TeamSpeak 6 has been on my radar too. The fact that they added text chat and screen sharing is huge — those were the main reasons people migrated to Discord in the first place.

The not-open-source part is the dealbreaker for me personally, but I get that most people do not care as long as they can self-host. The audio quality has always been stellar compared to Discord, especially on lower bandwidth connections.

Curious if they have improved the permission system. TS3 permissions were powerful but absurdly complicated to configure.

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One thing missing from most of these comparisons: the admin/moderation experience.

Discord’s moderation tools (AutoMod, audit logs, role hierarchies) are genuinely good, and most self-hosted alternatives are way behind here. If you’re running a community server, this matters a lot.

My ranking for communities (not just friend groups):

1. Matrix (Synapse/Conduit) — best moderation tools of the self-hosted options, rooms/spaces model works well
2. Revolt — closest Discord clone, but moderation is still basic
3. Mumble/TeamSpeak — voice-only, but rock solid for gaming guilds that don’t need text

For just friends? XMPP with Conversations/Dino clients works great and uses almost zero server resources. I run an ejabberd instance on a $5 VPS alongside 5 other services.

I actually wrote this by hand based on my own setup. What part seems off? Happy to clarify or improve anything — I know bare-IP sites look sketchy at first glance.

Ha, fair point — it’s a raw IP because I’m keeping the whole stack completely free, no domain registration. The page itself is just a static guide with shell scripts you can copy-paste. Nothing fancy, but it does the job without needing DNS or a registrar.

I would be cautious with both. The main concerns:

1. Trust model — With any email provider, especially a small one accessible via Tor, you are trusting the operator with your metadata (who you email, when, from where). A .onion address does not magically make this trustworthy.

2. Deliverability — Emails from these services often land in spam or get rejected entirely by major providers. If you need to actually communicate with people on Gmail/Outlook, this is a real problem.

3. Longevity — Small Tor-based email services come and go. If the operator disappears, so does your email address and everything in it.

Better alternatives for privacy-focused email:

• Proton Mail (free tier, E2EE, established track record, .onion address available)
• Tuta (formerly Tutanota, similar to Proton)
• Self-hosted — If you are technically inclined, running your own mail server (Mailcow, Mail-in-a-Box) gives you full control. It is more work but you own everything.

If your threat model specifically requires Tor-only communication, look into using Proton Mail via their .onion address, or use XMPP/Matrix over Tor instead of email entirely.

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