cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/DiscordAlternatives/p/1782665/searching-for-discord-alternative-with-multi-screenshare-feature
When gaming with friends, many times we'll share our screens simultaneously so we can help keep track of group members if we get split up.
Are there any discord alternatives with this feature?
Bonus points if it allows you to also toggle on/off the audio from the share separately from their microphone.
I have been looking into self hosting a Matrix server. Call and stream quality seemed pretty good, however there can only be one person screen sharing at a time. So yeah, unfortunately Matrix won't work as a discord alternative unless they get an update to allow for multiple people to screen share.
I remember there was a Discord competitor called Revolt that recently changed their name to Stoat. Haven't heard much in particular about it, but does any one have any thoughts on Stoat?
I just checked, it seems like Stoat doesn't have screen sharing yet. Also no video yet. Both say "Coming soon!"
They have text and voice channels available today though.
It's pretty much a Discord clone. The UI is very similar. Which is good!
However, right now the biggest hurdle I have is the slow server performance. They're understaffed and underfunded, the main instance is slow. Maybe it would run great if you self hosted it.
I recently learned about fluxer.app, which is another clone.
I just checked and screen sharing seems to be working with them. fluxer.app also has voice and text channels.
Interestingly, fluxer.app says federation is on the road map... But, realistically who knows when that could be. Fluxer also said they're purposely not working on federation now because they have a million other things to work on, which is totally fair.
fluxer.app wants you to pay them starting now. They sell Plutonium, which is like Nitro. Which. Also seems kinda fair. Devs need to eat.
Stoats backend does support voice and video it's just not quite enabled in the frontend yet. I got it all working by following the info here https://github.com/javif89/stoat-selfhost
I've been trying Stoat for the past few days with friends. It's really promising and feels a lot like discord. Haven't had any complaints or issues with the windows app. And once it's set up calls and servers are pretty easy to get set up. Their android app is pretty buggy though currently, it is advertised as in beta so hopefully that'll be fixed in the future. We don't screenshare so I haven't looked into it but I've heard it doesn't support it
I believe Element can do multi-screensharing with MatrixRTC, but you can only view one stream at a time. You can easily switch between active streams though.
Tbf, that's no different from Discord from what I've seen
Look again, there is a specific watch button for opening multiple, then you gotta switch to grid view and turn off the setting that shows users on the grid.
How do we switch between streams? Mybdriend group hasn't figured this out. It looks like there's a little line to click but it does nothing.
I think there were some small < > arrows on the sides of the stream
What matrix client did you use?
Element on PC. For mobile Element Classic only supports text chats, and Element X is the experimental app for testing voice and video calls. The PC program and Classic work fine, didn't test X
I tried Commet a few days ago, not only does it look more Discord like but it allows multiple screenshares (even one user can share so many screens until their PC freezes - as shown in the picture). (The client is alpha but most of the time it worked for me)
I am definitely gonna have to try Commet. Thanks for the heads up!
I would love to try it, but I can't seem to get a verification email to test it out.
Mine took 8hrs before I finally got it