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/

https://mashable.com/article/reddit-clubhouse-voice-chat

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    19 hours ago

    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.