I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.

this definitely makes sense in the OSS community, but i feel like someone should've already done it as a semi pet project already. I know i would've done it.

And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.

that's an interesting take, but personally i think the web should stick to pretty much static web pages, the browser is turning into a secondary operating system, which is being run on an operating system, which is just, stupid.

Personally i don't think any of this stuff should be done over the web, period.

The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.

yeah, my main complaint though is that we do have things like jabber, this is already incredibly accessible, there is almost no need for expanding the current landscape because it's been around for like 30 years now.

In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time.

no but that's not the immediate use case either, something like mumble is really nice if you're playing games with other people and just want to VOIP so you don't have to use a text chat, you can talk and play video games at the same time pretty easily. It's also nice if you just want to casually hang around other people without having to be physically near them, or at a keyboard typing on it constantly.

For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.

i mean, you don't need a camera, maybe in a professional setting, but in a casual setting, screensharing something to show someone else for example, you don't even need a camera.

Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.

this is fair, and tbh i don't even really want a discord clone, you could very easily just adapt one of the many existing text chat protocols IRC being the most obvious, and VOIP is basically a solved problem, that's not hard either. Mumble has a pretty good low latency implementation of it, but you don't always need low latency. Video sharing/video conferencing is harder, but we have things like youtube and netflix, so the actual video streaming part isn't the hard thing. We have entire video manipulation libraries like FFMPEG as well, which will do everything you need it to do.

Mumble i think is the perfect example of a "minimalist" application, it does VOIP and it does it really well. I pretty much just want mumble but for video sharing and i'd be happy.

I do not know what you talk about. I use screen sharing and voice chat daily on elements with our own hosted matrix server.

Edit: i felt wrong saying "voice chat" what even is that. I make regular calls and video calls with screen sharing in elements ;)

What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.

Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).