I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble.
I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.
Huh. I’d have said majority. It was always my impression that a) gamers make up the vast majority of discord users (with all their gamification and gaming features), and b) that gamers mainly care about voice chat (which is what people almost always talk about when it comes to discord and gaming).
That may be true but the sense I get from Gen Z folks who I've talked to is that for them Discord is almost more of a social network for interacting with a community. Their activity might be centered around gaming but they're using Discord to find people they don't already know to play with, talk about the game, etc. For those folks, Mumble will not be even close to an alternative to discord.
Myself, though, I basically only use it to talk to the same guys I've been gaming with since we met in middle school 20-some years ago, and for that Mumble seems perfect.
It's semantics, really. Run the server executable on any computer in your house. Done. If you don't leave your computer on 24/7, the Mumble server isn't up 24/7. Oh well. If you use it to talk to friends, you'll presumably have your computer on when you want to use it yourself anyway.
> If you use it to talk to friends, you'll presumably have your computer on when you want to use it yourself anyway.
I tried this in the past but it didn't work. Now if your friends want to play you need to start the server for them. What if you're not at home? You basically end up making your pc a 24/7 server. Or you need to coordinate so that someone else runs the server in those cases, but that ends up creating more confusion. And let's not start talking about port forwarding issues...
All these issues are solvable, but they add so much friction when all you want to do is play with some friends.
Mumble servers used to be just a few dollars a year (haven't looked in a long time). But even that is enough friction to prevent adoption. Plus it doesn't support any of the non-voice features.
I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.