Spacebar is a free, opensource selfhostable discord-compatible chat, voice and video platform.
- Discord-compatible (Use all your custom clients/bots with minimal changes)
- Selfhostable (Server)
- Open Source (GitHub Organization)
- Configurable (Configure every aspect and limits to your needs)
- Decentralized (no abuse of power and doesn’t have a single point of failure)
- Extendable (secure and cross-platform plugin system)
- Themeable (cross-platform theme system with design editor)
- Secure (publicly audited and hosted FOSS software for transparent foundation in terms of security)
https://docs.spacebar.chat/faq/
Currently there is no voice or video support in any Spacebar instance. This is a very difficult feature to get working, especially given that we must implement it the exact same way as Discord.com for client compatibility. We would be incredibly thankful for any assistance.
Damn.
Discuss without voice, might aswell use IRC
Just use mumble for voice
Mumble is so underrated. It does one job and but does it very well.
Yeah I’d love to move my gang off discord but getting them to go back to team speak or vent is not happening
Mumble is another strong, open source, self-hosted option.
If only it didn’t looked like a 20 year old software.
Maybe it’s just me but I think the Mumble UI is way better than the Discord UI
Yay mumble!
And I agree: it’s better. I think it’s faster and that, IMHO, is where the power is. It can look boring like a hammer as long as it’s intuitive … like a hammer.
I don’t know about the UX, but if you want peoples to use your app, it need to look nice.
I find the login page of discord intelorable, it has ugly EULA on it that I will never sign
Discord is also quite the resource hog. Trying to run the web version on weaker phones is a slog.
Some of the best stuff in the world looks like it’s 20 years past a prime that isn’t, because they’re truly good eternal.
It’s voice chat, you choose a server and then minimize to tray, you never have to look at it…
Especially on mobile.
oh no!! good thing that doesn’t impact anything
Same, if only teamspeak supported screen sharing / streaming, then it would be fine.
I thought discord streaming was so dumb until I was trying to reach my friend something in a game. Now we use it a couple times per month, it’s great. I hate that I like Discord lol
My group is on Teamspeak. They are supposedly adding it this year, but it’s been radio silence for months.
Well the minute they do and it works for sharing videos as well so we can watch YouTube as a group then we will drop discord super quick. I won’t want to host it at mine but I’ll happily pay for a vps for it.
Just use sunshine moonlight for screenshare, it beats literally everything else, it’s not even close, you can play games through it, it’s just that good.
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As far as I can tell, it’s not Discord, but an open source alternative. So I don’t think it talks to regular discord servers, but you can use any Discord compatible client to talk to SpaceBarChat.
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It means that clients and bots for Discord will also work with this.
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Same API, then?
Which in turn means discord must be able to harvest all the data otherwise it wouldnt be able to connect.
Discord compatible bots run on whatever server you run them on, they’re not owned or run by Discord.
It says the client is compatible with both space-bar and discord.com, so yeah, if you use it with discord, expect all the downsides of discord.
only if it goes through their servers
Well, just glancing at it, it isn’t discord. It doesn’t connect to discord servers at all.
What it does is replicate discord, in a way that allows users to still make use of things that discord users are already into. Bots in particular.
So discord won’t have access to anything that goes on at all, unless you’re using something that also connects to discord.
Pop-ups and fake notifications would have more to do with the client you’re using than the back-end would, so if you use a client that does those things, I wouldn’t bet on that changing.
The caveat: I’m no dev of any kind, so I can’t say anything about the actual code, I’m basing this on their own description. I linked the page to my cousin that sometimes will give a quick scan for hinky shit for me, but there’s no telling if or when he’ll do so nd get back to me.
Why not just use Matrix? I thought it was the goto FOSS and decentralized Discord alternative.
Matrix doesn’t offer the same experience as discord. I’m sorry but it doesn’t. I set up my own to compare to see if my friend group would like it, and it was quite a step backwards. Even in it’s best platform element it was missing a lot of stuff from discord.
So, things like this I’d be very interested to watch. Revolt looked the most promising but it didn’t offer federation, and I wasn’t going to make everyone have a separate accountjust for our server
So this will be interesting. I will need at least voice to get them to come over, but I’ll watch this project closely
Voice & screensharing seems to be the thing holding all of my friends chained to discord
I mean, it’s a valid reason. I originally joined Discord back in 2016 because of it’s easy to use voice. It became the standard for voice chat. Before that I had been using the Xbox party chat and other garbage voice systems.
We were using Skype… Dark days.
Element seems to have voice and video chats in beta right now, and they plan to implement it into the Element application, so it looks like it is on the way at least.
Mumbleb plus moonlight, boom done
I think the original question could be about the protocol. Why not use Matrix as the protocol for the project? No one is doing the work to bring a Matrix-based Discord alternative because they’re a) on Discord b) creatin IRC face-lifts like Element c) refusing to quit IRC d) making projects with bespoke protocols like this one. It’s incredibly frustrating.
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I haven’t, but I’m going to try it out!
This one is clearly made to look like slack, which is great I need to try this out. Just wish someone would make one that looks like disc. And then matrix needs screensharing support.
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TBH both disc and slack have their downsides, disc more so, so I’m fine if they just take the best of all worlds.
But yeah, screensharing is the deciding factor for me. As much as all my friends hate discord, we use screensharing all the time (it’s just a bit jankier getting it working on Linux).
https://element.io/app-for-productivity
Element x does screen sharing
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Yeah, I saw that element is using jitsi under the hood for its screensharing. If that makes for a seamless user experience, that’s great. It’s been like 10 years since I last tried Jitsi, but it was not smooth.
i can agree with regards to a proper threads/forum feature which is not that amazing in element right now… but it appears we are moving fast towards element call integration everywhere. this means p2p video rooms if i am not mistaken. is there something else except user friendliness in ux that could be better?
Unusably laggy no matter what instance you use.
My instance is pretty fast. Run Conduwuit as the server, problem solved
i cant confirm that. especially in the light of the new sliding sync implemented in elementx. it’s a nightmare for admins but for users it should be fine
I looked at matrix but the server setup was janky – enamoured of the current mayfly shine tools, and when I saw mumble install cleanly on my tiny arm box it was a sea change. No longer have the tiny arm box but I still run mumble.
I’d be super happy if it and its polite codecs were brought into the fed but I haven’t been paying attention.
How does this compare to Revolt?
Revolt is kinda “centralized”. You can host your own version, but they seem to actively discourage you from doing so.
Very bad. Spacebar is nowhere as functional as Revolt.
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Revolt offers voice chat and this doesn’t.
Does it work now? I tried it around a year ago and couldn’t get voice to work at all. It even had a message saying they were in the process of rewriting their voice streaming backend, and the legacy path may just be broken.
When I tried it seemed to work but I was by myself so not a very good test. Screen sharing was not working tho and their approach to self hosting (don’t do it or use our 200 docker containers) turned me off.
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is there any sort of way to have the chat logs be public and searchable? the worst thing about discord being a walled garden is that all the info on it can only be accessed by a discord client.
Do you still have to use discord in order to use this?
I think the idea here is that you are running your own discord, and only people with modded clients can use it because its not approved by discord.
I’ve been trying to find a more privacy-friendy alternative to Discord but I keep coming back to the issue of screen sharing. No other platform does it as smoothly.
The best I’ve found is using Parsec with some virtual audio cables to avoid voice feedback.
Spacebar looks great, and is exactly what I want, but it doesn’t look close to production ready yet
Yep it’s not near finished. This is one of those projects that’s sat in my “keep an eye on it” bookmarks for a good while, I figured I’d post it to get some attention on it, because it does look very promising.
I test installed it in Proxmox in a Debian 12 LXC for the sever part, it was fairly easy, just run three commands. The client was as well, but failed to do something with the email during registration. It has a while longer to go I think. But I put it in my bookmarks to visit every so often as well. :)
Cool, what are some alternative discord clients to use with it ?
WebCord supports it.
Why pick this over ArmCord?
Armcord is a discord client. Spacebar is a discord alternative (server+client)
So then no interaction with Discord?
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Just now heard of armcord which I’m going to give a shot on Linux here soon but looks like armcord is just a client, while this is a server as well.
There is also vesktop on Linux aswell witch is what I use. But I’ve tried armcord and webcord before.
I’d look over the server install if the process had docs.
I found some here: https://docs.spacebar.chat/setup/server/#setup
In 5 steps it violates ISO27002 3 times.
I’d say any setup result is purely accidental on the way to something far more exciting.
what about the screen sharing? muble for voice, matrix for communication but i cant find any suitable replacement for video
This is cool to see, though I am sceptical, if it is a good idea to create a drop-in discord server, because this does not allow for the project to add E2EE “easily” without eliminating the drop-in capability.
It’s a convenience over privacy thing. If the api is discord compatible you lose the e2e on that channel / server, or make the api e2e but then existing bots need modifying
I could see this being a toggle
That would require a custom client and eliminate the drop in feature. Sadly just adding a toggle does not work :/
is it… of value having something like this while matrix and element is a thing? i find these things interesting, but not sure if they are justifyable to deploy…
For me, the benefit of discord is not the text chat but the voice aspect. With push to talk/voice activated transmission and low latency for gaming.
The voice features of matrix are more of a conference call thing.
Until this gets implemented in matrix (not sure if ever) I’ll continue hosting mumble (or TeamSpeak)
interesting… but i understand the appeal of quickly jumping into a voice room. other than that, of course not as fancy of a ux experience, mumble would be quite suitable here… .
