Reddit previously experimented with live audio chat rooms, but ultimately discontinued the feature.
Given Lemmy’s unique position as a federated, open-source alternative to Reddit, should the Lemmy project (or individual instances) consider developing a similar voice chat feature?
- What potential benefits could voice chat bring to Lemmy communities, especially considering the platform’s focus on decentralized moderation and privacy?
- How might voice chat align or conflict with Lemmy’s core values of decentralization, privacy, and user autonomy?
- What technical and moderation challenges could arise from implementing real-time audio communication on a federated network, and how might these differ from centralized platforms like Reddit?
- Should such a feature be standardized across all Lemmy instances, or left as an optional plugin for instance admins to enable or disable?
- How could Lemmy’s open-source nature and ActivityPub federation protocol influence the design, adoption, and interoperability of a voice chat feature across the Fediverse.
- Are there existing open-source projects or protocols that could be leveraged to add voice chat in a privacy-respecting, decentralized way?
I’m interested in hearing from both users and developers about whether this is a direction Lemmy should explore, and what considerations should guide such a decision.
https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/11o30v2/why_is_reddit_ending_audio_chats/
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Should metal detecting functionality be added to my electric toothbrush?
Should pizza savers also be functional Magic 8 Balls?
Maybe Cessna planes should add Roomba functionality.
Voice chat is a fine and good usecase, and I might even be persuaded that some amount of ActivityPub integration might be a good thing (mostly just for account management, though), but no, it shouldn’t be added to Lemmy any more so than my nose hair trimmer should also be a functional tazer. If a particular instance admin also wants to provide voice chat to users, great.
One of Lemmy’s greatest strengths is that it doesn’t try to do too much. It does one thing and one thing well.
yes to at least one of those
goddamm cessna plane just stands around uselessly GRRR
This is another great example of pidgeonholing a decent idea into the wrong tech. Lemmy is federated, but is meant to be an open messageboard style of communication. This would be better suited for an actual chat/audio protocol, like Matrix or XMPP.
Instead of comments on Lemmy it should be just a voice channel with people talking about the thread live. /S
🤣 🤣
I really don’t want to use voice chat when I’m talking to random people, I’m already not using any chat features. I’d rather use a different platform if it comes up at one point (e.g. for stuff like coordinating between mods); I generally prefer it when software keeps its scope small.
I’m in the same boat - I don’t want to be in such close social proximity to Internet randos.
Short answer: No
Long answer: Nooooooooooooooo
I’m sorry, but is privacy really one of Lemmy’s core values? Because fediverse has no real privacy features (that I know of), in fact, federation and ActivityPub makes privacy features pretty hard to implement. Could you please elaborate and link to the source of this?
Assuming this was a good idea, which is far from certain, how would ANY instance afford the bandwidth, hosting, and moderation costs to do this without corporate backing in the form of ads or worse?
Why would anyone want that? You mention “Lemmy’s core values of decentralization, privacy, and user autonomy”, but surely another “core value” is being a general use forum. One main benefit of a forum is that you can have discussions without necessarily having to have everyone together in the same place at the same time. Live voice chat is the opposite, so surely something like that would be better off as a feature of a platform that focuses more on live interaction.
Moderation challenges would be absolutely immense of course, that is not in question. Moderating a voice chat is all but impossible in a setting where anyone can join without an invite, and accounts are free and easy to create.
Also, you can’t easily/fast search in voice data and you end up implementing all kinds of weird and costly workarounds like AI transcription in order to make voice meetings searchable. Voice is great for telling stories around camp fire, but it’s awful way to convey and store information in a online forum.
Not before they add polls.
How could you see this utilised to add value? Would they be synchronous,like rooms of people just talking or would it be stacks of recording that you have to press play on?
Perhaps something like Discord, where there are dedicated chat-rooms/channels?
https://www.wikihow.com/Talk-in-Discord
https://discord.com/blog/voice-chat-now-available-on-discord-mobile-apps
IDK
That’s what other federated services like Matrix are for. Maybe there could be an ActivityPub chatroom service but Lemmy is not and will never be that.
All I see is an extra layer of access to the information and an extra layer of interpretation from myself.
I have a friend who text me but does the voice message thing. It’s very frustrating why not just call it feels and awkward way of doing things.
Like others I also really don’t like the idea of other randoms. There is enough noise already around me I am trying to cut through. I kinda use lemmee as a simplified option of tech.
Are you asking because you want to train Ai voices or something?
Nope, I would say no.