All this talk about Discord replacements plus my own experience attempting to host a Synapse has got me wondering why it seems so hard to implement voice chat.
Stupid idea: back in 2022 I got an Asterisk server working on a raspberry pi over AREDN without too much trouble. What’s stopping people from just using a PBX like that for voice chat?
Simple 1:1 audio stream is easy.
Groups, screen sharing, noise canceling, NAT traversal, mobile apps, and all those extra features people have come to expect are hard.
Exactly!
people act entitled as if all that you mention was trivial and that somehow FOSS devs “owe” people, but we only see those big corpos make it happen because… well, they’re big corpos, burning VC money on makint it happen and making it happen in a controlled jail.
I have honestly not seen anyone acting like they are “owed” these things by FOSS developers. We just want them.
As for “why is it hard to self-host”, it is only NAT traversal.
TURN, STUN, ICE, etc. are not fun to debug. Not sure if anyone still bothers fiddling with TOS/DSCP on their router. You can build a voice server that just exposes a TCP port, but… latency. And corporate firewalls love to randomly block some UDP port ranges but not others.
Mumble will do all of that except screen sharing. Only the server has to deal with NAT.
Groups: just simple Chanels are fine, password lock them if you want.
Screen sharing: one at a time should be fine. Self hoster can configure max bit rates.
Mobile apps: building your app to be multiplatform is a lot easier than it was a decade ago.