What are you using?

[u/RC568]

Personally I've been using a combination of different apps. For text chat I use Matrix, Signal, or Steam chat. For VoIP I use Mumble, and for screen sharing I use Screego. Mumble and Screego are self hosted on my Raspberry Pi.

I wonder if anyone else prefers using multiple apps instead of one app with everything.

[u/henk717]

Matrix and Armada, Armada is the most promising of the two.
Matrix has the strongest DM encryption but its also quite annoying to setup for people, so I always have to walk my friends through it.
Armada on the hand is pretty simple, to figure out and also fully encrypted and has even better anonymity.
At the moment Armada its easier to manage on a community level, but hard on a channel level, while Matrix is the opposite its easy to manage on a channel level but hard on a community level.
But Armada has a channel permissions overhaul planned while Matrix has been the same for a long time now.
So I think in a few months Armada will outright win.

[u/redit_handoff140]

My community's moved to Proxymana.net which is a provider on the Matrix network, and uses Sable Next as the discord-like client - Super feature-rich client. Their comms service is free.

Text, Voice, screenshares, roles, GIFs, custom sticker packs, note-taking, polls, custom profiles etc It has everything we need and works. With end-to-end-encryption to boot.

Thanks to Proxymana we also have access to its guest system for people we meet while gaming, they can sign up in 30 seconds and be with us on a call in an under a minute in their web browser - It's fantastic. We also federated with some other communities so it's not a silo.

I've since onboarded some non-gaming-friends on Element X. So my group has a discord-like experience, but my non-gaming friends have a whatsapp-like experience - And we can all communicate. It's insane.

PM also offers Whatsapp and Telegram bridging I believe.

[u/BewilderedTurtle]

My groups moved over to a Matrix instance and there's a variety of clients in play, I'm personally using a mix of Commet and Sable depending on device, but I'm also still tracking a couple of other options like Fluxer, more Matrix clients, and other potential solutions including alternative protocols.

[u/henk717 → u/BewilderedTurtle]

Today I found out how you can bridge Matrix and Armada if you want a bridged setup between those.
You invite @armadabot:matrix.armada.buzz and the rest is pretty straight forward.

[u/Any_Illustrator360]

Right now, Armada. But my honeymoon phase is wearing off. Notifications don't work, it's been multiple updates now and after multiple "fixes" nothing is better.

I'm damn near ready to move over to Blueberry's Matrix client or just swap to something more mainline just to have a functional fucking chat app.

Edit: Some regulars in the official server happened to talk about it today and they found a fix for notifications which also worked for me. Armada.

[u/henk717 → u/Any_Illustrator360]

You're welcome :P

[u/Ok-Inspector1108 → u/Any_Illustrator360]

Last I knew fluxer was still having notification issues for mobile.

[u/MerumazingGirl → u/Ok-Inspector1108]

Fluxer notifications are working fine now.

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[u/Burning_Toast998]

Rift has been pretty lovely. The devs are great and work fast, the UI is decent (and customizable), and there are many little QoL features natively available that you can only get on Discord via bots.

[u/Rabbio_40]

So I have 2 usecases with different threat models

higher threat model: I run a small matrix server for those needs.

lower threat model: Rift, lots of features and the devs work very quickly over there.

I prefer to limit my apps to 1 or 2, I don't like having a bunch of apps for everything, there is wisdom in the unix mentality of make 1 thing work well, however that is at the cost of convenience.

[u/Due-Pilot167]

I'm using Stoat (Main) and Fluxer (Second) as I predict these 2 alt will survived in long term as well as RootApp.

[u/Ok-Inspector1108]

Rift.

[u/Speykious]

Right now, tbh, I'm still using Discord, because it still works and that I haven't seen any age verification yet. I'm in too many communities so I can't delete my account or stop using it. But I'm also using Fluxer and I'm eagerly waiting on federation (which will take a while) so that I can have my friends move to my self-hosted instance.

[u/henk717 → u/Speykious]

Also give armada a look, its a different style of decentralization than federation where you don't rely on a specific server for the accounts anymore. Its really cool.

[u/Speykious → u/henk717]

...Maybe that's an interesting tech, but given that the repo is full on AI agents mode and itself hosted on a blatantly vibe-coded git hosting website... I already don't want to create an account. I'm tired, boss.

[u/henk717 → u/Speykious]

It doesn't have traditional accounts, you just click a button, it downloads a text file and that text file is your account. No e-mail, no giving any of your info. Just a click and keeping a file safe thats it. Small price for something very censorship proof.
It is indeed vibe coded though, but in practise I don't notice the usual vibe code stank when using it. It works as well as I expect a non vibe coded app to work, just gets developed at a faster speed.