this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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What, no ranking for XMPP and IRC? They are by far the best alternatives in terms of openness, and have the advantage of being more focused on text-only and basic communication, securing the "do one thing and do it well" path. For things like voice chat there's Mumble, but tbh I don't know how is it doing.
Mumble still works but from what I can tell its software ecosystem seems to be decaying due to bots etc. not being updated and breaking changes in their dependencies, people can still get them to work if they really know what they're doing but it's difficult. It also has some quirks that make it confusing for people to use, I'm in a mumble server and any time anyone new joins someone has to explain to them that they need to go through the menus to "register" in order to join the main channel, even though this registration is entirely within the application and doesn't require email authentication or anything. There's also frequently SSL warnings and things like that.
I'd assume the SSL warnings are due to issues with the hosters and not with Mumble itself (to my knowledge, the protocol has nothing to do with SSL). The other issue you mention with joining the main channel honestly sounds like someone at the dev team forgot to flag a feature for a good while, though, because autojoins should not rely on client conf only...
The fact they are being shown to users is jank (it's a popup within the Mumble gui), the fact that the hosters ran into this problem is evidence that hosting Mumble is a big challenge because I am convinced they generally know what they are doing. The comparison here is Discord, for which neither the people running a channel or its users have problems like that.
Hi, I host a mumble server, if users are getting cert errors it is 100% the hosters fault and the error being shown to users is GOOD. Otherwise users could get man in the middled without knowing it. There is no excuse for users to get the error if the hoster is competent and has automated cert renewal setup correctly. And for the record automated cert renewal isn't much harder than it is for a website.
It's SSL warnings, they have to be shown to whoever is connecting, half the point is the system shouldn't have to know if the connecter is a user or an admin or whateverelse. Of course, the real solution is still to solve the SSL issues behind the warning.
If Discord Inc ever forgot to update their certs, you can be damn sure we'd like to not have the warnings hidden from us. The only difference is here that status is not under control of running a channel / making community, so one could argue that's actually worse.