Comment by dylz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylz | Hacker News Reader

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> Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated,

This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure.

The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA.

For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.

I've had a lot of success telling people "just click next" for every button in the Mumble setup, but Mumble doesn't make things simple for the non-enthusiastic end user.

The harder part for most users is figuring out how to connect. Mumble has a URI Protocol but that's only a temporary fix as it can't add a favorite to someone's list.

IMO the only reason Mumble can't compete with Discord is that they serve different niches. Mumble doesn't offer much for users who want a permanent text suite or multiple server connections at a time, but for friends/gamers hanging in voice it works fine (and Mumble beats Discord at VOIP). (and all of Mumble's competitors like Teamspeak also fall to Discord for the same reasons).

That's my thought too, Mumble's text chat is terribad, the UI looks like crap. The onboarding is typical of non-hipster F/OSS. The setup guide for servers isn't "run murmur.exe", it's "run openssl commands to generate a private key and generate a CSR" and the setup guide for clients is "if you lose your client certificates, you potentially lose all ability to connect, and permissions/rights, hope there's another admin".

Also, the access tokens option seems absurd from a UX perspective. Instead of just asking for a password with a remember box, you go to Server > Access Tokens and paste a string in and it'll attempt it the next time you're prompted for a passworded channel or server. Small things like that.

But it has the absolute lowest latency I've ever seen for VOIP, beats Discord significantly in quality, latency, and security (mTLS auth, client certs, pin your own CA for server, you control TLS on both ends). From a strictly engineering POV it's excellent. It also has some pretty amazing features for voice control, passing audio downstream/upstream into parent/child channels (eve players might get what I mean for fleet ops).

TeamSpeak tries to do too much, with chat, filesharing, and now no one really wants to host TS3 other than it being concentrated on a specific few like OVH because half of TS's server services can be misused for reflection spoofed DDoS attacks.

I'm not sure what Ventrilo is these days. They would not sell you a personal use licence at all - you had to sign up to "resell" a minimum of several thousand slots, and increase your purchase every contract period, or they would terminate all of your licences. You aren't permitted to run a community, nonprofit server for yourself, and at $1-2/slot/month a large community server would never happen for cost reasons.

> The setup guide for servers isn't "run murmur.exe", it's "run openssl commands to generate a private key and generate a CSR" and the setup guide for clients is "if you lose your client certificates, you potentially lose all ability to connect, and permissions/rights, hope there's another admin".

Fair, but in my experience - Mumble/Murmur being very common in my favorite game's competitive space - either A) someone is just going to rent their Mumble server for 5 bucks a month and not worry about setup, if they lose their personal cert they can use SuperUser - or B) They're an enthusiast who rents a VPS and actually hosts their own server for a large userbase, they will have the knowhow to setup. Generally anyone in these spaces granted admin powers will be smart enough to keep their cert around.

Losing client certs is less of a problem for this space because nobody requires users register to connect. If their group is private, they keep the IP to themselves and don't even bother adding a password. if its public, then its public and anyone can connect. Registration only necessary for mods or stopping hooligans from changing their names.

Point taken, although I did say "based on my experiences inviting folks to our server." :) I do think it is quite different than infamous Dropbox thread, however, where the top comment mentions mounting an FTP server with curlftpfs on Linux.

Our server (like many) is public, and allows anyone to enter without need for exporting your certificate or even creating a passphrase. The setup process is Enter Server Address + Port -> Enter username -> Connect, and you're done. For someone who has ever used an installation wizard before, it is not difficult. For very casual users -- I agree, it probably can be overwhelming.

I don't argue that Mumble is somehow as easy or easier than Discord. Discord has everything else beat when it comes to ease-of-use.

Also, in my opinion, Mumble's UI looks fine, and I appreciate that it looks native on whatever platform you run it on (as opposed to Electron apps like Discord). I also appreciate the lower RAM usage and system requirements in general.

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