it again

This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to myrmepropagandist

infodumping my findings about payment processing in self-hosted FOSS software

Sensitive content

in reply to myrmepropagandist

People ask about FOSS alternatives to Discord a lot, and there really isn't a viable alternative. The main things Discord has going for it are a common interface for text, voice, and video chat, and a good set of moderation tools. I can't think of anything else that does all that.

The most frequently mentioned candidate is Matrix, but Matrix has many problems. It has practically no moderation tools, and while ostensibly designed for self-hosting, has exceedingly high resource usage.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

@jerry supports a number of payment processors for funding infosec.exchange

To help support the costs associated with running this instance, please consider donating. You can set up recurring donations here:

Patreon: patreon.com/infosecexchange

Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/infosecexchange

Liberapay: liberapay.com/Infosec.exchange…

You can also support with a one-time donation using PayPal to "jerry@infosec.exchange".


I mean, every credit card processor is their own brands of bad. The "least bad" for US donations IMO is Zelle, since it's basically just a bank to bank money transfer though it requires your bank supporting it, and many of them don't allow for a recurring payment. But at least the fees are just payed for by the banks, not adding an extra payment to visa / MasterCard / random fin tech or payment platform etc.

@futurebird

This entry was edited (3 days ago)

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

As purely informational, PeerTube has optional monetization plugins, but the only one of those plugins I feel is viable currently is a premium content plugin that works with a Stripe account to accept payment for a subscription. PeerTube has live streaming but is harder to self-host than Owncast. I currently use PeerTube now but have used Owncast before.

As for Discord alternatives, I think XMPP with the Movim front end works well. It’s way more lightweight than Matrix and allows you to also blog with it if you want. There are some easy to self host XMPP servers.

Someone already mentioned webmonitization which is powered by Interledger which I agree could offer some options, but I think it needs a lot of buy-in from a LOT of financial institutions before it gets to a point that it could offer a way to survive financially for users. I don’t know too many details though.

This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to myrmepropagandist

To the monetization question specifically: I have seen that pixelfed is planning on integrating webmonetization.org/ for monetization.

It looks like that's a draft standard but if it does start to take off, it would make a huge difference in the space.

This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to myrmepropagandist

payment processing is essentially a no go besides pretty much just paying a company a lot of money to do it for you because payment processors do not allow sensible usage

Also there's tax issues and whatnot

That is all to say, most folks just stay away from payment things. The only thing possible to impl without paying anyone is cryptocurrency.

As for FOSS discord, there are many attempts. I wouldn't say any had success.

As for streaming, it's a pretty difficult problem. Huge amounts of bandwidth needed, depending on how many concurrent streams you want.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

People have already mentioned Matrix and Revolt. These are definitely the closest to Discord in the way that Discord works.

I do want to add that Discord is a modern thing that in many ways actually isn't so different from the ancient tech of IRC. IRC was text only, whereas Discord and the similar things can implement media, but otherwise the basic mechanisms weren't so dissimilar. (There were still methods of transferring files, but they're P2P, so require open ports and didn't embed.)

Revolt is probably the closest to being a viable competitor to Discord. Matrix is better in some ways, but doesn't seem to be taking off.

I'm not sure what could truly replace Twitch or Youtube or etc. The bandwidth those things use today is wild. Owncast/etc are for small scales.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

Reliability and community level funding hurdles for long term infra.

Doing this as small volunteer groups works only so long as everyone has free time.

Can't trust the big silos. Setting up a local silo may be good, but getting community involved requires intentionality that evades more than 80% of USians.

Also, reliable infra requires reliable staffing. That staff, in the US, need medical benefits, esp for the level of experience needed to run it with minimal staffing.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

I have some ideas in my head about writing a self-hosted Discord equivalent. It’s just ideas at the moment, though; 0 lines of code.
in reply to Seph

@melivia

It's to tickle those kinds of ideas that I keep bringing this kind of thing up.

@Seph
in reply to myrmepropagandist

in the mid-2000s, that would be irc and shoutcast (and if you wanted live chat you'd just run the channel name in your stream somewhere and people will join)

if you needed a bigger pipe, someone runs a relay and the audience connects to that instead

somehow, technology has gone _backwards_ from there

in reply to myrmepropagandist

There's revolt.chat

Their GitHub has a repo for self hosting the server. When I used it, it felt very similar to Discord. I opted to not use it for our migration because being able to use the app with multiple services was a goal, so we went XMPP (a ton of tradeoffs with this too).

This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to myrmepropagandist

If it's been mentioned already, I apologize for the repetition, but as far as an alternative for discord, maybe check out www.discourse.org? I know little about it, at least in any detail, but it's a modern take on forum software. You can pay for hosting, but it appears to be open source and self hostable. Also, you can start with paid hosting to experiment with it and migrate to self hosting later if desired with, I believe, help from their support team, although I suspect that support isn't included in the basic plan.

One of the cofounders is Jeff Atwood, @codinghorror, who can no doubt correct any egregious errors I've made above.

in reply to Dale Hagglund

@DaleHagglund @codinghorror Discourse is open source forum software to which chat functionality has been added; Discord is a chat service to which forum functionality has been added. The difference shows in the implementation.

Discourse is open source and well maintained. It's thoughtfully designed to help foster and grow a community. It's not hard to self-host, and there are multiple sources of full-service hosting. It has a Subscriptions plug-in that integrates with Stripe I think, though I haven't deployed it myself.

Unlike with WordPress, the company that builds Discourse (Civilized Discourse Construction Kit) works actively and cooperatively with multiple third parties that host and extend Discourse, including recommending their services and even sponsoring outside parties' work on the code.

It's a really shining example of how to do open source right.

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

@DaleHagglund @codinghorror Discord does not have video chat built in; the integrated chat feature is text chat. The plug-in ecosystem supports both major open source video chat platforms I'm aware of:

meta.discourse.org/t/jitsi-vid…

meta.discourse.org/t/bigbluebu…

I have not used either, so I don't have experience with deploying them, but they are available. If I were starting out from scratch today to build something like this for a community site, based only on my gist of what I remember hearing/reading from others, I'd try jitsi first.

In both cases, you need to follow the documentation for the chat platform (Jitsi or BigBlueButton) to set it up for self-hosting, then use the plug-in to integrate it into Discourse.

in reply to myrmepropagandist

Some of our hackerspaces use Matrix, so we use Matrix spaces like a "Discord" replacement - but I can't really recommend it, because Matrix is "the opposite of user-friendly".
This entry was edited (18 hours ago)
in reply to myrmepropagandist

there are several OSS discord-likes, the one I use is Matrix/Element. The dev team for "Tusky" makes heavy use of self hosted Matrix. Everyone I know who runs Matrix servers complains about the product quality tho.

The open source Twitch alike I'm currently trying out is stream.place . I've done one successful stream there already. The one thing I don't like is it is partially built on top of Bluesky which creates awkwardness.