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Revolt: FOSS Discord Alternative
- nocsi 3y agoThey need to make servers automatically publish onto the web. It’ll bridge that gap between Discord & Reddit wherein discussions can be discoverable. Plus all of that can be indexed and crawled
- FireInsight 3y agoThat would probably be an opt-in feature, though, as it could be bad for privacy.
- gremlinsinc 3y agothey should add dedicated q/a, news feed with Reddit post functionality and nested comments for static posts, killer search with bring your own openai key, karma, and maybe better moderation systems than Reddit.
- sylware 3y agoDo they have a noscript/basic (x)html portal? Or a plain and simple C client?
- staunton 3y ago> plain and simple C client? You mean native binary? Why? It is too slow?
- sylware 3y agoI meant an open source client implementation coded in plain and simple C (nothing related to speed, here, but being able to compile it with a small compiler is paramount, namely not one of the Big Tech compilers, namely gcc or clang). The main reason is independence of the client from the Big Tech web engines (which are honestly and fairly technical "abominations", including their SDKs). That said, for something discord like, the best small clients for interop would be an IRC bridges augmented with special and specific commands. There are many implementations of IRC clients and, what is very important, it is easy and reasonable to code an alternative (on top of a crypto lib ofc).
- mannycalavera42 3y agoI prefer the radio controlled micromachine game
- imtringued 3y agoI enjoyed it too.
- solarkraft 3y agoThis is cool, but why another chat silo? We have Mattermost, Zulip and most prominently Matrix, which all come with their own big ecosystems already. Why duplicate the work? Also: How do voice channels work in this thing? I've been thinking for approximately forever about making Jitsi meet more flexible to support channels, but never got around to it (I've done some basic ground work on it, in case anyone wants to pick it up).
- TobyTheDog123 3y agoDifferent strokes for different folks. And by "strokes" I mean use-cases, design preferences, integration needs, etc. Personally I'd use RevoltChat if they offered SSO/SAML/OpenID support - I like the UX and the Discord-esque vibe as opposed to the Slack-esque vibe the alternatives you listed carry.
- nine_k 3y agoWhy did people even create Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix when Jabber and IRC already had existed? "All progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- db48x 3y agoWhat’s with the terrible names? I’ll never use a communication product named “Discord”, and “Revolt” is even worse.
- BizarroLand 3y agoIt's FOSS, so make your own variant and give it a better name.
- db48x 3y agoThat’s not the point. Why are people choosing terrible names? “Discord”, “Revolt”, and “Riot” are all basically antonyms if your product is designed to enable communication between people.
- komali2 3y agoSame for Slack though, right? Like, not working? Revolt and Riot at least require a huge amount of communication to kick off, and Discord requires some large amount of people. Any one person can slack off on their own.
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoThere's another actually, along with Ventrilo and TeamSpeak, there was "Mumble," which is precisely what you don't want to do when voicechatting. So there's definitely a trend. I guess the idea is that your name stands out precisely for this reason, so people remember it. But yeah once it becomes a trend, hard to keep track & the trend changes.
- jimmygrapes 3y agoI'm fairly certain Discord was chosen as a play on the trend started by Eris Free Met and continued with Slack.
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoDon't forget Element was initially called "Riot"
- oddb0d 3y agoI’m a big fan of https://fluxsocial.io/ https://fluxsocial.io/ as it’s fully distributed
- e12e 3y agoHm, this doesn't appear to have been discussed here before? It's closed source?
- unintendedcons 3y agoSmells like token pumping
- logicprog 3y agoI actually have my own instance of Revolt set up on my home server for myself and my group of friends to use, the big issue is the lack of good mobile apps. The PWA is janky and unreliable and can't do notifications on iOS, and can't upload images on Android, either.
- ehPReth 3y agoPWAs should be able to send notifications on iOS now (after you add them to Home Screen). Does Revolt not recognize this?
- logicprog 3y agoIn theory it should work on iOS, yes, but for some reason the Revolt PWA doesn't let you switch mobile notifications on. Also, PWAs are just slower and more buggy.
- RGBCube 3y agoThey have a WIP Android app, which is also Material Design 3. It may release later this year.
- Firmwarrior 3y agoIs there any peer to peer video streaming built into it yet? That's one thing I'm really interested in.. even if you pony up for Discord Nitro, the video stream quality is pretty atrocious. I wish I could just fully saturate my home internet connection (or selfhost a private server on a beefy VPS for my friends and I). $20 a month's worth of VPS could go a long way
- shmerl 3y agoIs it using Matrix?
- gtirloni 3y agoIt's funny (or sad?) that many threads here are saying what Revolt should do just to be followed by why they shouldn't, UX-wise. The days of your software being customizable for your own needs are truly gone. We've mostly been conditioned.
- eschaton 3y agoYet another web page pretending to be an app, reimplementing IRC from scratch including the server. Just build on IRC already and add support for your new features to the open source native apps.
- ericflo 3y agoNo, do not do this. Use Matrix, or...anything else really. I tried building on top of IRC a decade ago and it was a more forgivable mistake back then, but a mistake nonetheless.
- jlund-molfese 3y agoYeah, for things like realtime voice calls as Revolt offers, there's no point in trying to bolt on to IRC. You can (ab)use IRC as a generic datastore, the same way you can Twitter, SMS, or anything else that allows for data to be stored, but it's a terrible idea, and you'll end up with something overly complicated and without any sort of compatibility with generic IRC clients. And honestly, complaining about Electron apps is just lazy. It may not be the choice you make when you have unlimited resources and time to write separate native applications for every platform, but it's perfectly accessible for a first iteration. Also a great way to make sure all your platforms can have roughly the same behavior. Would much rather have an Electron Linux app (which is easy to port and costs little to maintain) than no client at all.
- ta8903 3y agoYeah, you would use XMPP for this kinda thing.
- vore 3y agoIRC is so janky it’s almost definitely worth throwing it out at this point: - No standard authentication system, you have to go private message someone called NickServ. - No chat history built in unless you run a bouncer. - A lot of weird legacy features with multiple ways to negotiate them (CAP, PROTOCTL, ISUPPORT, just assuming you can use something, etc.) - Inscrutable and incompatible user and channel modes across different IRCds. - No voice chat unless some client is implementing it via some kind of DCC command, and even then no multi-user voice chat and requires direct IP connection. - Horizontally scaling IRC is… interesting. If I were to even think about using IRC as a base, I would overhaul a significant amount of the protocol and break compatibility with a lot of existing applications! None of these are insurmountable problems but to fix then you would be inventing a lot of bespoke parts of the protocol!
- sneak 3y agoBeware projects that demand you sign a CLA. Linux doesn't do this because it's GPL; projects that demand this are leaving the door open to license your work under non-free-software licenses. I personally won't donate free work to organizations that want the option of releasing nonfree software.
- tbrockman 3y agoI don't know why a significant amount of the comments are so critical of what seems like a pretty incredible project (and based on contributor statistics, primarily built by _a single person_), but I really like it and prefer the overall UX to Element so far (even though it's basically copied Discord entirely). Also, the backend is written in _Rust_, I thought you guys LIKED THIS KIND OF THING!
- himujjal 3y agoWelcome to Hackernews. Being sour is part of every user here just to spread negativity in the guise of "user feedback". Just ignore those comments and read the positive ones. This project is really good. Really really good!
- laeri 3y agoI agree with this comment. However, having mostly just a single person as the creator and maintainer means it has a truck factor of one. A small team would inspire more confidence in the longevity of the project.
- squarefoot 3y agoIt's Open Source, the best possible remedy against many disgraces, bus factor included.
- laeri 3y agoIt sure helps that the code is open source. However, there are some factors that still make it harder for other people to pick up a project - a lot of knowledge can be lost how the system works and has to be reverse engineered - which fork is the chosen one by the community and how will people know about it - branding might be unclear, can you reuse the name or should you rename your project
- kramerger 3y agoMaybe being featured on HN attracts more developers now? You seem to consider this important, maybe you could volunteer?
- carlotte 3y ago[flagged]
- zelphirkalt 3y agoSince Discord is getting worse and recently added another dark pattern ("Discord Birthday" crap, that always shows a red "1" just to annoy my OCDs) and did not have a good data protection policy anyway, I might take a look at this one. Hoping it will be a good replacement. But then I will have to deal with even worse network effect than back then, when I switched from Skype to Discord.
- ringer 3y agoDiscord keeps adding new crap and I always have to update my usercss to hide that crap. I mostly use it from a browser, so it's easy to run custom css/scripts, but the official client can be patched with e.g. OpenAsar[1]. A short (incomplete) list of my git history from the past 1 year: - May 15 2023 Remove activities ("Discord Birthday" ;)) - May 1 2023 Remove nitro super reaction - Apr 9 2023 Remove nitro ads - Dec 22 2022 Remove new features popup - Dec 22 2022 Remove snows giving seasonal event - Sep 5 2022 Remove floating unread indicator - Aug 31 2022 Remove new member badge [1] https://github.com/GooseMod/OpenAsar https://github.com/GooseMod/OpenAsar
- zelphirkalt 3y agoI would like to use it in the browser, sandboxing alone is reason enough. However, I had some issues with bad voice quality, when I was using it in the browser and apparently it annoyed people too much. Not sure why it has a problem with voice in the browser. Maybe I should try again.
- yscodes 3y agoLooks like it's not end-to-end-encrypted. Which should be default for anything that offers dms. I wanted it for Discord so I created an E2EE client on top of it: https://www.discryptor.io https://www.discryptor.io
- nathias 3y agosomeone who knows what he's doing did the optimizations, this thing is smoooth, kudos
- slotrans 3y agois the audio mixing as good as Discord's? IMO this is the killer feature, despite being subtle and something no one talks about. The audio mixing in Zoom and Meet is atrocious by comparison: the instant a second person starts talking the audio becomes garbled.
- jrm4 3y agoIf this is decentralized/federated than they should make a bigger deal of that on the page, and if it's not, well, no thanks.
- DreamFlasher 3y agoFullack. Is it based on Matrix and federates with it? If no, no thanks.
- imtringued 3y agoI think the same thing. This should be a Matrix implementation with some implementation specific extensions that will be included in the standard in the future.
- tredre3 3y ago> We don't think federation is beneficial to Revolt and would actively hinder our stance on privacy. In short, federation is prone to leaking your metadata, could make removing your data harder, and we otherwise have no incentive to develop support if it we aren't able to use it for the main platform (revolt.chat). https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/federation https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/federation
- jrm4 3y agoTough love coming then -- then unless we pay you directly, there's no good incentive for anyone to believe that you'll be able to always deliver your claimed advantages over Discord.
- veave 3y agoThey don't seem to claim any advantages over Discord, at least on their home page.
- paulmd 3y agoIt's self-hosted FOSS, you're not paying anyone directly and if you don't feel it delivers something you can write it yourself or pay to have it written. Anyway, this gets into a philosophical point about the whole Reddit exodus - ID federation and content federation are two different things, and when people talk about the friction of joining a forum vs clicking subscribe on reddit, ID federation is what gives you that, not content federation. And content federation introduces a lot of scalability problems, and difficulties deleting comments/etc. Yes, someone can notionally always crawl/cache you, but having it on your server is different from intentionally putting it out into a peer-to-peer CDN, or serving it to a bunch of different pods so they can put it in their members' feeds. Some people don't want that part, they want the content to stay on their self-hosted instance.
- bertman 3y agoDiscussion from 2 years ago when this was new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28434012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28434012
- 2Gkashmiri 3y ago2 years ago matrix did not have voice rooms. Now we have video rooms. How far stuff moves forward in short time.
- alecnotthompson 3y ago100 years ago, I was not born. Now, I am born. How things happen in arbitrary periods of time.
- arghwhat 3y ago> short time 1/40th of an average human life isn't really that short. That's 400-700 calendar work days depending on your work ethitcs, possibly thousands of man days. That's an eternity gone in the blink of an eye, not a short time. Life is what is short. :(
- colinsane 3y agothe first COTS videophones appeared > 50 years ago (though very expensive). either that adds to your existential angst or now you can frame this as a leap forward: “50 years without any widely deployed open source video-conferencing stack and suddenly it was rolled out to millions of users in the last 5% of that timeline with the majority of those end users not having to go out of their way for it.” it’s up to you.
- arghwhat 3y agoI'll reword that: - The technology was attempted and failed 50 years ago, like so many other things. - 12 years ago, video calls (1-to-1) became available to everyone - 4 years ago, for inexplicable reasons, demand spiked for videoconferencing. MS Teams gained an annoying foothold. - Around the same time, Jitsi Meet usage goes up as an easily accessible open source solution. - 2 years ago (looks like only 1 when checking), Matrix replaces integration with a native feature, for standalone feature parity with the rest of the space. Not that exciting a timeline...
- Animats 3y agoThe next big worry is Github. Moving major open source projects off Github is going to be difficult. But we probably will have to go to architectures where there are multiple synchronized repositories some time in the next few years.
- api 3y agoYeah it’s only a matter of time before enshittification comes for that too.
- Zarathustra30 3y agoI'm not sure about that. Microsoft is Commoditizing its Complement. I have a free repository on GitHub that auto-deploys to a paid Azure host. If GitHub wasn't as good as it was, M$ wouldn't have my $.
- Animats 3y agoPossible future problems: - Github actions putting Microsoft "telemetry" into projects being built.[1] - "Please log in with your Microsoft account." - "But first, this word from our sponsor". [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/4ibauu/visual_studio_adding_telemetry_function_calls_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/4ibauu/visual_studio_a...
- api 3y agoYour first possibility is rather chilling in its implications. Imagine a bulk install of MS spyware on billions and billions of devices. I bet the TOS allows it. The trust we hand these silos in exchange for convenience is just ludicrous.
- komali2 3y agoGitlab, yeah? We deployed an instance a while back and then found the server cost was high to where it still made sense to use github for now
- nannal 3y ago
- moojd 3y agoThis is really nice. Just needs one click joining for voice channels. This is an under-appreciated killer feature of discord that slack missed when implementing huddles. The ability to instantly hop in and out of voice channels is what keeps discord from feeling like any other teleconferencing app. Any friction to this makes it so I am less likely to just casually jump into a call.
- uoaei 3y agoIt's like talking over cubicle walls vs scheduling conference rooms.
- steanne 3y agothe very first time i went looking for a discord plugin, i was looking for a way to block that after having entered too many chat channels accidentally. it might be a killer OPTION.
- solarkraft 3y agoIt's crazy how collaboration solutions keep missing this. I passionately hate "calls". You don't catch people with a lasso to talk to them in real life.
- heyoni 3y agoLol! This is such a great analogy I might lasso some folks just to tell them about it.
- lucb1e 3y agoNot sure I understand. They're called "meetings" IRL right? Just that they're now online, a lot of the time. We use the word call and meeting interchangeably, I'm not really seeing the difference. (The only difference between before covid and after is that we are more people and have more calls that take longer. Text chatting is a lot more structured and efficient and inclusive because nobody has to wait for a turn while the topic evolves past five persons before it gets to you, but whenever a topic gets more than a handful of messages, invariably $boss will propose to stop wasting time and "plan a meeting" .... but I also have that experience with IRL meetings when there are more than, say, five people involved)
- kstrauser 3y agoHow's this better than Matrix? (Not a leading question. I haven't used Discord/Matrix/etc. more than a handful of times and don't know what I don't know.)
- muzzio 3y agoDoes Matrix have the equivalent of voice chat rooms that Discord has? I find as a user of Discord that being able to see who's just hanging out is the killer feature there. (As are things like game streaming and bots, ofc)
- dingusdew 3y ago[dead]
- Arathorn 3y agoyes, albeit in beta in Element: https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-rooms-and-a-new-search-experience/ https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro...
- moojd 3y agoI saw this and got excited but no, this isn't discord voice channels. This is an integrated jitsi meet call. It looks like some sort of prototype has been merged to develop though: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/pull/21476 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/pull/21476
- prophesi 3y agoWhat do you mean it's not discord voice channels? Looking at the screenshot[0] their Jitsi Meet integration is identical, because discord voice channels are essentially voice conference calls. [0] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/48614497/159062202-a7f8d8b2-ff39-4576-b398-cc3b526864f9.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/48614497/159062202...
- dhalucario 3y agoAre custom client's allowed? How can I be sure this won't be sold out of nowhere?
- Firmwarrior 3y agoThe backend is AGPL-licensed, so worst case you could just selfhost a forked backend and you and your friends could connect to it with a forked client Open source is friggin great. Some open source game addon manager I was using made a bunch of moves that pissed me off, but it was a breeze to fork it and just maintain my own version with a couple of patches applied
- allknowingfrog 3y agoIt took slightly longer than expected for me to track down an explanation of their business model. I think it boils down to "run cheap until we have one". https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/monetisation https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/monetisation
- dingusdew 3y ago[dead]
- spondylosaurus 3y ago> Last revision. 7th March 2022 They're running Docusaurus for docs but adding manual timestamps instead of using the built-in showLastUpdateTime variable... this hurts me.
- JustBreath 3y agoDunno if this is the case here, but there are use cases for manual timestamps, for example when you want to differentiate between metadata updates / formatting changes and content updates/reviews.
- amatecha 3y agoAh yeah, that's true, last commit to that file was actually on Apr 19th 2022.. https://github.com/revoltchat/documentation/commits/master/docs/faq/monetisation.md https://github.com/revoltchat/documentation/commits/master/d... Too bad the metadata isn't surfaced somewhere so you could kinda discern "last substantial change" vs. "last actual time anyone made an edit of any sort to this file".
- hardwaresofton 3y agoThe future continues to be AGPL[0]. By making their backend AGPL they've left themselves a path to some kind of profitability for companies that want to run custom versions. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30866724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30866724