Been trying to figure out a user friendly alternative that I can get my less technical friends to transition to. We all use Signal already for messaging but it just doesn’t fulfill our screenshare needs.
Most important feature it needs is the ability to screenshare with system audio, such as for streaming games or watching videos.
I’d ideally also like it to be E2EE just for the sake of privacy and security.
From what I’ve read and looked into it seems the closest thing that meets my needs would be Teamspeak 6 as you can host it yourself, and with the new update it now allows screenshare with audio (either as P2P or via server).
As far as I can tell chat messages don’t persist by default but it can be enabled (and this would be a feature my friends would really want too).
I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ but I’m aware it’s a bit old and is ARM so I’m thinking of buying a Pi 5.
Do you think I’m on the right track here or are there any other options this community would recommend?
This isn’t necessarily an answer, but what ever happened to Revolt?
They renamed to Stoat https://stt.gg/
I wonder how they got that name, maybe just me but it brings to mind a lot of things but none of them are a chat client.
I think it mostly reminds me of voat, anyone remember that horrible place?
I thought the same thing! Where fph went to continue to immiserate themselves.
Stoat is a cute little animal, and they say they chose it because it is quick and clever. Kind of like how “Lemmy” is named after an animal that shares similar properties
I like things being named after cute animals
What about cute animal killers?
Perhaps Spacebar is a thing (the client of choice would be Fermi I think). Didn’t try it myself yet though, I do not know about how well its security protocol works. I’d assume it uses just a standard TURNS server for audio and video though.
Then of course there’s Matrix with Jitsi plugin, which will give you persistent headaches and a new appreciation of touching grass. It’s a mess, but hypothetically offers E2EE (if it works).
I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ but I’m aware it’s a bit old and is ARM so I’m thinking of buying a Pi 5.
The Pi 5 lacks a H264 hardware encoder/decoder, making it unsuitable for most streaming/transcoding purposes.
Typically a video-chat server does no transcoding so this isn’t a major issue. But for hosting a Peertube or Owncast server it would.
Depends on what they settle on, especially for screen sharing. Many downscale content for people with weaker connections.
To my knowledge there is no such thing available however you have just enlightened me about TS6’s featureset. It sounds like it is the exact solution you are asking for (and one I’m going to immediately try out myself.)
Yeah I figured that might be the case. It was in the works for a while available on their community servers, but the server beta just came out in October, I’m going try it out myself this weekend too
Figured I’d follow up on this. Teamspeak 6 worked quite well and I will be moving from it to mumble entirely. The streaming is currently only P2P but they intend on implementing a client-server model. Even so as long as you aren’t streaming to a big audience (or have really awful bandwidth) it should be fine.
TS6 is still a beta and there were some bugs here are there but nothing show stopping.
I’m using TeamSpeak. It is very good and feature rich, but it’s important to note that video / screen sharing works only P2P in a moment, so no server processing. It’s probably ok if you don’t have more than 3 people in a party, but still worth noting.
I also tried Matrix + Element + Jitsi. Can’t recommend.
Element on Matrix is the only one I’m aware of - but it’s not the easiest to set up. I would try creating an account on matrix.org’s server just temporarily to try it out and see if it fits what you’re looking for. I like the decentralized nature of it, but the support is very piecemeal, and onboarding people essentially needs a class.
Ugh, I just got matrix with video working and it took way too long.
We all use Signal already for messaging but it just doesn’t fulfill our screenshare needs.
…why not?
Most important feature it needs is the ability to screenshare with system audio, such as for streaming games or watching videos.
It has that. Have you tried their videoconferencing feature?
Other than that you can use one of a million Jitsi instances (Element has a publicly available one). Personally I use MiroTalk.
I use Matrix with the Jitsi plugin. I know everyone talks shit about Matrix, it’s been flawless for me.
IDK about watching videos, that’s a lot to ask of a screensharing app.
Wait there’s a jitsi plugin?
The old A/V chats in Matrix were just Jitsi-meet in disguise, but this has been largely deprechiated now with Element Calls.
