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

  • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    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.