Not to be negative, but teamspeak and ventrilo represent some of the biggest failures of 'getting stuck in your lane' ever. They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat. Ventrilo still has no official ios/android app (lol). Both remind me of craigslist, actually- Except that craigslist is still going strong (for now).
Both still exist, granted- And many still use them. Its just that discord really shouldnt exist, it should have been one of these players. The head start they had should have been insurmountable.
Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix) - Its just I so rarely hear about TS/Vent that I thought it worth me shouting into the ether my disappointment I am not talking to all my friends on vent/ts in 2021.
I've met the owner of Ventrilo a few times at Quakecon a few years back. Super nice guy, pretty smart and nerdy in a good way. Seems to me the guy got pretty wealthy off Ventrilo in its heyday, and was happy with it. Because as people can go search, Ventrilo is essentially abandonware.
Discord's main benefits are the persistent chat with "slack-like" link embeds, emojis, and whatnot; as well as easier role management; and finally, federated identity.
If Mumble, for instance, could make their chat interface more appealing, and if someone had a lightweight user directory for it and friend management, it might have a chance of competing. But Discord has really taken over.
Discord also has a big lead in video support that, IMO, now exceeds anything else. It has flexible group based video chat that naturally extends voice chat. It has broadcasting support so you can stream your gameplay to each other, as well as player-in-player, pop out support, and side-by-side view. Almost all of these features work on mobile as well, including PIP/broadcasting (e.g. I streamed Genshin Impact directly off my phone.)
These may seem like gimmicks, but I use all these features extensively in a server of ~8 regulars to the point we reflexively broadcast to each other and regularly watch each others gameplay, comment, or just use it to hang out. I think this stuff will probably significantly solidify Discord's lead, especially considering the technical infrastructure necessary for features like this.
Before all that though, the slack-like features, and definitely the moderation features for bigger channels, were - still are! - major attractions.
Yeah, it became obvious around 2010 that Ventrilo was dead and that no further development was going to happen. That's when my group moved to Mumble, which was significantly better (and cheaper for hosting costs) but in the end Discord ended up being a significantly better product in pretty much every way.
It remains to be seen if Discord has a long term viable business model or whether it will get dumped like Skype, AIM, etc. when they need to monetise it and users get put off by the attempts.
That said, the move will likely be to the next highly funded product in that case, not back to TS/Mumble.
We use Discord in a professional context as a kind of virtual office, with voice channels set up for team offices and meeting rooms. The persistent voice channel is the absolutely crucial benefit above and beyond the "click-to-start-a-call" UX on other platforms.
We only pay $75/month, for two levels of server boosting. It's so underpriced for the corporate usecase, it's practically criminal. We'd probably be willing to pay four or five times as much, especially if it would allow us to host video/screen-shares with more people.
I appreciate that Discord is gamer-focused branding, but their inability to launch more or less the same product under a professional brand is astounding. They're leaving huge sums of money on the table. For example, being able to run a public Discord instance for customer support, with individual rooms per customer, and customer screen sharing and get anybody in the company to leave their team office on the private instance and join the support call in two clicks is mind-blowing.
Teamspeak and those tools currently have cross-channel communication which is very useful for large squad games. They are definitely a minority as most games are like 5 players per team.
So they have their niche uses (mumble too). guilded.gg is trying to fix that issue.
Having said all that, TS is definitely not a freemium business model. And they did well for themselves. But they are certainly stuck in their old ways.
Craigslist had many attempts to modernize. Turns out... people like the minimalistic nature of it. There are like a billion competitors, and they all failed.
I wouldn’t say that all the Craigslist competitors failed. Dozens of successful startups represent the unbundling of a single category on Craigslist into a more feature rich experience.
I'm a member of several squad gaming communities on discord. We always do our briefings in teamspeak for the better audio codecs and features for ducking and crowd control.
> They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat.
> Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix)
As a former developer of a chat app that used Matrix, I'm actually thinking that this is a good direction for Teamspeak and has the potential to make it a viable alternative to Discord. Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases.
And this is of course something the world badly needs right now.
Well they never were for a seamless purpose. We would mesh Ventrilo and IRC into a real awesome tool but I think we were the intended audience. There weren't millions of us there were tens of thousands of us.
It wasn't till there was millions of users that Discord started targeting them. First there was Curse that got bought out by Twitch and then Discord jumped in.
I still am the cranky guy who thinks IRC is the best communication tool out there and get mad looking at my Slacker screen.
In both cases, I feel like they just stopped moving altogether. It wasn't even that they didn't innovate or add new features, they stopped even improving the features they had.
I feel like there's huge market space for an application like Ventrilo that just does a simple voice server really well, without all the frills and bulk that more fully-featured app like Discord has.
I know that we aren't entitled to software support from devs who get what they want out of their software and then move on... but I'm right there with you in being sad that vent/ts haven't stayed the test of time. Discord saw the stagnancy in the market and just ate it right up.
I've used it and it does indeed work well, but I think it struggles with adoption in part because—it turns out—all those frilly features do in fact drive engagement, help suck users into the ecosystem, etc. Basically it's a repeat of IRC->Slack; people tend to migrate away from things that are easy to migrate away from toward things that are hard to migrate away from.
As a part-time reseller most of the scams and headaches come from platforms other than CL (FB, Mercari, OfferUp, Poshmark, etc).
Maybe it's just the Bay Area, but CL is almost always better for me. If it's a niche item I'll try Reddit or eBay and have pretty much written off the others.
> Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything "right" and still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market.
I disagree. WebRTC is utter nonsense. You neither want to implement nor use it. You never know if it's working. With Mumble (TCP and UDP, both can be used for voice) and Teamspeak you know that when you connect to a server, your connection is working. With WebRTC you only have a vague idea, since HTTP is working, but that doesn't mean much.
For bigger groups it is actually quite good.
Its also a more lightweight experience as opposed to Discord with all the chat ect. functionality.
And I have found it to be more ressourceful than Discord.
That being said nowadays I use Discord 95% of the time.
I don't know if it's actively maintained anymore because it's been a while since I played, but there was a mod for Arma 2 that simulated real radio physics and depended on Teamspeak.
What part of it? Lots of commercial services are built on open protocols. HTTP is probably the most prominent example, but even in the IM world it is (was?) not that odd to see a commercial service use IRC under the hood.
I'm glad to see TeamSpeak is still out there. I totally dropped it as soon as Discord became popular, not because I didn't like it - but literally everyone moved over, I didn't want to be left behind.
Totally can see how some folks out here value their data a lot more and want to keep things private! That's where TeamSpeak will always thrive!
Here's a little bit of a story-time anecdote: Back when I was in school, we used TeamSpeak to talk after hours, it was like the equivalent of people double (or 1.5x) my age spending hours and hours on the phone and their parents yelling "GET OFF THE PHONE".
It was a win win situation because with ADSL (3mbps lol) I could be connected all day and not hog the phone line, additionally the in-built chat to whisper things was good enough that we could exchange links for funny images/flash games etc.
The voice quality was never bad, it took a little server configuration to get it just right, and the ability to record your voice and the conversation made for some hilarious clips compilation throughout the years, sometimes we still share some of those clips to remember what it was like to have a squeaky teenage voice.
I spent thousands of hours on TeamSpeak and also tried Ventrilo/Mumble - but I was defo a team TeamSpeak kid...Also I really liked the fact that TeamSpeak had a public servers list that we could just join when someone forgot to pay the bill for our own server. Yep we rotated...so it wouldn't be the burden of 1 person paying for everyone!
Speaking of paying the bill, it was always just a couple of dollars PayPal'd over to someone who had a larger servers, basically sub-renting a whole room and subrooms...made us feel like adults paying our own bills :)
I have a personal TeamSpeak server for my friend group since forever. I don't know if it's nostalgia, or I'm just old (31) but I can't imagine replacing it ever. Initially for gaming sessions, it became a place to hangout when you're on the computer, whatever you are doing.
It's light weight, usable on my phone, self-hosted, no emoji-fiesta, can send the one-off chat message that I NEVER need history of. It just works and it's OURS. Once in a while when it's down all of my friends panic.
I always thought there was a missing consumer app for my use case. There was/is Houseparty but I thought that video is too much. Clubhouse seems like it's doing something right but still not on point re. dropping in to a "familiar" place and hanging.
Discord on the other hand just feels so alienating to me.
This is great news for Matrix also. With a widely known project like Teamspeak adopting it as a protocol, others might follow.
Speaking of Teamspeak 5 - I hope the new client doesn't hog multiple gigabytes of RAM. Being lightweight is one of the reasons I prefer Teamspeak over Discord.
I host my own TS3 server. It uses significantly less resources than the Discord client, has better audio (at least my friends sound better) and data is not going to Discord for whatever they're using data for. In case there's an issues with my Teamspeak server, I can solve it, instead of waiting for Discord.
I play games with my friends and girlfriend sometimes, I host a TS3 server to talk to each other for several reasons -
1) Voice data stays with us, not yet again some other company
2) The TS Client is slim, lightweight and uses little resources while the Discord client is absolutely horrid, sluggish and quite the memory hog
3) TS has far superior voice quality (subjectively) and latency (due to the server being close)
Hah, I have a different experience: my Teamspeak server literally stopped working once they started requiring a license key even for self-hosted instances. I scrapped the server entirely and switched to Mumble.
Ah, so your circle of friends does not include people with messed up audio. Teamspeak happily passes on whatever it got as input. Discord does quite a bit of filtering, able to salvage legibility of some of my friends.
If you have complex communication needs then this generation of voice software is still the best you can get.
For example, I play a good amount of Eve Online and we have a lot of ACL shenanigans. First, you have your fleet's main channel where most of the membership is going to be. So far so good.
At the top of the list are leadership channels. These guys can talk to and hear their own fleet but with can also instantly page other people in leadership (corp leadership and also other fleet commanders).
Then at the bottom of the list are specific group sub-channels. For example, your scouts and your logistics players need a good amount of coordination with each other, so they will have a lil room where they can talk at each other without tying up comms for the main fleet or distracting leadership with stuff that isn't actionable to them.
Then you can add in a whole extra layer of complexity if you are part of an alliance with multiple corps in it.
You basically can't do that in discord unless you want to have to switch between different channels the entire time. It might sound overkill but if you have 90+ players in your fleet you cannot get away with 'just put everyone in a big room'.
My friends have a Teamspeak server so that's what I use when playing games with them. I prefer it over Discord because it's lightweight in comparison. Also for whatever reason, I can't seem to get the microphone sensitivity right in Discord the last few times I used it.
Sorry Teamspeak, but you lost me already. Back about 7 years ago when I spent more time online with friends in school, we tried to use Teamspeak multiple times, but the audio quality was always awful. We didn't like Skype either, but the audio was still better, so we dealt with the bloat. Discord is king in my mind, without question. Being electron based makes it a bit heavy, but I can spare 200MB on my machine for some damn good chat and call.
You probably had the audio codec configured improperly. Back then, TS used Speex in different bitrates. Today it is OPUS Voice (or OPUS Music), which has absolutely great audio quality. Combine this with very low latency if the server is in your proximity and you've got something that sounds and performs better than anything else - Slack, Discord, etc.
"Damn good" chat might be true, but call? Only if you appreciate mediocre voice quality, a suboptimal RTC protocol and a good big chunk of latency.
Discord feels sluggish, bloated and heavy compared to TS, and it's not just because it's Electron-based.
Could've just been a network issue, or simply because it was 7 years ago. I've been using Teamspeak daily with my friends for 6 years, hosted on a 5$ digitalocean droplet and the audio is far superior compared to anything else.
Discord is pretty sweet too, with screensharing, videos, better chat etc. But once more than 2 people talk at once in a channel, even with Nitro/whatever, it starts cutting people up. We can really feel the difference when going back to TS after a Discord call.
TeamSpeak supports Opus and I don't remember quality being an issue. I actually distinctly remember Discord's audio being worse than the best TeamSpeak settings when Discord launched and my friends switched over.
I think Teamspeak defaults to a fairly average codec bitrate choice, it's not great but not awful. You can easily change it to be significantly better than what Discord offers though.
And because it's not running in electron TS voice is a lot more stable under packet loss situations.
Readit News
Both still exist, granted- And many still use them. Its just that discord really shouldnt exist, it should have been one of these players. The head start they had should have been insurmountable.
Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix) - Its just I so rarely hear about TS/Vent that I thought it worth me shouting into the ether my disappointment I am not talking to all my friends on vent/ts in 2021.
Discord's main benefits are the persistent chat with "slack-like" link embeds, emojis, and whatnot; as well as easier role management; and finally, federated identity.
If Mumble, for instance, could make their chat interface more appealing, and if someone had a lightweight user directory for it and friend management, it might have a chance of competing. But Discord has really taken over.
These may seem like gimmicks, but I use all these features extensively in a server of ~8 regulars to the point we reflexively broadcast to each other and regularly watch each others gameplay, comment, or just use it to hang out. I think this stuff will probably significantly solidify Discord's lead, especially considering the technical infrastructure necessary for features like this.
Before all that though, the slack-like features, and definitely the moderation features for bigger channels, were - still are! - major attractions.
That said, the move will likely be to the next highly funded product in that case, not back to TS/Mumble.
We only pay $75/month, for two levels of server boosting. It's so underpriced for the corporate usecase, it's practically criminal. We'd probably be willing to pay four or five times as much, especially if it would allow us to host video/screen-shares with more people.
I appreciate that Discord is gamer-focused branding, but their inability to launch more or less the same product under a professional brand is astounding. They're leaving huge sums of money on the table. For example, being able to run a public Discord instance for customer support, with individual rooms per customer, and customer screen sharing and get anybody in the company to leave their team office on the private instance and join the support call in two clicks is mind-blowing.
So they have their niche uses (mumble too). guilded.gg is trying to fix that issue.
Having said all that, TS is definitely not a freemium business model. And they did well for themselves. But they are certainly stuck in their old ways.
Craigslist had many attempts to modernize. Turns out... people like the minimalistic nature of it. There are like a billion competitors, and they all failed.
> Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix)
As a former developer of a chat app that used Matrix, I'm actually thinking that this is a good direction for Teamspeak and has the potential to make it a viable alternative to Discord. Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases.
And this is of course something the world badly needs right now.
As an ex-heavy user of teamspeak I can tell you that nobody cared about that.
It wasn't till there was millions of users that Discord started targeting them. First there was Curse that got bought out by Twitch and then Discord jumped in.
I still am the cranky guy who thinks IRC is the best communication tool out there and get mad looking at my Slacker screen.
I miss the people and the tone of the conversations and some of the aesthetic of clients like BitchX but as a technology, I don't really care.
I feel like there's huge market space for an application like Ventrilo that just does a simple voice server really well, without all the frills and bulk that more fully-featured app like Discord has.
I know that we aren't entitled to software support from devs who get what they want out of their software and then move on... but I'm right there with you in being sad that vent/ts haven't stayed the test of time. Discord saw the stagnancy in the market and just ate it right up.
I've used it and it does indeed work well, but I think it struggles with adoption in part because—it turns out—all those frilly features do in fact drive engagement, help suck users into the ecosystem, etc. Basically it's a repeat of IRC->Slack; people tend to migrate away from things that are easy to migrate away from toward things that are hard to migrate away from.
Maybe it's just the Bay Area, but CL is almost always better for me. If it's a niche item I'll try Reddit or eBay and have pretty much written off the others.
Also having fixed locations isn't great, esp. in the UK. Cities are covered but smaller towns are chopped off under bigger city 'communities'.
> Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything "right" and still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market.
No idea why you wouldn't just use Discord though.
That being said nowadays I use Discord 95% of the time.
> We use the Matrix protocol only for the messenger part. The rest does not require a different TeamSpeak server.
Makes sense but it would have been nice to have been fully open source-based.
Matrix also has its own voice/video, but it's not considered entirely ready for prime time yet, hence the Jitsi embeds.
This is rather unusual for a commercial service
Totally can see how some folks out here value their data a lot more and want to keep things private! That's where TeamSpeak will always thrive!
Here's a little bit of a story-time anecdote: Back when I was in school, we used TeamSpeak to talk after hours, it was like the equivalent of people double (or 1.5x) my age spending hours and hours on the phone and their parents yelling "GET OFF THE PHONE". It was a win win situation because with ADSL (3mbps lol) I could be connected all day and not hog the phone line, additionally the in-built chat to whisper things was good enough that we could exchange links for funny images/flash games etc.
The voice quality was never bad, it took a little server configuration to get it just right, and the ability to record your voice and the conversation made for some hilarious clips compilation throughout the years, sometimes we still share some of those clips to remember what it was like to have a squeaky teenage voice.
I spent thousands of hours on TeamSpeak and also tried Ventrilo/Mumble - but I was defo a team TeamSpeak kid...Also I really liked the fact that TeamSpeak had a public servers list that we could just join when someone forgot to pay the bill for our own server. Yep we rotated...so it wouldn't be the burden of 1 person paying for everyone!
Speaking of paying the bill, it was always just a couple of dollars PayPal'd over to someone who had a larger servers, basically sub-renting a whole room and subrooms...made us feel like adults paying our own bills :)
Thanks for allowing me to drive down memory lane!
It's light weight, usable on my phone, self-hosted, no emoji-fiesta, can send the one-off chat message that I NEVER need history of. It just works and it's OURS. Once in a while when it's down all of my friends panic.
I always thought there was a missing consumer app for my use case. There was/is Houseparty but I thought that video is too much. Clubhouse seems like it's doing something right but still not on point re. dropping in to a "familiar" place and hanging.
Discord on the other hand just feels so alienating to me.
Speaking of Teamspeak 5 - I hope the new client doesn't hog multiple gigabytes of RAM. Being lightweight is one of the reasons I prefer Teamspeak over Discord.
Any reason you prefer teamspeak over mumble?
Old TS3 client uses 60MB.
It's positive for matrix either way, but federation would be great.
https://community.teamspeak.com/u/erkinalp/activity
point to a comment from a developer where word "matrix" is in DNS SRV record name
https://community.teamspeak.com/t/teamspeak-development-stat...
All other sources in Google are reddit and Facebook posts.
For anyone who still uses Teamspeak today, what do you use it for?
1) Voice data stays with us, not yet again some other company 2) The TS Client is slim, lightweight and uses little resources while the Discord client is absolutely horrid, sluggish and quite the memory hog 3) TS has far superior voice quality (subjectively) and latency (due to the server being close)
I use discord for some things, but only from a browser. Wouldn't want to use it professionally, although it is relatively decent.
Speech quality is far better on mumble with less latency, because the server is in near proximity.
edit: Don't know about Mumbles text chat, it is rarely used.
Teamspeak never stopped working so there was never a reason to switch to anything else.
Hah, I have a different experience: my Teamspeak server literally stopped working once they started requiring a license key even for self-hosted instances. I scrapped the server entirely and switched to Mumble.
Ah, so your circle of friends does not include people with messed up audio. Teamspeak happily passes on whatever it got as input. Discord does quite a bit of filtering, able to salvage legibility of some of my friends.
For example, I play a good amount of Eve Online and we have a lot of ACL shenanigans. First, you have your fleet's main channel where most of the membership is going to be. So far so good.
At the top of the list are leadership channels. These guys can talk to and hear their own fleet but with can also instantly page other people in leadership (corp leadership and also other fleet commanders).
Then at the bottom of the list are specific group sub-channels. For example, your scouts and your logistics players need a good amount of coordination with each other, so they will have a lil room where they can talk at each other without tying up comms for the main fleet or distracting leadership with stuff that isn't actionable to them.
Then you can add in a whole extra layer of complexity if you are part of an alliance with multiple corps in it.
You basically can't do that in discord unless you want to have to switch between different channels the entire time. It might sound overkill but if you have 90+ players in your fleet you cannot get away with 'just put everyone in a big room'.
Deleted Comment
"Damn good" chat might be true, but call? Only if you appreciate mediocre voice quality, a suboptimal RTC protocol and a good big chunk of latency.
Discord feels sluggish, bloated and heavy compared to TS, and it's not just because it's Electron-based.
Discord is pretty sweet too, with screensharing, videos, better chat etc. But once more than 2 people talk at once in a channel, even with Nitro/whatever, it starts cutting people up. We can really feel the difference when going back to TS after a Discord call.
And because it's not running in electron TS voice is a lot more stable under packet loss situations.