Curiosity Poll: Mumble vs Discord

Curiosity Poll: Mumble vs Discord

(as a VOIP solution given the choice between the two)

  • I will only use Mumble
  • I strongly prefer Mumble
  • Either one works
  • I strongly prefer Discord
  • I will only use Discord
  • I’m not that interested in either

0 voters

Optional: Describe the reason for your choice.

Very interested in what people think about these.

Are they really comparable? Discord is so much more than just a chat service. Many use it for games and store guides, tips, faqs, etc. There are a ton of plugins for it also.

If Mumble has this capability, then I’m not aware it.

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Good point on context, I added “(as a VOIP solution)”. The benefit of Discord’s integrated services should apply to a vote if it’s something the person prefers vs using 3rd-party/self-hosted alternatives along with Mumble.

For pure VoIP, Mumble wins for me. Hands done.

But if you start to get into more general chat and integrations part, I’m actually more for Matrix than Discord.
Discord is fine and all, but it’s closed source and does not support enctryption.

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Discord doesn’t support end-to-end encryption but they do use HTTPS and WebRTC which has encryption built in.

Mumble is encrypted but also not e2e. The benefit is you can own the server.

Matrix is e2e <3 but not quite a “hang out” VOIP solution like Mumble/Discord (sadly)

Yes. My biggest point was that Discord is not open source. :slight_smile: The encryption part can be added if someone wants to.

With the Jitsi plugin it’s getting there. But yeah, it’s not there, for pure audio.

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In that case, I will always prefer an open source solution. However, I will say that, in my experience, the sound quality of Discord has been much better than Mumble.

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We have a large regular group on the Discord compared to Mumble Mumble maybe great for chatting but Discord has alot more people just chillin on it at the moment from what I’ve seen . wouldn’t mind seeing @Ulfnic there on discord either ;p

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VOIP is one of those difficult areas, where no matter what you choose, there will be ugly disadvantages one way or another.

My sense is that unfortunately, clinging to idealistic purity will only hold back progess for the community as a whole here. The practical solution is the one that the most people want to use here.

On features i’m thinking Mumble might be good for throwing up spot instances for discussion that’s free of distraction + higher security/privacy.

Discord is better as a persistant central hub that’s a mish mash of all things going on.

There’s something to be said for using and encouraging people to use apps that respect software freedom, it keeps up the pressure on software to move in the right direction if people vote with their feet.

There’s also something to be said for community accessibility and i’d argue it’s just as harmful to software freedom if there’s no gradual on ramp. In a way it’s also a vote for the gaps free software needs to fill.

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Well, I tried to install Mumble once (the server side), and it was a Sysadmin’s nightmare. The backend was very, very ugly. Extremely dated. It needs a very serious makeover. Like a total redesign, keeping pretty much the noise-cancellation feature, and that’s about it.

The word “prefer” is one of my favorite words, because it leaves room for those admittedly frustrating exceptions that always make perfect idealism impossible. You know, the black dot in the Yin Yang.

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I agree that we ought to have an option which is both Open Source, and privacy-friendly somehow or other. Is this DLN Discourse server on-prem? Or out in the cloud? Does DLN run any sort of community chat servers that are on-prem?

Maybe a compromise might look like this:

Discord could be used in a general, default way (for VOIP), whenever privacy doesn’t really matter. But for those more rare occasions where privacy does matter (sensitive specifics need to be exchanged, like login credentials, IP addresses, etc), then use an on-prem chat server for that, which is more secure (but not as feature-rich as Discord).

The backend (murmur) is CLI only as far as I remeber and all the settings are set in a murmur.ini file if I recall from last I set up a mumble server (which is actually still running). It wasn’t that bad, but it sure isn’t for non-techy folks.

That’s about the only good thing Discord has/does. It makes it easy to set up a “server” where you can invite people too. Even non-techy people can do it.

Couldn’t agree more, it’s THE WORST. In their defense it’s up and running the moment you install it but configuring it is pretty bad and I have years of experience with it. Needs a ground up rewrite.

Major hosting vendors are highly incentivized to not open their customer’s servers to obtain user generated keys for cracking encryption over their networks. Discord already has the keys and is highly incentivized to data mine it’s users.

I’d agree on-prem is more private (assuming equivalent security) but we’re talking night and day difference between on-prem/major cloud vs Discord. Even if their user agreement prevents sharing of collected data Discord is one acquisition away from it being dumped in the lap of an Evil Corp.

Discord is an alternative compromise to something like a public forum, I don’t think near 0 privacy/security and direct exposure to data mining can be called a compromise to cloud hosted mumble.

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I use discord for gaming and to follow several Linux groups (Wimpy’s World, UltimatePiServer, SelfHosted, etc). The last thing I need is another app running, doing basically the same thing (but not as well or simply).

I think I’d be in the strongly prefer Mumble camp, mainly for the self hosted aspect of it. However Discord is nice in the fact that it’s integrated with rich chat rooms and is easily accessible for people. The whole Mumble certificate situation takes getting used to.

Personally, I prefer Mumble over Discord as a VoIP client.