[cbdumas]

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.

[Semaphor]

> small minority

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).

[cbdumas]

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.

[SkiFire13]

> I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server

That makes you an even smaller minority unfortunately. Most people are not going to set up a home server.

[opan]

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.

[beart]

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.