Spacebar is a free, opensource selfhostable discord-compatible chat, voice and video platform.
- Discord-compatible (Use all your custom clients/bots with minimal changes)
- Selfhostable (Server)
- Open Source (GitHub Organization)
- Configurable (Configure every aspect and limits to your needs)
- Decentralized (no abuse of power and doesn’t have a single point of failure)
- Extendable (secure and cross-platform plugin system)
- Themeable (cross-platform theme system with design editor)
- Secure (publicly audited and hosted FOSS software for transparent foundation in terms of security)
https://docs.spacebar.chat/faq/
Currently there is no voice or video support in any Spacebar instance. This is a very difficult feature to get working, especially given that we must implement it the exact same way as Discord.com for client compatibility. We would be incredibly thankful for any assistance.
Damn.
Discuss without voice, might aswell use IRC
Just use mumble for voice
Mumble is so underrated. It does one job and but does it very well.
Yeah I’d love to move my gang off discord but getting them to go back to team speak or vent is not happening
Mumble is another strong, open source, self-hosted option.
If only it didn’t looked like a 20 year old software.
Maybe it’s just me but I think the Mumble UI is way better than the Discord UI
Some of the best stuff in the world looks like it’s 20 years past a prime that isn’t, because they’re truly good eternal.
oh no!! good thing that doesn’t impact anything
It’s voice chat, you choose a server and then minimize to tray, you never have to look at it…
Same, if only teamspeak supported screen sharing / streaming, then it would be fine.
I thought discord streaming was so dumb until I was trying to reach my friend something in a game. Now we use it a couple times per month, it’s great. I hate that I like Discord lol
My group is on Teamspeak. They are supposedly adding it this year, but it’s been radio silence for months.
2 questions:
- Does it stop all the incessant annoying pop-ups and fake notifications?
- Does it prevent Discord from selling all of my personal information to
OpenClosedAI?
Well, just glancing at it, it isn’t discord. It doesn’t connect to discord servers at all.
What it does is replicate discord, in a way that allows users to still make use of things that discord users are already into. Bots in particular.
So discord won’t have access to anything that goes on at all, unless you’re using something that also connects to discord.
Pop-ups and fake notifications would have more to do with the client you’re using than the back-end would, so if you use a client that does those things, I wouldn’t bet on that changing.
The caveat: I’m no dev of any kind, so I can’t say anything about the actual code, I’m basing this on their own description. I linked the page to my cousin that sometimes will give a quick scan for hinky shit for me, but there’s no telling if or when he’ll do so nd get back to me.
As far as I can tell, it’s not Discord, but an open source alternative. So I don’t think it talks to regular discord servers, but you can use any Discord compatible client to talk to SpaceBarChat.
I don’t think it talks to regular discord servers
So what does “Discord compatible” mean?
I tried this back when it was “FOSSCORD” and it did indeed connect to Discord.
It means that clients and bots for Discord will also work with this.
Which in turn means discord must be able to harvest all the data otherwise it wouldnt be able to connect.
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Discord compatible bots run on whatever server you run them on, they’re not owned or run by Discord.
It says the client is compatible with both space-bar and discord.com, so yeah, if you use it with discord, expect all the downsides of discord.
This looks interesting, and if they can get VC & E2EE it will definitely be something I’ll make the switch to from Matrix. As much as I love Matrix, it feels very messy and uncoordinated.
is there any sort of way to have the chat logs be public and searchable? the worst thing about discord being a walled garden is that all the info on it can only be accessed by a discord client.
Why not just use Matrix? I thought it was the goto FOSS and decentralized Discord alternative.
Matrix doesn’t offer the same experience as discord. I’m sorry but it doesn’t. I set up my own to compare to see if my friend group would like it, and it was quite a step backwards. Even in it’s best platform element it was missing a lot of stuff from discord.
So, things like this I’d be very interested to watch. Revolt looked the most promising but it didn’t offer federation, and I wasn’t going to make everyone have a separate accountjust for our server
So this will be interesting. I will need at least voice to get them to come over, but I’ll watch this project closely
Voice & screensharing seems to be the thing holding all of my friends chained to discord
I mean, it’s a valid reason. I originally joined Discord back in 2016 because of it’s easy to use voice. It became the standard for voice chat. Before that I had been using the Xbox party chat and other garbage voice systems.
We were using Skype… Dark days.
Element seems to have voice and video chats in beta right now, and they plan to implement it into the Element application, so it looks like it is on the way at least.
Did you try Cinny?
I haven’t, but I’m going to try it out!
This one is clearly made to look like slack, which is great I need to try this out. Just wish someone would make one that looks like disc. And then matrix needs screensharing support.
I’m pretty sure its supposed to be Discord. Discords tagline used to start with “Imagine a place where X” which is why theyre saying “Imagine a matrix client” lol
TBH both disc and slack have their downsides, disc more so, so I’m fine if they just take the best of all worlds.
But yeah, screensharing is the deciding factor for me. As much as all my friends hate discord, we use screensharing all the time (it’s just a bit jankier getting it working on Linux).
Ive been using Jitsi for screen sharing and calls :p
I think the original question could be about the protocol. Why not use Matrix as the protocol for the project? No one is doing the work to bring a Matrix-based Discord alternative because they’re a) on Discord b) creatin IRC face-lifts like Element c) refusing to quit IRC d) making projects with bespoke protocols like this one. It’s incredibly frustrating.
I looked at matrix but the server setup was janky – enamoured of the current mayfly shine tools, and when I saw mumble install cleanly on my tiny arm box it was a sea change. No longer have the tiny arm box but I still run mumble.
I’d be super happy if it and its polite codecs were brought into the fed but I haven’t been paying attention.
Unusably laggy no matter what instance you use.
Spacebar looks great, and is exactly what I want, but it doesn’t look close to production ready yet
Yep it’s not near finished. This is one of those projects that’s sat in my “keep an eye on it” bookmarks for a good while, I figured I’d post it to get some attention on it, because it does look very promising.
How does this compare to Revolt?
Revolt is kinda “centralized”. You can host your own version, but they seem to actively discourage you from doing so.
Very bad. Spacebar is nowhere as functional as Revolt.
Can you explain your opinion of the differences? A friend and I are interested in learning more about Discord alternatives that we can get our less tech-savvy friends to switch to.
Revolt offers voice chat and this doesn’t.
Does it work now? I tried it around a year ago and couldn’t get voice to work at all. It even had a message saying they were in the process of rewriting their voice streaming backend, and the legacy path may just be broken.
Cool, what are some alternative discord clients to use with it ?
Why pick this over ArmCord?
Armcord is a discord client. Spacebar is a discord alternative (server+client)
So then no interaction with Discord?
Just now heard of armcord which I’m going to give a shot on Linux here soon but looks like armcord is just a client, while this is a server as well.
is it… of value having something like this while matrix and element is a thing? i find these things interesting, but not sure if they are justifyable to deploy…
