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My experience has been that Discord is a pleasure to use.

And then there’s IRC, Slack and Gitter - by preference. With Gitter being by far the worst




We regularly have arguments among our gaming groups about which one is better. I find that Discord starts to get messy around 20+ people, after which a community starts to fragment into more smaller discord servers.

Slack has been pretty solid for large groups though. We'd normally hit the message limit in 3 days, sometimes even 1 day during a large raid. It didn't really matter because nobody really wants to scroll that far back.

IRC seems to have a chance with IRCCloud and the like, but it's just hard to get people into. But we are starting to see channels with 500-1000 people again, so maybe this appeals to some communities.


Interesting that my anecdata seems the exact opposite: I've never enjoyed being in a Slack of more than a dozen or so people. Slack never seems to have quite the balance for notification management that I want, but I've been in several huge Discords and not felt overwhelmed and/or like I was missing important announcements or things relevant to my interests/needs. Also, writing bots to auto-manage one off tasks always feels like more of a chore with Slack whereas I've spun up some really hairy "get the job done immediately" bots, that just run on my local machine, for Discord, with very little ceremony beyond convincing a guild leader to install the bot.


Zulip is at the top of my preference list, at least for professional usage. Give it a shot, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I love it.


I've pushed zulip in my org (~50 people, 15 devs) and no one that has tried has "gotten it". I haven't used it that much myself so I can't demo it properly but i believe it could be "the right way" of doing internal communication for teams/dm. But maybe it's too advanced?

Do you know of any official/unofficial videos that would help getting traction?


Yes, Zulip has the disadvantage that the UX isn't exactly the same as every other chat program, so it takes some getting used to. The UX is great, it's just different enough that people don't grok it immediately, and that's too much for people unless you start with a core that's using it and grow the company around that (hard to do with an already established company).

I'm afraid I don't know of any videos, but I tell people "Zulip is exactly like Slack, but everything is a thread, and you can zoom in and out of threads" and find that that's basically enough for them to get it. Maybe try that with a few people and see?


In our early days of Zulip-use, I had to regularly edit people's messages to force them into using a topic. A handful of people still don't get it and treat topics as special/long-lived channels, but most of us devs love it.


You can break messages off into other topics, and we have one long-lived channel per stream, which I've found helps (you don't always want to make a new thread to post a one-off link).


We do something similar to Zulip that is (in my opinion) a little easier to use, Aether (https://aether.app). Its also thread based, but it’s a little more in the line of Slack and Discord in terms of design. So far as we can see it’s been a fairly easy uptake moving from there.

Also helps that we have a full email coupling, so if someone in your team doesn’t like or want to use the app, everything will stream to them just as regular email threads they can respond. This is useful for older folks who prefer email, or higher up people who don’t want to deal with an app but still be able to follow what’s happening.

Here’s a comparison of how that works in one image: https://i.imgur.com/wLFnIyn.png

If you’d like to try it I can throw in a discount code, just reach out - my email is in my profile.


> Gitter being by far the worst

God I hate Gitter. I'm forced to use it because some communities (such as Mithril.js) hang there but it's slow, riddled with UX problems, and search is completely useless.


Same here, although it's still not a patch on IRC. The problem with IRC has always been that it's usually blocked everywhere and that there is really only one top-class client (mIRC).

It's such a shame that for chat you have the choice between something which turns your laptop into a helicoper but works everywhere or something super fast and extendable (and free!) which is blocked by every firewall everywhere.


I use a weechat relay over websockets (via nginx). It's a pretty convenient solution to the whole "my corporate firewall thinks I'm part of a botnet" issue (in addition to giving you channel history persistence).


> mIRC

Ha! Never thought I'd hear mIRC described as a top-class client. Unix has irssi, and I'd opine that even Xchat is better than mIRC.

I hadn't though of mIRC in so long. It makes me think back to the days of planning imageboard raids on IRC. They even had a special version of mIRC for imageboard raids called m/i/rc.


Discord is okay as an "all in one" package, but purely for voice communications falls far behind alternatives like Teamspeak.


Mumble / Murmur [1][2] is a nice self hosted alternative to Teamspeak and there are also many public servers. Rock solid, great voice quality, UX is still being refined, not as frictionless as Discord for new users, but I keep one running for family to fall back to. The server is just routing text / voice, so it scales to VERY large numbers of users with little resource usage.

[1] - https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page

[2] - https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble


Mumble also has the lowest latency of any VOIP software out there, at least to my knowledge. It's something the developers prioritize a great deal.

In my experience, this improves the quality of every conversation. They just flow more naturally.

I wish other solutions would prioritize latency. Skype went very noticeably backward after they switched away from P2P.


I agree completely. I found what helps even more is to use fq_codel + google's BBR congestion control on the server and increase the netdev budget about 4x the default values and the latency remains very low with more people connected.


> Mumble / Murmur [1][2] is a nice self hosted alternative to Teamspeak

You mean an open source alternative, because TS is already self hosted.


Correct.


Define far behind? Discord solves the low latency communication problem for me like 99.99% of the time without any sort of issue. I don't really see how you're claiming it falls far behind if the difference between it and Teamspeak/Mumble/Vent or whatever is so razor thin. I've barely noticed any issues in the past 3 years of Discord, and it was the same with the previous 4 years of Mumble and however many years of Vent and Xfire before that.


Constant server issues, hard to find server regions that work well across continents at the same time, very limited support for hotkeys, ...


Huh, I don't know if I've ever had server issues with Discord outside of the whole thing going down once or twice in the past couple years. I've heard people complain about it and it's baffling to me. Maybe it's a regional thing, which would be unfortunate, but the USW server work great as far as I can tell and I voice chat on disc almost every night for multiple hours.

I also have everything I want hotkeyed, so I still think that "far behind" is a huge stretch at best.


Our raid group (spread across Europe) has communications break down about 1 in 6/7 raid nights. Its quickly solved by swapping to US East but the latency is not great for our Eastern European players. We used to be able to bounce between Western Europe and Central Europe to avoid problems but discord recently pooled all the european servers claiming it would help solve issues like this, but it hasn't really.


Similar/same experience here: Friends are in Europe, I'm in SEA / Singapore. We randomly have the robot voice or people cutting out and then start the 'switch region' dance. Which might fix the problem for a while, but messes with the latency quite a bit then.


Does Teamspeak allow each user to set the volume of any other user they hear separately? This has made discord the current choice for our group of friends.


One of the biggest things that Teamspeak has over Discord is its ability to do compression and normalization on incoming audio streams. Between those two, it doesn't matter how poor or inconsistant a microphone setup the other party has, it sounds good.

That's alone is my biggest wish out of Discord.


Yes.


Can even set 3D settings for each friend, which can be handy. For some of the cooler things you can do with Teamspeak through extensions see the Arma 3 ACRE plugin.

http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=19324 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1q4NgyCMs


I never used gitter but started to consider it.

May you please expand on why it’s not of your liking?


The gitter frontend client is a bit glitchy with scrolling up the backlog. But other than that, it's certainly workable.




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