Yeah, sadly most open source alternatives to discord either cannot do voice/video chat or cannot do it as well or seamlessly as discord did, partially because federated voice/video chat is not really a solved issue and partially because of money. Though even most of the centralised ones don’t really have voice/video chat that works well except for a few like Signal because they have the resources.
Another problem is it’s based on p2p a lot of the time, whereas I think things like discord partially use their servers to facilitate it, I’ll check on this though.
Matrix could’ve implemented it with classic TURNS for a while now so the feature at least is there for those needing it, but they dug their own hole instead and focused so hard on their idea of a protocol they created software that hardly can do anything, and what is should be able to do it does really badly. Also for some reasons it was more important to throw away he concepts of “Communities” and build… “Places”. Now Element is a convoluted mess that <Error Decrypting Second Part of this Message>
To my understanding they’re pushing those TURN connections through your home instance though? Wasn’t that the whole reason it takes so phenomenally long?
Otherwise implementing WebRCT with TURN would be rather easy, there are ready-to-use modules and frameworks to do so in basically any language. Whatever it is that’s wrong with the teams behind Matrix, it causes Matrix (especially when used with Element) to be just awful and buggy.
Jitsi doesn’t have e2ee except in a few situations and they don’t seem interested in bringing e2ee to all platforms, or they can’t. It also is somewhat buggy with disconnects etc. Also it’s meant for one off calls or meetings compared to discord, but yeah, it’s okay for some situations.
Yeah, sadly most open source alternatives to discord either cannot do voice/video chat or cannot do it as well or seamlessly as discord did, partially because federated voice/video chat is not really a solved issue and partially because of money. Though even most of the centralised ones don’t really have voice/video chat that works well except for a few like Signal because they have the resources.
Another problem is it’s based on p2p a lot of the time, whereas I think things like discord partially use their servers to facilitate it, I’ll check on this though.
Matrix could’ve implemented it with classic TURNS for a while now so the feature at least is there for those needing it, but they dug their own hole instead and focused so hard on their idea of a protocol they created software that hardly can do anything, and what is should be able to do it does really badly. Also for some reasons it was more important to throw away he concepts of “Communities” and build… “Places”. Now Element is a convoluted mess that <Error Decrypting Second Part of this Message>
Matrix uses TURN, and the Matrix protocol is not used for carrying voice/video.
Element is an independent client developed by Element, and not part of the Matrix protocol.
To my understanding they’re pushing those TURN connections through your home instance though? Wasn’t that the whole reason it takes so phenomenally long?
Otherwise implementing WebRCT with TURN would be rather easy, there are ready-to-use modules and frameworks to do so in basically any language. Whatever it is that’s wrong with the teams behind Matrix, it causes Matrix (especially when used with Element) to be just awful and buggy.
Jitsi
Jitsi doesn’t have e2ee except in a few situations and they don’t seem interested in bringing e2ee to all platforms, or they can’t. It also is somewhat buggy with disconnects etc. Also it’s meant for one off calls or meetings compared to discord, but yeah, it’s okay for some situations.