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Sharkord - an open-source self-hostable Discord alternative with voice, video, and real-time messaging. (sharkord.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Came across this on the r/selfhosted community. Still very much in the alpha stages, but it's already got a Docker image you can try out for yourself, or try out the demo server.

Tried it earlier today, couldn't get the voice/video chat to work right away on my self-hosted setup but the real-time chat was very snappy. Looks promising.

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[–] 40 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (21 children)

No E2E-encryption? Can't find any info about it. Unencrypted = big nope. Looks good otherwise :)

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  • [–] 62 points 9 months ago* (18 children)

    Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Discord isn’t E2EE either. Having data under your control even if not encrypted is a big win.

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  • [–] 14 points 9 months ago (16 children)

    why use this over the hundreds of messaging platforms that can be self hosted and have e2ee

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  • [–] 20 points 9 months ago (12 children)

    voice/video chat

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  • [–] -1 points 9 months ago (11 children)

    then you can use matrix

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  • [–] 21 points 9 months ago (9 children)

    Can you? Can I? Best I understand it's a world of pain. If there was a clear winner in the discord-a-like OSS race all these alternatives wouldn't be coming out of the woodwork. Maybe it's matrix (with an actually good client, proper decentralization, easy containers), maybe stoat, maybe ... I've always hated discord anyway and have little need currently, I can wait.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

    Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I'm missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don't use Discord very much.

    If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you're in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there's a better client out there for that?

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    This is spot on. Discord and Matrix are, IMO, quite different. Matrix is more like Slack or Teams. You can do voice and video calls, if you configure it to do so, but it isn't like Discord in that regard at all. If you don't use Discord for that and mostly just chat with your friends then sure, but you have a lot of choices in that case.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

    Seems likely, certainly Matrix has some pretty evangelical supporters. I think you nailed it with discord being more useful for mid sized numbers and having a client that handles it pretty well. I'd also add pretty painless onboarding. An OSS offering that matched it's primary features (and has E2EE) or has a good framework, roadmap and people to get there would come in pretty clutch as discord goes public and starts monetizing everything in sight. A million (or thousands) independent FOSS 'discords' in the night would be a sweet sight.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    (and has E2EE)

    Normally my policy is "E2EE or GTFO", but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

    E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn't have E2EE either, obviously. That's an absurd idea.

    Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I'm in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I'm also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It's not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

    That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I'm like "dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS". One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

    Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

    E2EE for a public forum makes no sense.

    Totally valid point, especially w.r.t. ease of onboarding for public usecases. Sure would be nice if it functioned (optionally) as a private forum as well. Seems like a lot of commonality there and covers the DM case and the 'semi-public' but discord is totally logging everything case. One can hope, but I agree, first things first.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

    I admit i mostly use matrix as an instant messenger, but it works fine for when i need comms with my friends while gaming or when i want to share my screen for something. My university also has its own deployment so all the people around me automatically have an account anyway, which makes it easy to set up groupchats.

    Sure it still has some jank to it, but if you look at how janky it used to be even just a year ago, the trajectory is pretty clear to me. Its a very ambitious project that arguably tried to do too much at once in its early days, but i think its here to stay and its only gonna get better. If its not good enough for you today, then just wait another year or two until it is. Its not going away because its being used basically everywhere at this point. Government, healthcare, military, university, private industry, schools, etc.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Fair cop, sounds useful, and I have used it in the past for similar. I was however looking at it in the context of Selfhosted.

    its being used basically everywhere at this point. Government, healthcare, military, university, private industry, schools, etc.

    True, and I have good hopes for it, partly because of the adoption, you will however note the scale of your examples, basically it's an IT department project rather than a set and forget selfhosted container (I recognize there'll always be moderation to do). We shall see, I'm in no hurry.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    I have, and am, selfhosting Matrix, and it isn't that big of a deal if you're someone that, you know , self hosts things. That is just outside of what most people can or are willing to do. That's totally fine, but finding a FOSS platform that will host a VoIP/video server for you and not try to monetize you is almost certainly going to be rare or short lived.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    I see. I havent selfhosted any matrix servers yet, so i havent looked into it too much. But yeah its kind of an intimidating process to set these up when i look at the guides. I know that there are a few server implementations besides synapse that are mature and stable (and supposedly much more resource efficient) and they do support docker deployment. All of these including synapse can however be run on a raspberry pi so there isnt really any big requirements other than keeping it up to date and doing backups of your databases.

    https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity

    https://github.com/matrix-construct/tuwunel

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    I'm in a Discord server with 2000 members. You really want to encrypt and decrypt all incoming and outgoing messages 2000 times? There's a reason why most E2EE messaging apps don't really do that for group chats.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Depends on the usecase. If you don’t need chat history for new-joiners, you can work with a single key per group, rotating it whenever someone joins or leaves. Since the server broadcasts a „so-and-so has left/joined“ it might as well include the new key. That key is then used by everyone in the group, so you can still broadcast all messages and don’t have to encrypt them individually.

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