Hammers suck. Easily stolen if left unprotected. Basically haven't changed since invetion. Sometimes they break. Most people actually want a screwdriver.

Mumble is a tool with its own strengths and weaknesses. It's not a social communication platform, so of course it sucks to run a community on it!

What it is is an excellent voice server. I've used it for intercom at a large live event and it was perfect. I've seen it used at a large LAN gaming event to successfully cut bandwidth usage almost in half. It also has broad support for positional audio in games - something that Discord notably completely lacks.

It's free, it's open, it's not bound to provider-operated servers, it has stellar latency and is very extendable. Please, find me another option.

All good, but it has no users while everyone has Discord and since Discord works from a website you don’t even need to install a client.

Simple convenience is the killer feature. Niches will use niche software

That's just the point - it doesn't need to have everyone on it because it's not a social platform, it's a voice server. I'd never use Mumble to message someone out of nowhere, share memes or have a meeting. All my gaming groups are on Discord, which is where we hang out and plan events. But when we actually go play, we often switch to Mumble or TeamSpeak (depending on the game).

Convenience isn't a killer feature for us - it's the actual features. Positional audio simply isn't available on Discord and depending on what you're playing, might only be available via Mumble and nothing else.

It's a tool like and other with its own use-cases. It will never be the one and only communication platform and that's a good thing!

TeamSpeak has cemented Mumbles paradigm in the minds of many, many mainstream people years before Discord existed. Mumble works pretty much the same in terms of convenience and simplicity. It's not that niche. Try it before you knock it.

>Try it before you knock it.

This is the kind of stupid elitism people have here. As if I haven't hosted Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, and Mumble servers for years. Maybe these days there isn't competition (although you mentioned TeamSpeak), but even back in the day it was a tiny miracle if two different groups actually shared a platform even inside the same game different groups/clans/guilds usually had different setups and I had to juggle multiple clients just to participate compared to now when everyone is simply on Discord.

Unless you need some niche feature (like the OP's positional audio) there simply is no reason to go for out dated client/server model.

>but it has no users while everyone has Discord

Why do you know that?

Tell me you don't play video games without telling me you don't play video games.

Everyone is on Discord.

So where are the gaming and niche interest communities, then?

Obviously it's me (and friend around me).

>Security problems.

What security problems?

Why? I have an open source project and we run it on Discord with 500 people on the server because it's just better than anything else available. Yes I wish there were an open source alternative but there isn't really when you don't want to self host or manage servers like with TS or Mumble (and those are utterly lack any contribution or chat features). Just voice chat alone doesn't cut it and Mumble not even that good as some people make it out to be

Element is the closest but the fact that it's paid already a huge turn off for a lot of users https://element.io/

Element isnt paid? It has paid hosted options if you want your own synapse server, but the free version has always been there and if you're using discord why care that you dont have your own domain for your matrix community

On discord, communities (or as they call it servers) will typically have many different channels. From my understanding you'd need your own domain to replicate that on element. Eg. #memes:ultimatefrisbee.pt

Its in beta but element groups were added recently for this kind of thing.

I dont think it has voice rooms yet but hopefully one day.

If you run an open source project yourself, maybe you could sympathise with the contributors and formulate your criticism in a more constructive manner.

This attitude of "you got it for free so you can't complain" is a scourge on open source. How can something ever improve if we can't point out the flaws in it?

>is a scourge on open source

I wouldn't say so, unstructured complaining really doesn't help at all. If the project has been around for a while then the flaws are usually well known. Before you lodge a complaint, you'll want to check the bug tracker to see if something has already been discussed. If it has, then the flaws have already been pointed out, and further complaining upon that point does nothing and only serves to annoy the people working on a fix -- the best thing to do there is to start contributing and collaborating on a fix to the issue. Then once you do that, you'll see why it's not helpful when people keep bothering you with "is it fixed yet" type comments :)

If you don't want to self-host then Element is not paid either.

It's entirely possible to criticize closed source software without suggesting someone leave the community.

I think it might be a little uncharitable to say they prefer closed source software, it might be because it's often the easiest to access/use for a lot of people. I mean, that's been the struggle, no?

Nonsense, this message board has nothing to do with open source software per se.

That’s pretty elitist and for no reason. Just because you use niche software doesn’t make you special