Given the recent controversies surrounding Discord and the fact that the end user is a product of Twitch, I wonder if there is any “bare bone” solution to stream my gaming session to a friend who’s on Windows. I’d rather that they didn’t have to do anything except clicking on a link or perhaps installing a piece of software but with no need to do any configuration. From their perspective, it should "just work.
On my side
Should I set up a webserver into which I feed an OBS stream? Or can perhaps ffmpeg work as a server on it’s own?
I’m on Arch Linux, playing games on Steam, within dwm within X11.
On my friend’s side
No idea how a windows user is supposed to receive such a video feed.
Edit: text and voice chat, we’re considering Signal for.
The two most* famous discord alternatives that I know are stoat and fluxer.
I’m the moderator of the fluxer community, you can check it here: !fluxer_app@lemmy.world
EDIT: typos
Thanks! I’ll check it out! :D
Both of these look great, I’m noting them for the next time my friends get frustrated enough with Discord to consider moving
You could use owncast as a twitch alternative: https://owncast.online/
Some Matrix clients such as comment also support screen sharing (for a more discord like experience). But I haven’t used it myself, so I can’t speak to its quality or reliability: https://commet.chat/
Nice!
Discord alternatives are complicated, because Discord is conceptual bullshit. It started as voice communication, yet became popular for the text communication.
So you won’t find a good replacement (unless something new created in particular to mimic discord), because the things it now provides are better handled by seperate applications.
PS:
OBS should already work on it’s own, without a dedicated webserver on your side. Basically every media program (also browser) should be able to handle streamsOBS’ WHIP (WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion) support should allow direct connection to web browsers.
(I’ll will take a look at it when I’m home)
Dont forget people using discord as a fking replacement for a repo…
wtf?
Pleass tell me you are just talking about discord channels instead of proper issue trackers and not something even more stupid…
Both.
People have locked channels with info instead of a readme in a repo.
And
Channels for opening issues with topics for bug tracking.
For example check nexus mods authors…
Thanks! I just installed OBS - also trying out a few variants from the AUR - but it gave an error saying “couldn’t load frontend-tools plugin”, didn’t recognize/pick up the Steam and/or the game’s window, even though I tried the game in various screen modes, and WHIP wasn’t in the streaming servers/sources selection section. I did some limited troubleshooting, but gave up, because my friend says they have Steam too. We’ll try out Steam’s “native” broadcasting function later tonight and see if we’re satisfied with that + chat/voice chat through Signal.
Thanks for your time and input! :)
Oh, I assumed you already had setup OBS…
And WHIP is probably unneccessarily complicated anyway.
I was able to stream the output of my V4L2loopback-device (the virtual camera created with OBS’ output) to a browser accessing localhost:<port> with Motion without any setup other than creating a single-line config file defining the port…
Yeah, sorry, I was unclear on several parts in the post. Thanks anyways! If Steam’s native broadcasting turns out to such, I’ll try something else.
There’s quite a few Discord alternatives. IMO Stoat and especially Fluxer are pretty discord-like. Fluxer is pretty new and still working out kinks. They support (Stoat) or will support (Fluxer) self-hosting and Fluxer will implement (limited) E2EE. I have heard of other alternatives like Root, TeamSpeak, Mumble but cannot speak to them.
Teamspeak and Mumble (which I prefer because it’s free and open-source… also already vastly superior sound quality years ago when Teamspeak was stil the common option most peope used) are indeed “separate applications” doing only one of the jobs… voice communication in this case.
Boggles my mind that teamspeak has always sounded better than discord, and yet dicksword swallowed TS’s market. Something teamspeak handled (haven’t used in ages, cannot say if it still does) was people speaking at the same time.
The main trouble with Stoat and Fluxer from what I’ve seen is that they’re both trying too hard to be Discord, while neither of them are quite hitting the mark. They’ll be interesting to follow in the future
I am very happy with having Sharkord installed on my server. Still in alpha stage, but it’s very well built in many places. The project is only 3 month old.
Native softwares will never happen, though.
Second this, me and my friends have been using it since the day it came out (I am the one hosting it) and it checks all the boxes for us.
I was never able to get my group to switch away from Discord but this has finally done it
Noice :) And yes, it looks like Discord and works like Discord for each update (if not better) and I have searched for such software for many years. Based in EU no less :D
Matrix with Commet would have been a good alternative for me, but I hate how Matrix is built (you are literally forbidden to delete channels you have created).
you are literally forbidden to delete channels you have created
Server admins and space admins can delete rooms within them just fine. If you are the last person left in a room and you leave it, it disappears too.I was the admin for the space I created :) Good to know that the whole space will be completely deleted after I left it. They should tell one that. Very confusing otherwise.
God I love humanity. Sometimes. Really neat project! :D
Haha, yes, you’re telling the truth xD
Electron is a relatively recent thing. What did Devs do in the past?
Native software, usually only for Windows. And probably no webapp or a very limited one.
Yes, but if you ask me, native softwares is not webapps in any kind and form.
Owncast already mentioned, and while it’s good, it doesn’t achieve real-time streaming like discord does. It’s more of a twitch replacement for streamers with an actual audience thanks to it’s ActivityPub support (in that people on stuff like mastodon can “subscribe” to the server).
MatrixRTC is still new and while it’s already being used to provide voice channels in clients like element, cinny and commet, as of now none of them can stream gameplay with audio.
For this I’m currently using Broadcast-box. Self-hostable, but the dev also provides a public instance.
It uses WHIP to stream over WebRTC (OBS is compatible) to achieve less than half second latency. More than fast enough to feel like “real-time” if in a voice-chat with friends. And you can push the video quality past what any platform like youtube, twitch or discord will allow.
Sweet! Thanks for the recommendations!
Owncast seems to do just fine for real-time streaming here…?
No?
The fastest I got it down to was about 30 seconds of stream delay. It’s a limitation of HLS, which will never be truly fast.
Owncasts own guides state:
If you require real-time, video conferencing style latency you may want to look for a different solution that doesn’t use HLS video, as this scaling and distribution model will never get to sub-second levels.
Open source, they are working on a self hosting img.
I’ll use that, it’s basically a discord copy but for free :).
I’m super excited about fluxer. An iOS app is all I need before recommending it to my buddies but I am very excited for the self-hosted version
You can also check out stream.place which has integration into bluesky and the atproto.
Whatever your preferred matrix client is. That’s the alternative. Element, Nheko, Fluffychat, all decent options.
Is it perfect? Hardly. Is it the best you’re going to get short of some cheap discord knockoff? Yes.
Matrix is a beyond dog shit discord replacement.
If you need something to replace teams sure it’s passable. By dear fuck is matrix garbage.
Never tried it myself, but doesn’t steam have a feature to stream to your friends? Your friend would just need to install the client and create an account. All the other options in this thread are just if you want to serve your streams to a broader audience
Not even. You can share a stream link.
I just recommended it to my friend. Let’s see what they say.
My friends and I have been using Steam’s group chat feature while waiting for an alternative. For streaming game play, we can use Steam’s broadcast feature. The downside being we can only watch one stream at a time.
Fluxor is looking like a good Discord alternative, but it’s too early to tell.
Matrix and Peertube.
I have the same question, but a particular problem I am having is the need to chat via text while streaming instead of audio for accessibility purposes. Discord’s game overlay worked okay for this (not great, but usable) on Windows, but doesn’t run at all on Linux, and every alternative I look at seems very voice chat focused. Steam does have chat options within the overlay but doesn’t seem to have good chat history options.
I’m using a separate little laptop to chat, in this case, with Signal. It’s a little inconvenient, but on the other hand, if you don’t have multiple monitors, you are at least free from chat notifications in your gaming screen/window. :)
Yet another though, if you have an Android phone, just plug in a keyboard and use the phone for chat. :D
I’ve considered that a few times, and have done the 'phone chatting while gaming" solution, but it gets pretty unwieldy quickly in my experience, sadly.
You might want to try a service based on XMPP instead of Matrix due to how Matrix caches all the chats its users are in. If you want to go the XMPP route, Movim is the most similar to Discord.
For streaming, I’ve heard of Owncast as a FOSS alternative. I don’t stream nor do I watch them, so please don’t consider this more than pointing out what’s available
As for twitch alternatives, owncast is awesome, and peertube can be your own personal YouTube and handle livestreams, both have a live chat. But if you simply just want a twitch alternative owncast will be simpler on your end.
Luckily i barely use discord, but i have one small usecase for it where it is pretty much irreplacable, which is that i use it to voice chat with a friend when playing games with crossplay support, since he is on ps5, and discord now having ps5 support makes that the go-to app.
