Does anyone have experience with Mumble?
from waddle_dee@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 05 Nov 15:47
https://lemmy.world/post/38370798
from waddle_dee@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 05 Nov 15:47
https://lemmy.world/post/38370798
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.
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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.
Would it be something that I could add to my home server? I have a setup for Nextcloud, apache, Grocy, Jellyfin, etc. So, I didn’t know if I could just throw Mumble on there. In addition, I greatly appreciate that it’s barebones! I don’t want, or need, any of the extraneous stuff Discord has. I just want to voice chat, and text like the old AIM days.
The short answer to “can you add it to your home server” is yes. It’s not like there is some cap beyond your own system resources that prevents you from running multiple services.
Awesome, didn’t know if there was any sort of risk associated. Thanks!
Well there can be some “risk” depending on how you’re going about this. I’m assuming you will be wanting people outside of your home network to be able to each your server. To do so you’ll either have to open a port in your LAN firewall and expose your server on said port to the internet, or have all users who will be using this on a VPN you create.
The former being “more risky” but quantifying that risk is difficult. Ive done this in the past and don’t personally see it as a big deal. My current mumble server does not live on my LAN but I will be pulling my server out of a local data center in the nearish future and running it out of my home once more at which point a number of publicly accessible services will be hosted from my LAN.
Yeah, my ports are open for other uses on my server, so this isn’t an issue. But I have followed the advice of a cyber security friend who helped me fortify my server against any attacks. It was fun to find a note on my root of my server with instructions lol
I don’t see why not. Again, the resource footprint is so tiny that you can just throw in Mumble anywhere. You can make it tinier still if you limit sending pictures via that chat and allocate a maximum bandwidth via the config.
If pi zero, you’re serving 12 users low latency over wifi? Does it route the actual audio?
Yes, it’s sufficient. I wouldn’t advise it due to the extra overhead of wireless packet loss, but it’s absolutely technically possible. Don’t overestimate how little bandwidth voice chat really needs. It’s like 10-50kB/s per person and you’re unlikely to ever have more than 2 or 3 people talking at a time.
I haven’t used Mumble since like 2010, looks like it’s still the exact same tool as it ever was, and that’s honestly all it really needs to be. Love to see it
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.
github.com/stoatchat/
I’ve seen stoat around, and it is interesting. I’d like it as a replacement for discord I.e. large populous servers. For small chats, I think Mumble is my best bet.
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)
Mumble supports text chat and images too. Right click on a channel or user and select send message. There is an insert image button in the message window. I wish they would make it so you could just drag and drop an image though.
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/c58581f1-5a0b-4923-af17-b692f74e3834.png">
I stand corrected then! TIL
You actually can drag-n-drop pictures to the chat. Just drag them (dropping multiple images is possible) to the message text field and the image will be uploaded and shown in the chat - scaled down if it is big.
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.
Thanks for your well articulated response! I think Mumble might be my best bet. I personally love the idea of a hassle setting it up, but never having to touch it after. I’ve found most products I stick with are like that. I converted an old laptop with 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD with an AMD CPU into my server, so I don’t expect any issue with loads.
Sounds perfect, my TS3 instance was running on a 10+ year old Dell Optiplex until a while ago when I moved it to a VM.
You seem to have everything covered, VOIP services are not that heavy, and its great having a residence on the internet where your nerds can drop in and out of. The main issue is getting people off Discord or understanding that old programs are just as if not more functional. (Plus, the whole “If TeH PrOdUcT is Fr33, UR da PrOduCt” thing, but im preaching to the choir here)
Shit I miss Ventrilo… Setting up custom binds so I could talk shit about the raid leader directly to the other warlock in the group just by pressing a different “talk” button was amazing. And I can still here the push-to-talk notification sounds… When the guild moved to Discord, I died a little inside and didn’t even know it yet. Yea, we have a meme channel now, but at what cost??
It is always the warlocks that are the problem.
Signed, a mage
Hope you’re quick on the levitate, cause we are going to summon you off a cliff.
Levitate? Do I look like some priest? I just blink away!
Or more likely, hit blink, it bugs out and you go half a meter backwards instead… But then you can always ice block or slow fall to save the day!
Damn it, it’s been too long and I forgot the name of slow fall… I think that means you won the internet today.
I’ve spent many nights roaming in an EVE online pirate gang shooting the shit on mumble. Can recommend.
Ha [Internet high five], there is a thing about EvE online players and being opinionated nerds about VOIP solutions.
or as we did back in the olden days: ^5
o7
I still think it’s better than discord. And alliance auth tied in super easy.
Besides, I think it’s better that it’s usually hosted on an individual corp/alliance level.
Shut should do one thing. And do it well.
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
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.
That’s TS5, but I believe that’s paywalled for self-hosting compared to TS3.
I was looking into team speak and found this video that captures someone else’s experience.
Tldw; lots of super neat features, some clunky interfaces that maybe highlight how used to discord we’ve gotten
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.
Mumble is what most people used before Discord. Everyone moved to Discord because it was comparatively better than Mumble.
No, they moved to Discord because there was a for-profit corporation that was extremely motivated to move people to Discord. Mumble is better in every way that an anti-consumerist cares about.
This is incredibly reductive and at best looking at mumble through Rose tinted glasses.
Mumble has had a rocky past as a useful piece of software and it’s absolutely not been a discord competitor any more than TeamSpeak is a discord competitor.
Maybe it’s changed recently, but mumble has not had the feature set that made discord useful in the first place.
Mumble never tried to get feature parity with discord. If all you’re using discord for is voice mumble is a perfectly adequate replacement.
That might be true, but claiming that people only moved because they were propagandized into doing so by a for-profit company is absurd.
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 is THE SHIT.
…10 years ago
Ran it back on a raspberry pi and it was great.
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.
I personally would avoid it
Why?
Been using and hosting it probably for two decades, never any issues