This article was originally posted on theoteno’s Inkwell blog.
Where do I even start? Oh, of course with the long Discord/Amazon outage on a night 2 days ago… but unlike 1-2 weeks ago, I planned to watch anime with a new friend. (we met on a local anime Discord, I needed it for my local “Crunchyroll” registration) I needed a backup plan for later. Luckily, I was already a user of the Matrix chat protocol with Discord alternative clients, after being betrayed by Stoat(Revolt). Unless there’s a Flatpak for Stoat, I don’t think I can use it in Game mode on my Steam Deck.
Let’s skip Commet(Chat): Yes, it’s great: I love the GIF picker, but it is really not great in a GameMode/Gamescope session.
Now, this is where the fun begins!
I had 3 other Matrix apps:
- Fractal: best GTK File Picker (Gnome) and Downloads go into a folder you choose! BUT it has chosen to not run in GameMode
- Cinny: it’s good at supporting old versions of chat rooms, but can’t use file picker in GameScope
- Comet, uh.. I meant…
- Element, Element-Classic: the official reference app, the web app and mobile edition, too
Element is reliable, for real: just added the host/home permission with Flatseal and it worked.
But it doesn’t have a GIF picker, just some stickers and what you have downloaded to upload… I was testing voice call, screenshare on my test (that’s the name…!) server, and later rediscovered the Extensions …and → the Custom Widget!
I tried to add the GIF websites (Giphy, Klipy) to add to the sidebar, without any success. The GIF keyboards might be popular, but where are these on Steam Deck game session?
I still didn’t try search engines at this point!
I tried Google, then looked for embedding search engines (after failing with the main DuckDuckGo URL) with Whoogle, LibreX coming to mind: none of the 2 is maintained anymore.
Right after, I hit gold: duckduckgo.com/search.html was working… kinda
I wanted to find a gif search engine, so I continued my search!
Yahoo, Bing, Startpage, Brave Search.. I tried these. DuckDuckGo still practically loaded in, so I turned to AlternativeTo for help:
SearXNG, well I was starting to get tired looking at its page… after browsing GitHub and Codeberg for search engines…
then, I saw it:
mwmbl - Mumble Search: I have run into it before and used it as I was curious, buuuuut hardly had a usecase for it…
I tried it, for some reason: …and …it worked
I tried some searches, no gifs animated, most sites wouldn’t load (except Wikipedia) BUT search text previews worked! I even found a good idea for videos. Later I might even do something of a reflection about the reactions and stuff, but I still wanna write a bit:
So, about to make a video I hopped on to the Discord and Matrix servers!
I got a warm welcome, so I wrote what I just did! I was hit with the “How did you do it?” question, while I only pasted in a URL from Zen Browser!
The server admin (one of the devs) suggested a blog post, so I did one after finding a blogging fediverse site I kind of like!
I’m sorry you couldn’t run it like that on mobile, Daoud Clarke: it still perfectly runs on Element Classic (Android 11)…
(psst… maybe it runs on Element.io at the browser as a widget! Please don’t give it up!)
Ok, the music is over, time to sleep till 12PM!
(I added inkwell.social to the mwmbl index waiting list, everyone sleep well!)