As someone who doesn't use voice channels, I can't even count how many times I've accidentally joined them because I mis-clicked. And then I have to find the "end call" button because, of course, it's small and located away from the channel itself. It is so unbelievably annoying.
The best feature Discord added recently was the ability to hide channels, so I can finally, once and for all, forget about voice channels.
GP is right, frictionless voice channels is a killer feature. Maybe a toggleable prompt or some other feature to prevent accidentally joining can be an opt-in.
I've also been on Discord since 2017, and I've done it many times. Especially on servers which put voice channels right next to text channels. And I'm not the only one either, judging by another comment[0].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36439417
> The app even prompts you if you're sure about joining under some circumstances.
The app is even worse! It brings a full-screen pop-up and if you haven't granted Discord microphone permissions, it will bug you, every, single, time.
Anyway, I think opt-in for some kind of friction makes sense.
Nowadays each audio channel has an associated text channel, making it a lot easier.
Keep your mic muted if this is a concern.
Discord makes it clear when you're in a call.
I simply do not believe in adding friction because of bad users.
If everybody were “considerate” then a simple toggle wouldn’t cause any issues.
Revolt has your mic muted by default.
It's a good reminder indeed, I hadn't considered the old gaming toolkit we used as teenagers and I work with 100% technical people that can figure out an apt install mumble
The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus. Issue open since 2016: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/2560
If you drop out for a minute you won't have access to anything that was posted in chat, which makes it useless for anything other than voice only comms, that might suit some business purposes but I've always needed to post links or screenshots in chat during meetings.
This sort of is yet another data point related to a conundrum: on one hand, applications that integrate multiple functionalities are convenient but there's always one or more functionality that doesn't fit your needs; on the other hand, applications that focus on one functionality do it well, but you have to hand pick one-by-one to fit all your needs, perhaps add some glue scripts/plugins to make them work nicely together, and this is inconvenient (in particular if you are not alone and not in an organization that "dictates" those choices) and a slow process.
Basically it is Office365/LibreOffice/Emacs or Browsers (with plugins to add chat, email clients, etc.), issue trackers (sometimes feature Wikis and more), Git online front ends (sometimes offer Wikis and issue trackers), versus e.g. raw Git, Vim/Notepad/Nano, bare-bones browsers (Surf, Midori browsers), ...
I favor the dedicate apps for things I do a lot - usually I eventually know them pretty well and I have the know-how to make them interoperate. For more casual stuff, I'm like the random user - the convenience just wins.
But for communication applications, as long as people jump the bandwagon of the latest private service provided "for free", you have to go with the flow or only be the nerd that talks with nerds on obscure networks.
I am on my way to bed but, damn, you're getting me curious about the delay that Mumble has versus speed of sound. Knowing it uses Speex ("This is an example of Speex ..." x100) which has a minimum delay of 30ms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex), and that you have <1ms ping on gigabit LAN so ignoring that by comparison (even if you>mumble>someoneelse is 2 hops), sound travels...
$ qalc
> 340m/s * 30ms
(340 * (meter / second)) * (30 * millisecond) = 10.54 m
If you say it was ~11+ meters (36 ft), I may be curious enough to create a test setup :p. But I'm assuming you mean the person sitting next to you, not someone who put Mumble on huge speakers across a hall.
It was also in 2009 so it could even have been Celt rather than speed or opus
This is my complaint about Discord and such as well, though. People seem to love platforms where what you typed last week is never looked at again and isn't searchable/accessible from a regular web search. HN is also moving more and more in that direction: threads always dropped off very fast (matter of up to 3 days if you have a top-of-the-year popular thread) but then, at some point, editing was restricted to only be 2 hours (countless times I run into not being able to add a correction or addition, so posts are now less good/useful in posterity), and last week I noticed I couldn't reply to someone anymore after 18 days (they had replied to me, I had finally gotten around to checking their suggestion, and wanted to reply back ... alas).
I played Eve Online and had to use Mumble. Damn, I wish more people used Mumble, it's such a nice piece of software and it's open source! If only we could have text chat mixed with the audio backend from Mumble, all this together in one app, I believe it would be amazing.
(The only difference between before covid and after is that we are more people and have more calls that take longer. Text chatting is a lot more structured and efficient and inclusive because nobody has to wait for a turn while the topic evolves past five persons before it gets to you, but whenever a topic gets more than a handful of messages, invariably $boss will propose to stop wasting time and "plan a meeting" .... but I also have that experience with IRL meetings when there are more than, say, five people involved)
IRL you might just grab an empty office or room and hit the whiteboard for ten minutes.
In other tools you need to invite specific people to a chat, and they have to find and respond to that specific event.
In discord you say “let’s meet in the engineering channel” and anyone who also wants to join can do so.
It’s a seemingly simple difference but I found discord so great for remote work relative to slack. It’s just much more casual, like real life.
You could probably make that work in VC but the UX is going to be awkward and un-intuitive no matter how you slice it.
So the best option (online/available status and 1:1 calls which is what we have now) is probably the best alternative.
It's still exactly one conversation you can be part of at a time. This compares to in person conversation where you can be part of a greater conversation while also carrying on a smaller, secondary conversation with the people immediately adjacent to you.
I've seen some conference software try to address this with a "tables" system where you sit at a table of a few people but are in a greater discussion room. Your table conversation is only heard at the table but the room conversation is heard at all the tables. then the table channel is "open mic" and the room "push to talk" (or both being bound to different "push to talk" buttons).
That kind of addresses the issue but it's awkward and doesn't translate well to anything other than conferences. Maybe a 2d/3d game style environment with range chat would work the best for something like this but I've yet to see an interface for this that isn't miserable outside of actual games. It'd solve the "walk up and talk" issue but it'd add 10 other issues all of it's own.
Its very different.
Lets log into Discord. We see Alice, Bob, and Charlie are in Room A. Domingo and Ed are in Room B. Francine, Greg, and Hoarice are in Room C. To swap between these three conversations, we just double click on one room or the next. We're instantly swapped between these calls.
Lets say your group of friends has three different calls going on in Skype. How do you quickly see who is talking to who? How do you quickly hop from one conversation to the other? Like in Teams, if a few people are in a call together, how do I know? Sure, I can see Alice and Bob are in a call, but how do I know they're in the same call? How do I know that Charlie is also in there? How do I join their call in progress if not a scheduled meeting? If I'm in the call wtih Alice, Bob, and Charlie, how do I know that Domingo and Ed are talking about the topic of Room B?
The ergonomics of the "call/meeting" versus "room/channel" is vastly different. They both very much have their place, but they're not interchangeable. Forks are good for eating, but it turns out spoons are useful too.
But I use slack for work and some org's community space is also on slack so I make the best of it that I can.