Selfhosted

So, I’ve been having issues with voice chat on Discord and I’m looking for alternatives. In my search, I came across Mumble, here. Does anyone here have experience, or information regarding Mumble, or a better alternative to Discord with better latency? Is it relatively easy to set up? Is it safe? Any advice and help is greatly appreciated.

Been running a server for my friends for over a decade now. Can recommend. It's just one apt-get to set up, runs on a Pi Zero for a dozen people, has clients available for pretty much any platform and doesn't really require any maintenance. Latency will depend on the routing between you and your friends' ISPs, of course, but the whole purpose of the software itself was to provide a low-latency voicechat server for gaming.

But: That's it. You don't get anything else. It's a barebones voice chat server. You can set up rooms and have basic text-functionality, but you don't get any fancy user management, no full-fledged chatrooms, no persistence beyond the room setup and only limited backend options. Keep that in mind.

I’ve spent many nights roaming in an EVE online pirate gang shooting the shit on mumble. Can recommend.

Mumble is THE SHIT.

Some expirence on some self-hosted VOIP solutions from my EvE online days and I self-host a Teamspeak instance (my nerds like it, get off my lawn).

Mumble in terms of its UI and user expirence, the worst of the major VOIP projects (looks very 2008), however it is by far the best in terms of server stability, plugin compatibility and security. To quote my old EvE admin "Mumble will take the team two weeks to set up correctly, and drive them mad, but once thats done they will not need to touch the config again". Plus it not requiring a license allows large orgs to use it freely. Ever have a need 2.5k+ VOIP users all trying to talk over eachother? Mumble is the only free application that will handle that without issue.

Teamspeak3 is what I run, and for small communities its perfect. TS5 exists, and the devs keep trying to make "We have Discord at home" and its just a UI fork, they all run the same server backend. As for features, TS3 has the best of ease of set up and granular permissions with API tools to allow for remote or automated managment. For user counts, anything beyond that of a small guild in any game will require a license, they are cheap (I just renewed my 30$ a year license and didnt have to reboot). Its drawbacks are that it struggles after several hundred users (its heavier on server hardware than mumble is) and user accounts with permissions can break the server. Fortunatly settings are managed by a local database so backups of server state and files are easy.

I remember Ventrilo existing, thats about it.

Hardware wise, a new pi should be fine, older models might have issues based on expected user load. Network load is not significant for normal hobbiest user counts, security is not any different than normal homelab internet services.

Let me know if there is anything I can help with.

Been using and hosting it probably for two decades, never any issues

I self host and use mumble daily with my friends. I absolutely love it. One small tip I can share is to enable RNNoise noise cancelling on the client, because it is very effective.

Some mates and I self host mumble. Haven't touched the server in a while but I remember it being pretty easy to set up.

The voice quality is imo better than discord and it's way lighter on system resources.

If you want all the other nonsense like screen sharing and chat and what not, I think there are some open source alternatives (to discord) like fosscord or whatever this is called now but I've never used them.

I used Mumble to 5-queue league of legends and feed the other team. Mumble worked perfectly and was very boring, letting me focus on getting caught out and focused down.

Mumble was... fine. My friends actually moved to Discord from Mumble for our MMO stuff but that was primarily because it was easier to invite randos to the chat. That quality makes it almost impossible to break away from atm.

I recall the latency being only a little worse than Discord, but I think that's because a friend set up the server at his work as a side thing (he also hosted Minecraft and Terraria). It's not too complex to setup, but your quality will depend a lot on the computer and network you're running. At least, it did for us, back in the day.

We've thought about alternatives to Discord. Old names were Ventrilo and TeamSpeak but they're just not very modern. Plus, now almost every chat app has voice, too. Just, for features, it's hard to beat Discord at this... though I'm willing to read the other comments to get for ideas, too. Lol

My Minecraft pals used mumble at various points. It's less polished than some options. I like the FOSS and the simplicity but the certificates confused me as a noob. Would still recommend.

i havent had the chance to try stoat yet because most of my friends refuse to leave discord, but i heard of Stoat (used to he called Revolt, but i think there was a trademark conflict) a while back and have wanted to try it out.

https://github.com/stoatchat/

Mumble is what most people used before Discord. Everyone moved to Discord because it was comparatively better than Mumble.

It's a voice chat server. That's all it does. ~~You can't post images, GIFs etc.~~

Fine for if you just need voice, but good luck getting people away from discord.

(Used it for WoW before discord)

I'd suggest looking into TeamSpeak, like others have mentioned. Trivial to self host, too.

Edit: to be clear, this would cover the voice call aspect of discord, not the chat channels and other community tools. While it's can do text chat, it's more of a side feature rather than core. I didn't think it does images or video, but it's been a hot minute.

Ran it back on a raspberry pi and it was great.

I personally would avoid it