22 ms·

Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

729 points by OuterVale 2y ago

mclanett 2y ago
I'm at a total loss why social chat boards want to have the most antisocial names.
- culi 2y ago
  Some would consider a commitment to overthrowing oppressive power structures extremely pro-social Would you call the French Revolution antisocial? Massive demonstrations? What about the Hong Kong uprising? It's all a matter of perspective. Those who live a stable life might see a threat to the system that grants them that stability as "anti-social" while those who do not benefit from the current system can see revolting as "pro-social"
unification_fan 2y ago
Pretty cool. I just wish it had its own identity and didn't look like Walmart Discord.
- rokkamokka 2y ago
  I'm all for good UI/UX spreading as much as possible for the benefit of users. That said, I've barely used discord and thus can't rightly say if it has good UI/UX.
  - drpossum 2y ago
    Do you have other opinions about the UI/UX of apps you haven't used?
- gingersnap 2y ago
  Mom: "We have Discord at home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdUWZga7T7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdUWZga7T7Q
high_na_euv 2y ago
I hope the communities/servers arent self-hosted because that would be shot in the knee, cuz this is security issue TeamSpeak and Ventrilo were like that
- Underphil 2y ago
  Is it beyond to you seek out that information before commenting?
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    I didnt manage to find it on their page, so I guess it is centralized like dc
- no_oneimportant 2y ago
  how tf can something be a server if its not selfhosted
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    Discord servers arent self hosted
    - gibibit 2y ago
      Discord servers are not servers.
      - high_na_euv 2y ago
        But thats the common nomenclature among discord users
m00dy 2y ago
They will have a better stack than Discord once they migrate to Tauri.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  At first glance it's hard to even tell them apart, did they copy literally all of the CSS and layout?
- pas 2y ago
  It seems the progress for that stalled. (Last commit 5 months ago https://github.com/revoltchat/frontend/tree/main/packages/desktop https://github.com/revoltchat/frontend/tree/main/packages/de... )
mogoh 2y ago
So, how does it compares to matrix/element?
- gunalx 2y ago
  I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord. If i would want something opensource i would also want something decentralized.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord. Judging by the FAQ, they see Matrix as a protocol as "obtuse and unstable": > Does Revolt have federation? > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap. However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are: > Implement the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable) https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
    - freeamz 2y ago
      It is hard to get E2E (device 2 device) right. I get matrix is not perfect, but I have jet seen an open source alternative with both server/client implementation that get it right. One thing about matrix is that every device has a key in addition to the password, that key in in addition encrypted with another password, it makes it very difficult for average user, but then just use matrix in unencrypted mode to get the slack/discord effect.
      - ranger207 2y ago
        If Revolt is a Discord alternative, then they may have chosen not to implement E2E because their intended audience generally doesn't care for it and the UX is too confusing for a marginal perceived benefit
peterjaap 2y ago
So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with the unicorn-puking emoji-littered eye-scorching UX/UI garbage that Discord is? Interesting.
- diggan 2y ago
  I mean, if you are looking for a Discord alternative, isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? If you want something that is the opposite of what you describe, IRC still exists and works well, but not sure many end-users would call it an alternative to Discord.
  - OptionX 2y ago
    That and I assume if its open-source you can make clients that look like whatever you'd want.
  - spacechild1 2y ago
    > isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? I think this applies to the original target audience, namely gamers, but as a general purpose chat application, e.g. as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious. Of course, this begs the question why these projects adopted Discord in the first place. I guess the lack of a better alternative (that is not self-hosted)?
    - Mashimo 2y ago
      > as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious. Why is that?
    - TulliusCicero 2y ago
      They use it because Discord works well and simply, with a rich feature set, that's largely free. And yeah, there aren't FOSS alternatives that actually match up.
- bilekas 2y ago
weberer 2y ago
>To ensure users stay safe on the platform, we explicitly disallow: >Misinformation & Conspiracy Theories >Spreading false or misleading information that can cause harm to individuals or society is prohibited. This includes conspiracy theories that have been debunked or lack credible evidence. Why? That sounds so dumb to waste resources policing it.
- Mashimo 2y ago
  They did not say they are policing it.
  - Almondsetat 2y ago
    What is the point of disallowing without policing?
    - rizky05 2y ago
      [dead]
    - Mashimo 2y ago
      Probably same as most other social platforms. Selective enforcement, virtue signaling, a tool to use when they get bad press for a server.
      - Almondsetat 2y ago
        I mean, bad press will chastise you even if you actually enforce stuff
- jisnsm 2y ago
  It’s really fucking boring how every platform that hosts speech tries to nudge you in their direction these days.
  - bilekas 2y ago
    I don't know why everyone think's they have a right to say and behave however they want using someone else's services. If the platform or provider don't want to associate with you, that's their prerogative. The hubris to assume otherwise is ridiculous.
Mashimo 2y ago
The github https://github.com/revoltchat https://github.com/revoltchat
- cies 2y ago
  This is sorely lacking on the homepage! All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.
  - internetter 2y ago
    > All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage. Says who? I don’t see that in the OSI definition
    - cies 2y ago
      Go to ten FLOSS project and check. Some want to be able to quickly assess some tings (is this JS/PHP/Python, or is this Rust/Go -- my interest). Someone posted the github link here on HN: why would that be?
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      Nobody but I don't believe any company saying their product is open source if they aren't willing to point me to where to find the code right away.
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    Yeah, I had to click around a bit to find the link. Oddly it was only on the discover page for servers I found it. Bottom left corner https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers But now I also know where to go if I'm in need of a femboy community.
    - MK2k 2y ago
      front page, scroll down, there's Developers - Source Code
  - 2y ago
croisillon 2y ago
haha i had to laugh at the language selectors: {flag:uk} English (traditional) {flag:us} English (simplified)
- Y_Y 2y ago
  An old joke, but a good one. Shoutouts to Noah Webster for "opinionatedly curating" British English from an inconsistent crufty unspellable mess to a randomly tweaked version of the same thing.
- jeffhuys 2y ago
  How to quickly lose a few potential users.
  - roblabla 2y ago
    Other people might say it's a great way to self-moderate its network.
  - gooseus 2y ago
    lol, or how to easily filter out a few users who can't take a joke.
  - diggan 2y ago
    With emphasis on few. I'd wager less than 0.01% of potential users would be butthurt enough by that joke to avoid the platform as a whole. And the ones who got butthurt, probably better off not having them on the platform in the first place.
  - another-dave 2y ago
    It seems strange that someone would be offended by the US variant being called "simplified" spelling — wasn't that the whole point?
    - freeopinion 2y ago
      Maybe they meant people who don't want to be considered traditional...
voidUpdate 2y ago
> Revolt is the chat app that’s truly built with you in mind. Is this meant to be a unique selling point? All of the features also exist in discord. Also, "Bots some for extra spice". Might need a text review
- benrutter 2y ago
  I think the implication is that discord is designed for profit, not you.
colesantiago 2y ago
Donation page to Revolt before Discord succumbs to platform decay or (enshittification) after being owned by Wall Street soon. https://wiki.revolt.chat/notes/project/financial-support/ https://wiki.revolt.chat/notes/project/financial-support/ https://ko-fi.com/insertish https://ko-fi.com/insertish
CleanCoder 2y ago
The offering in its current form (https://i.imgur.com/zcmEOhr.png https://i.imgur.com/zcmEOhr.png) does not feel truly communal.
- internetter 2y ago
  Discord scale “communities” have tens-or even hundreds of thousands of members
- concerndc1tizen 2y ago
  What's not communal about it? Should they allow anyone to participate without limits?
- Mashimo 2y ago
  Can you elaborate?
GAPAT 2y ago
[dead]
jaggs 2y ago
Really nice. Perfectly timed for enshitification, and love that it's open source. Now just need some sort of federation and it's good to go. And choosing to go with an established UI will make adoption that much easier when TSHTF. [just had a longer look around. Is this a Russian project?]
_mitterpach 2y ago
Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public, I reckon this might be made in preparation for it. I think it is a wise move to offer an alternative. The design is very similar to Discord, could this possibly even go to a copyright breach or is the bar for that set too high?
- wooger 2y ago
  Lol, the design of discord is identical to about 9000 chat apps no?
  - bryanhogan 2y ago
    There really is no other app in this space on the same quality as Discord. Discord was born out of Skype, Teamspeak and similar being so awful to use. Discord took the complaints from these and made a product which was the best version of them all.
    - grumple 2y ago
      Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better voice chat to me.
      - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
        With an emphasis on the gaming space and open communities, whereas Slack focused on corporate and closed communities. I've been in the Go community for a while and they had to write a bot to get access to it (as Slack works invite only) and iirc had to work with Slack engineers to work with the scale they had. Meanwhile Discord's success is down to it being open, anyone can create a new channel and get instant access to things like voice chat. Of course, this has its downside, and I'm sure Slack deals with a lot of abuse, ranging from porn to doxxing to it being used as a C&C server.
        grumple 2y ago
        I think it’s a good product. The problem with all these chat apps (as companies to invest in) is there’s no moat; as soon as a more convenient or better option comes along, people will switch. There’s not a big integrated community or advantage to sticking to one app. Which doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t make plenty of money, just that I don’t buy into any hype around them.
vr46 2y ago
How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? If you are constantly forced to override the warnings about unsigned software, assuming your system even allows you in the first place, how much friction before less technical users give up? Code signing is good, I like it, I approve, but it is a big obstacle for me personally and others who cannot afford Apple Developer Credentials.
- diggan 2y ago
  > How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? Does the license of your application somehow prevent you from following whatever Apple wants to do regarding signing? I think there are plenty of apps/games out there built on FOSS technology yet they're still signed and run like anything else signed on macOS, but maybe I remember incorrectly?
  - devsda 2y ago
    It might be nothing technical. Some developers avoid paying for the Apple dev program on principle. Joining it could be seen as supporting Apple's attempt at building walled gardens. There's also the operational challenges for open source like who will sign-up and how to secure or maintain the signing keys etc. It brings in lot of friction.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    It’s the 99 bucks argument every time…
    - Karliss 2y ago
      The problem is that with exception of single person projects it's not as simple as paying 99$. Using individual developer account means exposing private information of one of the developers (which not everyone wants) and is a major buss factor. Doing it properly with organization account means nontrivial amount of paper work to establish either a commercial company or an officially registered non profit. There are very few open source projects big enough for this.
RobotToaster 2y ago
The self hosting instructions aren't that friendly imo.
- p2detar 2y ago
  I couldn't even find them. Do you have a link?
  - OuterVale 2y ago
    https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
- diggan 2y ago
  The backend seems to be a fairly standard Rust project, you basically run `cargo build --release` and then deploy the binary. For the frontend, it seems like a pretty standard frontend project, you install dependencies, then run build command and you have a bunch of website assets you deploy to your server. Overall, seems pretty standard and easy to deploy. Most complicated would be to also run the various services that are supporting the backend, but again, not overly complicated. Is there something specific that is missing to be able to self-host this?
  - moiz41510 2y ago
    I think it's pointless to selfhost if you have to recompile an app in order to connect to your server. The team should have a field box to add a server URL.
    - remram 2y ago
      It doesn't look like this is the case? I'm looking at https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted/blob/master/README.md#custom-domain https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted/blob/master/README... where you are told to update 2 config files.
- IceDane 2y ago
dabeeeenster 2y ago
The homepage has no explanation of where the server is in all this? Github page doesnt help either?! Where is my data stored?
- OuterVale 2y ago
  https://revolt.chat/legal/community-guidelines#jurisdiction https://revolt.chat/legal/community-guidelines#jurisdiction
- guy234 2y ago
  According to another comment itt it is federated.
  - Aachen 2y ago
    I didn't see federation mentioned anywhere, just self hosting. The difference: - Self hosted means everyone has their own server, people need to register for the server they're interested in using. Websites are an example of this: you host your own system independently of anything else going on (though there are hyperlinks to cross-link content, which aren't necessarily present in other self-hosted software). Git servers are another example, like Gitea or Forgejo or Gitlab or gitweb - Federated usually lets you connect servers, so that if I'm on HN and want to post a comment on a Reddit thread, if they were federating, I could just do that without logging into reddit specifically (let alone registering a completely separate account for the other server). The best example may be email, where I don't need to register with Google (yet) to send a Google user an email but I specify @gmail.com after the user's name. A more recent popular example is Mastodon Each has upsides and downsides, like having to moderate content from other servers and having a much more complex protocol (federated) versus being independent and simple but also being another walled garden (self hosted) Edit: confirmed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278375 > > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap
lordofgibbons 2y ago
The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers. I'm really hoping for an alternative. I'm always weary of en-shitification whenever a single platform wins all the users.. like what has happened to Reddit.
- yownie 2y ago
  I couldn't agree more
- INTPenis 2y ago
  I think the biggest selling point is clearly the community. Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix. Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook. I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.
  - internetter 2y ago
    > they took They are more than likely still taking, based on the 17% layoff a few months ago As is Snapchat, miraculously (Snapchat is the most wildly mismanaged social media company from a fiscal perspective it’s wild)
  - Dracophoenix 2y ago
    > The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook. In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.
mid-kid 2y ago
Is this still centralized? Or can you self-host without needing a separate client instance for each host?
- TZubiri 2y ago
  [flagged]
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted As for clients I don't know.
  - cdaringe 2y ago
    The compose file specified a service for the web app
  - Aachen 2y ago
    8 GB RAM minimum for a non-graphical server software?! This thing must have more components and services than my desktop OS while having a few website open in Firefox and Chromium each
    - verdverm 2y ago
      9 services, 5 theirs, 4 other OSS
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Synapse, after a reboot and the cache is cold, uses less than that. I don't think our synapse server even has 8GB allocated to it. But that's for private chat, we can't join large rooms because I deployed our server as a test, alongside Mattermost and rocket.chat. I haven't felt compelled to switch to dendrite or whatever, nor split the synapse microservices out, nor install postgres on a dedicated VM, and so on. All of which would make someone else's matrix experience better but my life ^ that much worse.
  - tomefuwu 2y ago
fareesh 2y ago
[edit] seems like it's federated
- hoistbypetard 2y ago
  Their FAQ makes it seem like it's not: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
TZubiri 2y ago
Reminder that discord is an app for kids. Is your open source code and volunteer run project going to keep kids safe? Is it an advantage that the comms protocols are open and everyone can build bots? Or a disadvantage for this usecase? Also, how is it an alternative for Discord if it's in a whole different jurisdiction?
- Mashimo 2y ago
  > Reminder that discord is an app for kids. Why is that?
  - esafak 2y ago
    Have you seen the UI? Nothing fit for adults, who value their attention and time.
    - Mashimo 2y ago
      Sorry, I don't see it. I can quickly jump around channels and server with shortcuts, the UI looks similar to other chat apps. Auto-Embed can be disabled, if that steals your attention. Or what do you mean?
      - TulliusCicero 2y ago
        They just don't like the design and are choosing a condescending way of framing it.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    Because it's a video game accesory. They market to kids, and have kid safety features.
    - Mashimo 2y ago
      I don't use discord in combination with games at all. But you can use it that way. That does not mean it's only for kids.
bryanhogan 2y ago
Love to see this! Worried about Discord's future, with its monopole position greater enshittification is definitely a real risk. Would also love to see some solution to Discord's problem of being an information black hole here as well.
dmos62 2y ago
I've recently heard it said that there's a better alternative to Discord called Gilded, but no reasons were provided. Anyone has insights?
maelito 2y ago
How does it compare to Element ?
createvideoai 2y ago
[dead]
drpossum 2y ago
[flagged]
- hypercube33 2y ago
  At first I thought you were being brutal but...a GitHub page with a screenshot would be better. The aesthetic of the website is...unique
threesevenths 2y ago
A British company making a chat app. What’s the privacy policy? 5 eyes first then you?
- prmoustache 2y ago
  You know it includes a backdoor for the government.
  - culi 2y ago
    it's open sourced and self-hostable
- crtasm 2y ago
  It's open source and you can self host it.
- palata 2y ago
  Slack belongs to Salesforce (US), Discord is based in the US, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple... Not saying this is better, but is definitely not worse. At least in Europe there is the GDPR, whereas in the US there is a president officially supporting corruption [1]. If you care about privacy, you have to go for open source end-to-end encryption. Probably Signal. At least this you can self-host. [1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-executive-order/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-exe...
- harry_ord 2y ago
  The bigger question mark for me is. Is this still at risk from the online safety act that seems to be killing lots of smaller UK communities/games?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
concerndc1tizen 2y ago
What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing. What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much? What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
- lapcat 2y ago
  "Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht... Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.
  - PaulKeeble 2y ago
    They have been trying to get to IPO for a while. 2 years ago they deleted a huge swathe of accounts to cause those people to create new ones to boost their growth stats and frankly having been caught up in it that was the push I needed to get off Discord. It caused a huge discontentment at the time as it wasn't clear if it was a bug or intentional but Discord didn't fix it. They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.
- suddenlybananas 2y ago
  Not open source.
- pjc50 2y ago
  It's very, very badly performing. And yet every time I want to start it, it requires another 15 updates.
  - steezeburger 2y ago
    I agree about the updates, but I'm in a shit ton of servers and performance is fine for me. Can you talk to the issues you've had a bit?
aragilar 2y ago
It's unclear if voice/video are supported or not?
- bovermyer 2y ago
  Yeah, this is the part I care about. I'm not a big Discord user, but the one thing I do use it for is voice chat and game streaming with friends.
- entropicdrifter 2y ago
  Voice is kinda supported, in the sense that they implemented the feature years ago and then proceeded to decide to do a huge rewrite that they've also decided blocks any sort of improvement or iteration on their voice chat features. Last I checked we're like 3 years into said big rewrite with 0 improvements to voice chat.
landsman 2y ago
Importat is funding for these projects. Plenty of them start as open source with donations which can led to frustration and burnout of developers.
- freehorse 2y ago
  Or prosper fine and then end up being sold anyway to some crappy corp for a few million $$$ leaving users stranded there, we need better models for both ends of the risks.
Palmik 2y ago
Why don't you allow OAuth / social login via Google, GitHub and yes, even Discord? Seems like it would make adoption much easier.
- erlend_sh 2y ago
  We started a contribution towards that end: https://github.com/authifier/authifier/pull/63 https://github.com/authifier/authifier/pull/63
nottorp 2y ago
This is as centralized as Discord right? No running your own server, should you choose to.
- hoistbypetard 2y ago
  They publish instructions for self-hosting a server: https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Oh nice. It wasn't clear at all from the front page that there is a server available for self hosting.
snvzz 2y ago
I cannot find anything on the website about Revolt's end to end encryption story. This doesn't give me much confidence.
juped 2y ago
I like a good ejabberd fork! edit: oh, this isn't an ejabberd fork. Why didn't they just fork ejabberd like normal people? Seriously, _rust_?
seanvelasco 2y ago
i wish they picked a more unique name. to me, it just seems like they're a copycat by picking a name that's a synonym - or at least of the same nature - of the word "Discord" same with the streaming platforms Twitch and Kick looking at their UI, it's the exact same UI as Discord. no improvements while also inheriting the same flaws that make using Discord neurotic
- smusamashah 2y ago
  Revolut OTOH is a bank https://www.revolut.com/ https://www.revolut.com/
hampus 2y ago
Seeing as this is closely related to [1], which I also commented on, and in the hopes that someone finds this useful regarding Discord's ownership of your data (where your messages remain even if you delete your account): If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [2]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276504 [2]: https://discorch.org https://discorch.org
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
das_keyboard 2y ago
Looking at https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers it seems that all reasonably active servers are either turkish[0] or anime related. [0]: Turkey banned Discord in 2024: https://www.reuters.com/technology/turkey-blocks-instant-messaging-platform-discord-2024-10-09/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/turkey-blocks-instant-mes...
- josteink 2y ago
  So like Mastadon then. Every time I’ve looked into it, every server I’ve checked has been filled with furries and anime-avatars. I mean, I’m glad they’ve found a community where they feel at home, but it kinda makes it a hard pass for the rest of us ;)
  - grotorea 2y ago
    Well, I guess it's better than the reddit alternatives that are full of communities who got banned from reddit.
    - moltopoco 2y ago
      Out of curiosity, I've just looked at the front page of lemmy.org, and its community seems virtually indistinguishable from reddit.
      - grotorea 2y ago
        Eh, lemmy is a bit of an exception because it is a leftwing split from reddit and reddit has been on very left mood those last years. The most obvious one I was thinking of was Voat, which was shutdown a while ago.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    I'm on fosstodon.org. Never noticed anything like that, but I also can't say I spent much time checkout out the avatars.
  - 2y ago
cedws 2y ago
Is it built on Matrix? I used Riot (now Element) back in the day, but like others have said in this thread, without a network effect these things don't really take off. I haven't heard of anyone using Element for years now.
- throwaway9386 2y ago
  Not being built on Matrix is a plus, at this point, given the historically poor moderation of that platform.
- opan 2y ago
  I have over a dozen people I regularly talk to on Matrix, though I prefer to not use browser/electron apps, so I only use Element on my phone (separate codebase from other Element), and Nheko on my PC. FluffyChat on Android also seems decent and recently added multi-account support.
Tepix 2y ago
Putting your data in a centralized instance may eventually just lead to enshittification and/or data loss. Why not use a federated group discussion such as Lemmy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)
LuciOfStars 2y ago
I would move to Revolt in a heartbeat, if it had a PluralKit equivalent. Currently the only thing keeping me trapped on Discord.
9283409232 2y ago
Discord alternatives have a hard time because of network effects. Does revolt has a bridge to Discord?
- culi 2y ago
  Both platforms have good bot APIs. Should be trivial to create a bridge through bots
openscript 2y ago
I've accidentally typed https://revolut.chat/ https://revolut.chat/ instead https://revolt.chat/ https://revolt.chat/. Apparently I wasn't the first one...
- JFingleton 2y ago
  Revolut (the banking service) and Revolt are both British I believe... Seeing as Revolut has been around for a number of years, as a British person I wouldn't have chosen a name so close to Revolut (for any product).
  - OccamsMirror 2y ago
    Revolt isn't some random made up word. It seems ridiculous to class this as an obvious name collision.
no_oneimportant 2y ago
hmmm
esafak 2y ago
It's been in development for five years. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?after=0.2.6 https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?after=0.2.6
- WhyNotHugo 2y ago
  Are they using exiting protocols and networks? Or is it entirely bespoke protocols?
  - remram 2y ago
    Looks like their own protocol: https://developers.revolt.chat/developers/events/protocol.html https://developers.revolt.chat/developers/events/protocol.ht...
- ryebrd 2y ago
  The last release was 3 weeks ago (https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/releases https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/releases), and it looks like they changed their tag formats to YYYYMMDD-X. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?before=0.2.6 https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?before=0.2.6
Bengalilol 2y ago
3'000+ lines of code <- this seems pretty low
moiz41510 2y ago
[dead]
jonathantf2 2y ago
Interestingly (and sadly) the largest deployment of this was probably on Andrew Tate's grift course website thing, see the dev's blog: https://insrt.uk/post/andrew-tate-stealing-software-revolt https://insrt.uk/post/andrew-tate-stealing-software-revolt
- jimmydoe 2y ago
  The largest Mastodon deployment is truth social. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-media-platform-found-using-mastodon-code/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-medi...
  - culi 2y ago
    It's not exactly an instance though. They just stole most of the Mastodon code. In theory it could be opened up so other instances could subscribe to the Truth Social feed but we don't really know how feasible that is and how much of the protocol/code was modified
adiadd 2y ago
It's tough to compete in a market like social networks, you need mass adoption for high value. Although this looks cool, I'm interested to see how it differs specifically to provide more value than Discord already does (ton of people, various servers, great integrations, etc.)
- NewJazz 2y ago
  Similarly I'd wonder how this compares to e.g. XMPP or matrix for messaging. Those are the big names in open source and have been for some time now.
- asddubs 2y ago
  I think it doesn't necessarily have to be dominant to be considered a success. It's good for people to have the option to choose a free alternative if they want to, where they can be in control of their own data rather than it being centralized and at the mercy of some company, much like with software forges. Of course mass adoption would be cool but I don't think it's necessary to justify these types of projects
nestoras_design 2y ago
Friendly UI. Looking good!
CivBase 2y ago
I use Discord for three things: text chat, voice chat, and screen sharing. Looks like screen sharing isn't supported yet, but it's on the roadmap at least[1]. [1] https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/6/views/4?pane=issue&itemId=57976152&issue=revoltchat%7Cbackend%7C313 https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/6/views/4?pane=i...
butz 2y ago
Why even build an app? This app should've been a website. Better pester browser developers to implement "Add to desktop" feature.
- ddejohn 2y ago
  Hard disagree. I'm sick and tired of web apps. Please give me more desktop applications not based on electron.
- extraduder_ire 2y ago
  There is a webapp version. It's the grey button just to the right of the download button. Looks like their main desktop client is the same as their webapp.
joshdavham 2y ago
Just a bit of critical feedback: the landing page isn’t responsive to a horizontally rotated iPad. Otherwise, awesome project!
stevetron 2y ago
Discord seems to be going the way of Skype: deprecating their support for Windows 7, in favor of a newer OS offering from Microsoft which harvests data in the background under the feeble guise of telemetry. Granted there is telelmetry in Windows 7, but you can disable it in Windows 7 and not worry obout it being over-ridden the next day, or even the same day, with some forced update.
- doubled112 2y ago
  I'm not sure what to take from this. Are you worried there is some sort of anti-Windows 7 conspiracy, where software vendors stop supporting a 15 year old years out of support OS so that an unrelated software vendor receives more data? Or is it simply more likely that nobody wants to test their software on a 15 year old OS? When XP came out that would have been Windows 95, and the same thing happened.
- squigz 2y ago
  Windows 7 is a 15 year old OS that's been out of support for 5 years. It is utterly ridiculous to paint Discord as unreasonable for not supporting it?
- Shared404 2y ago
  If you're worried about Windows 10's/11's telemetry, you should read Discord's TOS.
- fiverz 2y ago
  Discord still works fine on Windows 7. Is that about to change? I'm actually surprised that it still works since it's just a Chrome-app. The Guilded desktop client dropped support for Windows 7 like 2 years ago.
sitkack 2y ago
Every time I see one of these projects, I wince because 2/3 of the time the backend is in PHP (no offense). The backend is in a typesafe, memory safe language! https://github.com/revoltchat/backend https://github.com/revoltchat/backend
nop_slide 2y ago
I don't see anything about funding/pricing, how is this going to stick around for the long term?
didip 2y ago
I am surprised that it is written in Rust. Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower. Maybe it's needed for audio/video streaming? Is the API discord compatible? That's basically necessary for adoption.
- vivzkestrel 2y ago
  what do you think it should be written in? golang?
  - didip 2y ago
    Golang would have encouraged a lot more contributions, e.g. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost (I am not affiliated with them).
    - ZeWaka 2y ago
      I don't think that correlation of number of commits implies causation.
- airstrike 2y ago
  I would pick Rust for 9/10 of problems today.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower. If you're an app dev who's really and truly serious about lowering the barrier to self-hosted services, then you need to consider what the install and deployment step looks like. For languages like Rust that default to producing a single static binary, that's as easy as it gets. Likewise, you need to consider that users might want to self-host on a potato, which is where Rust's efficiency shines even for small services. These are both things that Mastodon got horribly wrong, for example, by choosing to use Ruby.
tonymet 2y ago
Discords performance is unmatched. I hope that’s one of their goals as well
Legion 2y ago
Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has been a net loss for the Internet.
- zamalek 2y ago
  Don't forget IRC. My previous employer [very reasonably] blocked Discord with their MITM. This meant that the numerous developer/package discords were inaccessible to me. Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).
- happyweasel 2y ago
  Absolutely. Information can no longer be retrieved via internet search. Discord and Slack are effectively silos.
  - dbg31415 2y ago
    A lot of sites now block non-Google search engines from accessing their data. Honestly, I find it easier to check a Discord server than to get useful results from DuckDuckGo these days. Google has done whatever it takes to incentivize people not to use competitors. It sucks.
  - nijave 2y ago
    Sure but you can search for communities then use the platform-native search. Not as convenient as a search engine natively supporting, though.
    - meta-meta 2y ago
      until the discord server goes down
      - nijave 2y ago
        If the thing goes down there's no guarantee any indexer/scraper is going to index/scrape it
elif 2y ago
There's a massive shady component of discord inherent to how access and security are at the whim of ar arbitrary discord mods. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control. The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge, But more sickeningly, recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0] There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy. [0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners? EDIT: moved this to a global comment as it was too tangential to where I originally replied
jonstaab 2y ago
I'm also building a FOSS Discord alternative, but this one's based on nostr: https://flotilla.social https://flotilla.social
- ravenbitcoin 2y ago
  Flotilla.social and Chachi.chat are both amazing, yet early, Nostr alternatives.
korse 2y ago
The problem with Discord is that it doesn't allow for servers in the same way a protocol like IRC does. Some commenters have alluded to this. From a quick glance, revolt.chat doesn't allow for server creation either. Am I mistaken or is this pretty much a joke (Discord replacement with the only real benefit being a 'trust us bro, we're European' sort of promise to not do bad things)?
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  What you classify as a problem is exactly why Discord was a smashing success.
  - korse 2y ago
    Financial success, undoubtedly. Successful at distancing users from the systems that underpin their interactions, certainly. As far as granting users more agency over their digital existence, it has been an abject failure, a state consistently exacerbated by the number of tech communities that could easily exist on IRC or a custom platform. It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
    - TulliusCicero 2y ago
      A success in terms of popularity, in terms of creating something that regular users enjoy and find value in using. > It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared. It's exactly this sort of sneering attitude that so often causes FOSS projects to fail to catch on in the mainstream. The framing isn't "people like this feature set", it's "people got conned". For a certain type of user, they must see others' preferences as beneath them, as lesser.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - korse 2y ago
        I'm not an elitist and I don't have problems with 'regular users'. What I do have a problem with is all the technical users who know better and turn everything over to Discord corp anyway. How many 'hacker spaces' do you know that use Discord as a primary communications channel? They could just as well run a primary communications channel on something sensible, durable and self-hosted that ties in to discord intake for newcomers. Come in to the discord, say hi, chat a bit and then graduate to where the real content is. Discord should have been a on-ramp for technical communities, not the foundation.
notepad0x90 2y ago
I think I'm using every chat platform that has wide adaption in tech circles. The one trend I'm seeing is that most of us just use the platform random communities insist on us using, we don't use them out of preference. And those communities choose the platforms because of the support they're getting from companies like discord and the amount of work needed to moderate and administer the community under the platform. My point being: community admins are the real consumers of these products, not normal users. If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. But if I have to run a community, I will chose whatever platform requires the least effort while integrating well into all my administrative and devops workflows. If I could speculate a bit, I think discord webhooks and bot api has helped it succeed a lot. But things can be improved upon. Making it dead-easy to integrate into github actions, alert/monitoring platforms,etc.. is a huge selling point. It should be easier to use a platform like this to send notifications than with email. And it should have at minimum one "bridge" type integration that is natively supported: for email! It's really mind-blowing to me with M365, how I have to switch between teams and outlook. How come they haven't figured out how to get and respond to emails from within teams? (the reverse is possible but doesn't work well).
- juliangmp 2y ago
  >If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them. Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users can't find their results in search engines.
  - notepad0x90 2y ago
    it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML. I prefer discord over LKML any day. But some people prefer them over anything else. That's kind of my point, I don't have the time or energy to complain about this, I just want to talk to the right people. No one asked my preference, so in practical terms, it doesn't even matter.
gibibit 2y ago
Doesn't anyone else miss the old days of forums like PHPBB and VBulletin for collaboration? They had everything I needed, and nothing I didn't. Easily searched by Google. Actual pagination instead of stupid endless scrolling. All the new forums are going to Discord (synchronous) or Discourse (asynchronous) which I find to be much less useful.
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  I do terribly. However you needed SysAdmin skills to administrate a *nix box. System skills to run the forum and webserver configuration. And money to pay for the webhost/vps/cloud minus any malicious actions such as DDoS or bandwidth stealing. All three are sparse now and not forgetting the laws of the country. UK has become a pain to host anything community oriented.
  - sneak 2y ago
    There is cheap managed hosting for forums. I use one such for my BBS.
    - rkuykendall-com 2y ago
      What do you use? I moved mine to Bluehost and it's been a very expensive nightmare. There is no mystery around the death of forums.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  I am thinking about that time and hosting a forum myself all the time. But there are a few issues connected with it: (1) If I hosted one, I could only do it invite only, because I don't want to be responsible or held responsible, if some shithead posts illegal stuff on it. (2) So it is back to friends only. But my friends do not show motivation or interest in being very active initially in such a media. I would have to artificially create topics and discussions around them and ask them to comment or so. It feels like it would require a lot of initial investment to get something that sustains itself by having active people and good info on it to be worth it for people to interact through it.
rmm 2y ago
Still waiting for a new web replacement for phpbb
Bluescreenbuddy 2y ago
Truly built with us in mind....Until they get so big someone with a fat check approaches them and then we just have another Discord.
LinNight 2y ago
[dead]
galaxyLogic 2y ago
Lots of comments on Discord here, but is anybody saying this new service "Revolt" is better than Discord?
carlgreene 2y ago
Can we stop building communities in non-indexable locations? The death of forums and hence “google-ability” for problems and solutions is so depressing. The UX is worse in every way
- MrLeap 2y ago
  I think this is largely a consequence of the escalating commoditization of human attention, political polarization, marketing yadda yadda. Communities disperse, and are drawn to solutions that make them a little trickier to bot into and be absorbed by the marketing apparatus. A little friction that makes it harder for sock puppets / gpt bots carpet bombing your communities wholesale is an ephemeral competitive advantage right now. Not a perfect defense, but what is anymore? Is it even possible to build an effective captcha now? Tell you what would really gum them up, make some communities require people buy a physical X$ RSA token. Sure you could make bots for that, but how long to automate the unboxing of those tokens? It could become an arms race where the packaging becomes the captcha. Some humans are going to always try to keep moving ahead of the noise wavefront. I'm rooting for them. Wanting all things to be index-able these days kind of feels like asking early 90's internet kids to be normal and go hang out at the mall.
- remram 2y ago
  Nowadays "indexable locations" mean "crawled by big tech to feed your likeness to their AI". It's hard to advocate for now.
  - klabb3 2y ago
    Bingo! I changed my mind about this after AI. (Specifically that they are allowed to train & commercialize any IP they want without license - I have nothing against AI itself)
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Negative. Communities need not be findable by bots on the public web, in fact many should not be. Nobody has a right to read, index, analyze, or resell my conversations with friends. Anyone who wants to has plenty of options for posting in public forums, and the movement away from that behavior indicates a growing awareness of its problems.
Apocryphon 2y ago
Nice and I'll try it out, but I can't help but to wonder what about all of the open-source Slack alternatives like Ferdi, Franz, Rambox, etc. Is it just because Slack is just no longer in vogue that there's a market for this?
shmerl 2y ago
Is it using Matrix? And if not, why the need for another protocol?
anonzzzies 2y ago
The nicest thing about Discord is that there are so many servers for every topic you can imagine; the rather sad thing is that when a server goes away, all that valuable content is gone. It should really stop companies from using it or make sure there is a bot offloading/indexing the content.
- mikrotikker 2y ago
  Forums are a lot better... but less engaging
Farbklex 2y ago
It looks like this is still a closed platform, isn't it? Is there a way to just browse the chat of a public server without signing up? I would like to have a more open, low friction, internet searchable alternative to Discord. Revolt doesn't take it far enough.
OrangeMusic 2y ago
So... it's not based on Matrix? So yet another non standard/non interoperable protocol? Why?!
- culi 2y ago
  If you wanted Matrix you would use Element or something. Discord has a totally different feature set than Matrix-based software
stiltzkin 2y ago
[dead]
Creator56 2y ago
[dead]

729 points by OuterVale 2y ago

mclanett 2y ago

I'm at a total loss why social chat boards want to have the most antisocial names.

culi 2y ago
Some would consider a commitment to overthrowing oppressive power structures extremely pro-social Would you call the French Revolution antisocial? Massive demonstrations? What about the Hong Kong uprising? It's all a matter of perspective. Those who live a stable life might see a threat to the system that grants them that stability as "anti-social" while those who do not benefit from the current system can see revolting as "pro-social"

unification_fan 2y ago

Pretty cool. I just wish it had its own identity and didn't look like Walmart Discord.

rokkamokka 2y ago
I'm all for good UI/UX spreading as much as possible for the benefit of users. That said, I've barely used discord and thus can't rightly say if it has good UI/UX.
- drpossum 2y ago
  Do you have other opinions about the UI/UX of apps you haven't used?
gingersnap 2y ago
Mom: "We have Discord at home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdUWZga7T7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdUWZga7T7Q

high_na_euv 2y ago

I hope the communities/servers arent self-hosted because that would be shot in the knee, cuz this is security issue TeamSpeak and Ventrilo were like that

Underphil 2y ago
Is it beyond to you seek out that information before commenting?
- high_na_euv 2y ago
  I didnt manage to find it on their page, so I guess it is centralized like dc
no_oneimportant 2y ago
how tf can something be a server if its not selfhosted
- high_na_euv 2y ago
  Discord servers arent self hosted
  - gibibit 2y ago
    Discord servers are not servers.
    - high_na_euv 2y ago
      But thats the common nomenclature among discord users

m00dy 2y ago

They will have a better stack than Discord once they migrate to Tauri.

moffkalast 2y ago
At first glance it's hard to even tell them apart, did they copy literally all of the CSS and layout?
pas 2y ago
It seems the progress for that stalled. (Last commit 5 months ago https://github.com/revoltchat/frontend/tree/main/packages/desktop https://github.com/revoltchat/frontend/tree/main/packages/de... )

mogoh 2y ago

So, how does it compares to matrix/element?

gunalx 2y ago
I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord. If i would want something opensource i would also want something decentralized.
- diggan 2y ago
  > I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord. Judging by the FAQ, they see Matrix as a protocol as "obtuse and unstable": > Does Revolt have federation? > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap. However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are: > Implement the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable) https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
  - freeamz 2y ago
    It is hard to get E2E (device 2 device) right. I get matrix is not perfect, but I have jet seen an open source alternative with both server/client implementation that get it right. One thing about matrix is that every device has a key in addition to the password, that key in in addition encrypted with another password, it makes it very difficult for average user, but then just use matrix in unencrypted mode to get the slack/discord effect.
    - ranger207 2y ago
      If Revolt is a Discord alternative, then they may have chosen not to implement E2E because their intended audience generally doesn't care for it and the UX is too confusing for a marginal perceived benefit

peterjaap 2y ago

So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with the unicorn-puking emoji-littered eye-scorching UX/UI garbage that Discord is? Interesting.

diggan 2y ago
I mean, if you are looking for a Discord alternative, isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? If you want something that is the opposite of what you describe, IRC still exists and works well, but not sure many end-users would call it an alternative to Discord.
- OptionX 2y ago
  That and I assume if its open-source you can make clients that look like whatever you'd want.
- spacechild1 2y ago
  > isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? I think this applies to the original target audience, namely gamers, but as a general purpose chat application, e.g. as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious. Of course, this begs the question why these projects adopted Discord in the first place. I guess the lack of a better alternative (that is not self-hosted)?
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    > as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious. Why is that?
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    They use it because Discord works well and simply, with a rich feature set, that's largely free. And yeah, there aren't FOSS alternatives that actually match up.
bilekas 2y ago

weberer 2y ago

>To ensure users stay safe on the platform, we explicitly disallow: >Misinformation & Conspiracy Theories >Spreading false or misleading information that can cause harm to individuals or society is prohibited. This includes conspiracy theories that have been debunked or lack credible evidence. Why? That sounds so dumb to waste resources policing it.

Mashimo 2y ago
They did not say they are policing it.
- Almondsetat 2y ago
  What is the point of disallowing without policing?
  - rizky05 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    Probably same as most other social platforms. Selective enforcement, virtue signaling, a tool to use when they get bad press for a server.
    - Almondsetat 2y ago
      I mean, bad press will chastise you even if you actually enforce stuff
jisnsm 2y ago
It’s really fucking boring how every platform that hosts speech tries to nudge you in their direction these days.
- bilekas 2y ago
  I don't know why everyone think's they have a right to say and behave however they want using someone else's services. If the platform or provider don't want to associate with you, that's their prerogative. The hubris to assume otherwise is ridiculous.

Mashimo 2y ago

The github https://github.com/revoltchat https://github.com/revoltchat

cies 2y ago
This is sorely lacking on the homepage! All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.
- internetter 2y ago
  > All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage. Says who? I don’t see that in the OSI definition
  - cies 2y ago
    Go to ten FLOSS project and check. Some want to be able to quickly assess some tings (is this JS/PHP/Python, or is this Rust/Go -- my interest). Someone posted the github link here on HN: why would that be?
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Nobody but I don't believe any company saying their product is open source if they aren't willing to point me to where to find the code right away.
- Mashimo 2y ago
  Yeah, I had to click around a bit to find the link. Oddly it was only on the discover page for servers I found it. Bottom left corner https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers But now I also know where to go if I'm in need of a femboy community.
  - MK2k 2y ago
    front page, scroll down, there's Developers - Source Code
- 2y ago

croisillon 2y ago

haha i had to laugh at the language selectors: {flag:uk} English (traditional) {flag:us} English (simplified)

Y_Y 2y ago
An old joke, but a good one. Shoutouts to Noah Webster for "opinionatedly curating" British English from an inconsistent crufty unspellable mess to a randomly tweaked version of the same thing.
jeffhuys 2y ago
How to quickly lose a few potential users.
- roblabla 2y ago
  Other people might say it's a great way to self-moderate its network.
- gooseus 2y ago
  lol, or how to easily filter out a few users who can't take a joke.
- diggan 2y ago
  With emphasis on few. I'd wager less than 0.01% of potential users would be butthurt enough by that joke to avoid the platform as a whole. And the ones who got butthurt, probably better off not having them on the platform in the first place.
- another-dave 2y ago
  It seems strange that someone would be offended by the US variant being called "simplified" spelling — wasn't that the whole point?
  - freeopinion 2y ago
    Maybe they meant people who don't want to be considered traditional...

voidUpdate 2y ago

> Revolt is the chat app that’s truly built with you in mind. Is this meant to be a unique selling point? All of the features also exist in discord. Also, "Bots some for extra spice". Might need a text review

benrutter 2y ago
I think the implication is that discord is designed for profit, not you.

colesantiago 2y ago

Donation page to Revolt before Discord succumbs to platform decay or (enshittification) after being owned by Wall Street soon. https://wiki.revolt.chat/notes/project/financial-support/ https://wiki.revolt.chat/notes/project/financial-support/ https://ko-fi.com/insertish https://ko-fi.com/insertish

CleanCoder 2y ago

The offering in its current form (https://i.imgur.com/zcmEOhr.png https://i.imgur.com/zcmEOhr.png) does not feel truly communal.

internetter 2y ago
Discord scale “communities” have tens-or even hundreds of thousands of members
concerndc1tizen 2y ago
What's not communal about it? Should they allow anyone to participate without limits?
Mashimo 2y ago
Can you elaborate?

GAPAT 2y ago

[dead]

jaggs 2y ago

Really nice. Perfectly timed for enshitification, and love that it's open source. Now just need some sort of federation and it's good to go. And choosing to go with an established UI will make adoption that much easier when TSHTF. [just had a longer look around. Is this a Russian project?]

_mitterpach 2y ago

Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public, I reckon this might be made in preparation for it. I think it is a wise move to offer an alternative. The design is very similar to Discord, could this possibly even go to a copyright breach or is the bar for that set too high?

wooger 2y ago
Lol, the design of discord is identical to about 9000 chat apps no?
- bryanhogan 2y ago
  There really is no other app in this space on the same quality as Discord. Discord was born out of Skype, Teamspeak and similar being so awful to use. Discord took the complaints from these and made a product which was the best version of them all.
  - grumple 2y ago
    Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better voice chat to me.
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      With an emphasis on the gaming space and open communities, whereas Slack focused on corporate and closed communities. I've been in the Go community for a while and they had to write a bot to get access to it (as Slack works invite only) and iirc had to work with Slack engineers to work with the scale they had. Meanwhile Discord's success is down to it being open, anyone can create a new channel and get instant access to things like voice chat. Of course, this has its downside, and I'm sure Slack deals with a lot of abuse, ranging from porn to doxxing to it being used as a C&C server.
      - grumple 2y ago
        I think it’s a good product. The problem with all these chat apps (as companies to invest in) is there’s no moat; as soon as a more convenient or better option comes along, people will switch. There’s not a big integrated community or advantage to sticking to one app. Which doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t make plenty of money, just that I don’t buy into any hype around them.

vr46 2y ago

How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? If you are constantly forced to override the warnings about unsigned software, assuming your system even allows you in the first place, how much friction before less technical users give up? Code signing is good, I like it, I approve, but it is a big obstacle for me personally and others who cannot afford Apple Developer Credentials.

diggan 2y ago
> How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? Does the license of your application somehow prevent you from following whatever Apple wants to do regarding signing? I think there are plenty of apps/games out there built on FOSS technology yet they're still signed and run like anything else signed on macOS, but maybe I remember incorrectly?
- devsda 2y ago
  It might be nothing technical. Some developers avoid paying for the Apple dev program on principle. Joining it could be seen as supporting Apple's attempt at building walled gardens. There's also the operational challenges for open source like who will sign-up and how to secure or maintain the signing keys etc. It brings in lot of friction.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  It’s the 99 bucks argument every time…
  - Karliss 2y ago
    The problem is that with exception of single person projects it's not as simple as paying 99$. Using individual developer account means exposing private information of one of the developers (which not everyone wants) and is a major buss factor. Doing it properly with organization account means nontrivial amount of paper work to establish either a commercial company or an officially registered non profit. There are very few open source projects big enough for this.

RobotToaster 2y ago

The self hosting instructions aren't that friendly imo.

p2detar 2y ago
I couldn't even find them. Do you have a link?
- OuterVale 2y ago
  https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
diggan 2y ago
The backend seems to be a fairly standard Rust project, you basically run `cargo build --release` and then deploy the binary. For the frontend, it seems like a pretty standard frontend project, you install dependencies, then run build command and you have a bunch of website assets you deploy to your server. Overall, seems pretty standard and easy to deploy. Most complicated would be to also run the various services that are supporting the backend, but again, not overly complicated. Is there something specific that is missing to be able to self-host this?
- moiz41510 2y ago
  I think it's pointless to selfhost if you have to recompile an app in order to connect to your server. The team should have a field box to add a server URL.
  - remram 2y ago
    It doesn't look like this is the case? I'm looking at https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted/blob/master/README.md#custom-domain https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted/blob/master/README... where you are told to update 2 config files.
IceDane 2y ago

dabeeeenster 2y ago

The homepage has no explanation of where the server is in all this? Github page doesnt help either?! Where is my data stored?

OuterVale 2y ago
https://revolt.chat/legal/community-guidelines#jurisdiction https://revolt.chat/legal/community-guidelines#jurisdiction
guy234 2y ago
According to another comment itt it is federated.
- Aachen 2y ago
  I didn't see federation mentioned anywhere, just self hosting. The difference: - Self hosted means everyone has their own server, people need to register for the server they're interested in using. Websites are an example of this: you host your own system independently of anything else going on (though there are hyperlinks to cross-link content, which aren't necessarily present in other self-hosted software). Git servers are another example, like Gitea or Forgejo or Gitlab or gitweb - Federated usually lets you connect servers, so that if I'm on HN and want to post a comment on a Reddit thread, if they were federating, I could just do that without logging into reddit specifically (let alone registering a completely separate account for the other server). The best example may be email, where I don't need to register with Google (yet) to send a Google user an email but I specify @gmail.com after the user's name. A more recent popular example is Mastodon Each has upsides and downsides, like having to moderate content from other servers and having a much more complex protocol (federated) versus being independent and simple but also being another walled garden (self hosted) Edit: confirmed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278375 > > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap

lordofgibbons 2y ago

The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers. I'm really hoping for an alternative. I'm always weary of en-shitification whenever a single platform wins all the users.. like what has happened to Reddit.

yownie 2y ago
I couldn't agree more
INTPenis 2y ago
I think the biggest selling point is clearly the community. Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix. Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook. I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.
- internetter 2y ago
  > they took They are more than likely still taking, based on the 17% layoff a few months ago As is Snapchat, miraculously (Snapchat is the most wildly mismanaged social media company from a fiscal perspective it’s wild)
- Dracophoenix 2y ago
  > The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook. In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.

mid-kid 2y ago

Is this still centralized? Or can you self-host without needing a separate client instance for each host?

TZubiri 2y ago
[flagged]
magicalhippo 2y ago
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted As for clients I don't know.
- cdaringe 2y ago
  The compose file specified a service for the web app
- Aachen 2y ago
  8 GB RAM minimum for a non-graphical server software?! This thing must have more components and services than my desktop OS while having a few website open in Firefox and Chromium each
  - verdverm 2y ago
    9 services, 5 theirs, 4 other OSS
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Synapse, after a reboot and the cache is cold, uses less than that. I don't think our synapse server even has 8GB allocated to it. But that's for private chat, we can't join large rooms because I deployed our server as a test, alongside Mattermost and rocket.chat. I haven't felt compelled to switch to dendrite or whatever, nor split the synapse microservices out, nor install postgres on a dedicated VM, and so on. All of which would make someone else's matrix experience better but my life ^ that much worse.
- tomefuwu 2y ago

fareesh 2y ago

[edit] seems like it's federated

hoistbypetard 2y ago
Their FAQ makes it seem like it's not: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html

TZubiri 2y ago

Reminder that discord is an app for kids. Is your open source code and volunteer run project going to keep kids safe? Is it an advantage that the comms protocols are open and everyone can build bots? Or a disadvantage for this usecase? Also, how is it an alternative for Discord if it's in a whole different jurisdiction?

Mashimo 2y ago
> Reminder that discord is an app for kids. Why is that?
- esafak 2y ago
  Have you seen the UI? Nothing fit for adults, who value their attention and time.
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    Sorry, I don't see it. I can quickly jump around channels and server with shortcuts, the UI looks similar to other chat apps. Auto-Embed can be disabled, if that steals your attention. Or what do you mean?
    - TulliusCicero 2y ago
      They just don't like the design and are choosing a condescending way of framing it.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Because it's a video game accesory. They market to kids, and have kid safety features.
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    I don't use discord in combination with games at all. But you can use it that way. That does not mean it's only for kids.

bryanhogan 2y ago

Love to see this! Worried about Discord's future, with its monopole position greater enshittification is definitely a real risk. Would also love to see some solution to Discord's problem of being an information black hole here as well.

dmos62 2y ago

I've recently heard it said that there's a better alternative to Discord called Gilded, but no reasons were provided. Anyone has insights?

maelito 2y ago

How does it compare to Element ?

createvideoai 2y ago

[dead]

drpossum 2y ago

[flagged]

hypercube33 2y ago
At first I thought you were being brutal but...a GitHub page with a screenshot would be better. The aesthetic of the website is...unique

threesevenths 2y ago

A British company making a chat app. What’s the privacy policy? 5 eyes first then you?

prmoustache 2y ago
You know it includes a backdoor for the government.
- culi 2y ago
  it's open sourced and self-hostable
crtasm 2y ago
It's open source and you can self host it.
palata 2y ago
Slack belongs to Salesforce (US), Discord is based in the US, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple... Not saying this is better, but is definitely not worse. At least in Europe there is the GDPR, whereas in the US there is a president officially supporting corruption [1]. If you care about privacy, you have to go for open source end-to-end encryption. Probably Signal. At least this you can self-host. [1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-executive-order/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-exe...
harry_ord 2y ago
The bigger question mark for me is. Is this still at risk from the online safety act that seems to be killing lots of smaller UK communities/games?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

concerndc1tizen 2y ago

What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing. What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much? What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?

lapcat 2y ago
"Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht... Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.
- PaulKeeble 2y ago
  They have been trying to get to IPO for a while. 2 years ago they deleted a huge swathe of accounts to cause those people to create new ones to boost their growth stats and frankly having been caught up in it that was the push I needed to get off Discord. It caused a huge discontentment at the time as it wasn't clear if it was a bug or intentional but Discord didn't fix it. They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.
suddenlybananas 2y ago
Not open source.
pjc50 2y ago
It's very, very badly performing. And yet every time I want to start it, it requires another 15 updates.
- steezeburger 2y ago
  I agree about the updates, but I'm in a shit ton of servers and performance is fine for me. Can you talk to the issues you've had a bit?

aragilar 2y ago

It's unclear if voice/video are supported or not?

bovermyer 2y ago
Yeah, this is the part I care about. I'm not a big Discord user, but the one thing I do use it for is voice chat and game streaming with friends.
entropicdrifter 2y ago
Voice is kinda supported, in the sense that they implemented the feature years ago and then proceeded to decide to do a huge rewrite that they've also decided blocks any sort of improvement or iteration on their voice chat features. Last I checked we're like 3 years into said big rewrite with 0 improvements to voice chat.

landsman 2y ago

Importat is funding for these projects. Plenty of them start as open source with donations which can led to frustration and burnout of developers.

freehorse 2y ago
Or prosper fine and then end up being sold anyway to some crappy corp for a few million $$$ leaving users stranded there, we need better models for both ends of the risks.

Palmik 2y ago

Why don't you allow OAuth / social login via Google, GitHub and yes, even Discord? Seems like it would make adoption much easier.

erlend_sh 2y ago
We started a contribution towards that end: https://github.com/authifier/authifier/pull/63 https://github.com/authifier/authifier/pull/63

nottorp 2y ago

This is as centralized as Discord right? No running your own server, should you choose to.

hoistbypetard 2y ago
They publish instructions for self-hosting a server: https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
- nottorp 2y ago
  Oh nice. It wasn't clear at all from the front page that there is a server available for self hosting.

snvzz 2y ago

I cannot find anything on the website about Revolt's end to end encryption story. This doesn't give me much confidence.

juped 2y ago

I like a good ejabberd fork! edit: oh, this isn't an ejabberd fork. Why didn't they just fork ejabberd like normal people? Seriously, _rust_?

seanvelasco 2y ago

i wish they picked a more unique name. to me, it just seems like they're a copycat by picking a name that's a synonym - or at least of the same nature - of the word "Discord" same with the streaming platforms Twitch and Kick looking at their UI, it's the exact same UI as Discord. no improvements while also inheriting the same flaws that make using Discord neurotic

smusamashah 2y ago
Revolut OTOH is a bank https://www.revolut.com/ https://www.revolut.com/

hampus 2y ago

Seeing as this is closely related to [1], which I also commented on, and in the hopes that someone finds this useful regarding Discord's ownership of your data (where your messages remain even if you delete your account): If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [2]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276504 [2]: https://discorch.org https://discorch.org

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

das_keyboard 2y ago

Looking at https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers it seems that all reasonably active servers are either turkish[0] or anime related. [0]: Turkey banned Discord in 2024: https://www.reuters.com/technology/turkey-blocks-instant-messaging-platform-discord-2024-10-09/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/turkey-blocks-instant-mes...

josteink 2y ago
So like Mastadon then. Every time I’ve looked into it, every server I’ve checked has been filled with furries and anime-avatars. I mean, I’m glad they’ve found a community where they feel at home, but it kinda makes it a hard pass for the rest of us ;)
- grotorea 2y ago
  Well, I guess it's better than the reddit alternatives that are full of communities who got banned from reddit.
  - moltopoco 2y ago
    Out of curiosity, I've just looked at the front page of lemmy.org, and its community seems virtually indistinguishable from reddit.
    - grotorea 2y ago
      Eh, lemmy is a bit of an exception because it is a leftwing split from reddit and reddit has been on very left mood those last years. The most obvious one I was thinking of was Voat, which was shutdown a while ago.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  I'm on fosstodon.org. Never noticed anything like that, but I also can't say I spent much time checkout out the avatars.
- 2y ago

cedws 2y ago

Is it built on Matrix? I used Riot (now Element) back in the day, but like others have said in this thread, without a network effect these things don't really take off. I haven't heard of anyone using Element for years now.

throwaway9386 2y ago
Not being built on Matrix is a plus, at this point, given the historically poor moderation of that platform.
opan 2y ago
I have over a dozen people I regularly talk to on Matrix, though I prefer to not use browser/electron apps, so I only use Element on my phone (separate codebase from other Element), and Nheko on my PC. FluffyChat on Android also seems decent and recently added multi-account support.

Tepix 2y ago

Putting your data in a centralized instance may eventually just lead to enshittification and/or data loss. Why not use a federated group discussion such as Lemmy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)

LuciOfStars 2y ago

I would move to Revolt in a heartbeat, if it had a PluralKit equivalent. Currently the only thing keeping me trapped on Discord.

9283409232 2y ago

Discord alternatives have a hard time because of network effects. Does revolt has a bridge to Discord?

culi 2y ago
Both platforms have good bot APIs. Should be trivial to create a bridge through bots

openscript 2y ago

I've accidentally typed https://revolut.chat/ https://revolut.chat/ instead https://revolt.chat/ https://revolt.chat/. Apparently I wasn't the first one...

JFingleton 2y ago
Revolut (the banking service) and Revolt are both British I believe... Seeing as Revolut has been around for a number of years, as a British person I wouldn't have chosen a name so close to Revolut (for any product).
- OccamsMirror 2y ago
  Revolt isn't some random made up word. It seems ridiculous to class this as an obvious name collision.

no_oneimportant 2y ago

hmmm

esafak 2y ago

It's been in development for five years. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?after=0.2.6 https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?after=0.2.6

WhyNotHugo 2y ago
Are they using exiting protocols and networks? Or is it entirely bespoke protocols?
- remram 2y ago
  Looks like their own protocol: https://developers.revolt.chat/developers/events/protocol.html https://developers.revolt.chat/developers/events/protocol.ht...
ryebrd 2y ago
The last release was 3 weeks ago (https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/releases https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/releases), and it looks like they changed their tag formats to YYYYMMDD-X. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?before=0.2.6 https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?before=0.2.6

Bengalilol 2y ago

3'000+ lines of code <- this seems pretty low

moiz41510 2y ago

[dead]

jonathantf2 2y ago

Interestingly (and sadly) the largest deployment of this was probably on Andrew Tate's grift course website thing, see the dev's blog: https://insrt.uk/post/andrew-tate-stealing-software-revolt https://insrt.uk/post/andrew-tate-stealing-software-revolt

jimmydoe 2y ago
The largest Mastodon deployment is truth social. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-media-platform-found-using-mastodon-code/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-medi...
- culi 2y ago
  It's not exactly an instance though. They just stole most of the Mastodon code. In theory it could be opened up so other instances could subscribe to the Truth Social feed but we don't really know how feasible that is and how much of the protocol/code was modified

adiadd 2y ago

It's tough to compete in a market like social networks, you need mass adoption for high value. Although this looks cool, I'm interested to see how it differs specifically to provide more value than Discord already does (ton of people, various servers, great integrations, etc.)

NewJazz 2y ago
Similarly I'd wonder how this compares to e.g. XMPP or matrix for messaging. Those are the big names in open source and have been for some time now.
asddubs 2y ago
I think it doesn't necessarily have to be dominant to be considered a success. It's good for people to have the option to choose a free alternative if they want to, where they can be in control of their own data rather than it being centralized and at the mercy of some company, much like with software forges. Of course mass adoption would be cool but I don't think it's necessary to justify these types of projects

nestoras_design 2y ago

Friendly UI. Looking good!

CivBase 2y ago

I use Discord for three things: text chat, voice chat, and screen sharing. Looks like screen sharing isn't supported yet, but it's on the roadmap at least[1]. [1] https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/6/views/4?pane=issue&itemId=57976152&issue=revoltchat%7Cbackend%7C313 https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/6/views/4?pane=i...

butz 2y ago

Why even build an app? This app should've been a website. Better pester browser developers to implement "Add to desktop" feature.

ddejohn 2y ago
Hard disagree. I'm sick and tired of web apps. Please give me more desktop applications not based on electron.
extraduder_ire 2y ago
There is a webapp version. It's the grey button just to the right of the download button. Looks like their main desktop client is the same as their webapp.

joshdavham 2y ago

Just a bit of critical feedback: the landing page isn’t responsive to a horizontally rotated iPad. Otherwise, awesome project!

stevetron 2y ago

Discord seems to be going the way of Skype: deprecating their support for Windows 7, in favor of a newer OS offering from Microsoft which harvests data in the background under the feeble guise of telemetry. Granted there is telelmetry in Windows 7, but you can disable it in Windows 7 and not worry obout it being over-ridden the next day, or even the same day, with some forced update.

doubled112 2y ago
I'm not sure what to take from this. Are you worried there is some sort of anti-Windows 7 conspiracy, where software vendors stop supporting a 15 year old years out of support OS so that an unrelated software vendor receives more data? Or is it simply more likely that nobody wants to test their software on a 15 year old OS? When XP came out that would have been Windows 95, and the same thing happened.
squigz 2y ago
Windows 7 is a 15 year old OS that's been out of support for 5 years. It is utterly ridiculous to paint Discord as unreasonable for not supporting it?
Shared404 2y ago
If you're worried about Windows 10's/11's telemetry, you should read Discord's TOS.
fiverz 2y ago
Discord still works fine on Windows 7. Is that about to change? I'm actually surprised that it still works since it's just a Chrome-app. The Guilded desktop client dropped support for Windows 7 like 2 years ago.

sitkack 2y ago

Every time I see one of these projects, I wince because 2/3 of the time the backend is in PHP (no offense). The backend is in a typesafe, memory safe language! https://github.com/revoltchat/backend https://github.com/revoltchat/backend

nop_slide 2y ago

I don't see anything about funding/pricing, how is this going to stick around for the long term?

didip 2y ago

I am surprised that it is written in Rust. Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower. Maybe it's needed for audio/video streaming? Is the API discord compatible? That's basically necessary for adoption.

vivzkestrel 2y ago
what do you think it should be written in? golang?
- didip 2y ago
  Golang would have encouraged a lot more contributions, e.g. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost (I am not affiliated with them).
  - ZeWaka 2y ago
    I don't think that correlation of number of commits implies causation.
airstrike 2y ago
I would pick Rust for 9/10 of problems today.
kibwen 2y ago
> Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower. If you're an app dev who's really and truly serious about lowering the barrier to self-hosted services, then you need to consider what the install and deployment step looks like. For languages like Rust that default to producing a single static binary, that's as easy as it gets. Likewise, you need to consider that users might want to self-host on a potato, which is where Rust's efficiency shines even for small services. These are both things that Mastodon got horribly wrong, for example, by choosing to use Ruby.

tonymet 2y ago

Discords performance is unmatched. I hope that’s one of their goals as well

Legion 2y ago

Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has been a net loss for the Internet.

zamalek 2y ago
Don't forget IRC. My previous employer [very reasonably] blocked Discord with their MITM. This meant that the numerous developer/package discords were inaccessible to me. Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).
happyweasel 2y ago
Absolutely. Information can no longer be retrieved via internet search. Discord and Slack are effectively silos.
- dbg31415 2y ago
  A lot of sites now block non-Google search engines from accessing their data. Honestly, I find it easier to check a Discord server than to get useful results from DuckDuckGo these days. Google has done whatever it takes to incentivize people not to use competitors. It sucks.
- nijave 2y ago
  Sure but you can search for communities then use the platform-native search. Not as convenient as a search engine natively supporting, though.
  - meta-meta 2y ago
    until the discord server goes down
    - nijave 2y ago
      If the thing goes down there's no guarantee any indexer/scraper is going to index/scrape it

elif 2y ago

There's a massive shady component of discord inherent to how access and security are at the whim of ar arbitrary discord mods. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control. The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge, But more sickeningly, recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0] There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy. [0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners? EDIT: moved this to a global comment as it was too tangential to where I originally replied

jonstaab 2y ago

I'm also building a FOSS Discord alternative, but this one's based on nostr: https://flotilla.social https://flotilla.social

ravenbitcoin 2y ago
Flotilla.social and Chachi.chat are both amazing, yet early, Nostr alternatives.

korse 2y ago

The problem with Discord is that it doesn't allow for servers in the same way a protocol like IRC does. Some commenters have alluded to this. From a quick glance, revolt.chat doesn't allow for server creation either. Am I mistaken or is this pretty much a joke (Discord replacement with the only real benefit being a 'trust us bro, we're European' sort of promise to not do bad things)?

TulliusCicero 2y ago
What you classify as a problem is exactly why Discord was a smashing success.
- korse 2y ago
  Financial success, undoubtedly. Successful at distancing users from the systems that underpin their interactions, certainly. As far as granting users more agency over their digital existence, it has been an abject failure, a state consistently exacerbated by the number of tech communities that could easily exist on IRC or a custom platform. It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    A success in terms of popularity, in terms of creating something that regular users enjoy and find value in using. > It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared. It's exactly this sort of sneering attitude that so often causes FOSS projects to fail to catch on in the mainstream. The framing isn't "people like this feature set", it's "people got conned". For a certain type of user, they must see others' preferences as beneath them, as lesser.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - korse 2y ago
      I'm not an elitist and I don't have problems with 'regular users'. What I do have a problem with is all the technical users who know better and turn everything over to Discord corp anyway. How many 'hacker spaces' do you know that use Discord as a primary communications channel? They could just as well run a primary communications channel on something sensible, durable and self-hosted that ties in to discord intake for newcomers. Come in to the discord, say hi, chat a bit and then graduate to where the real content is. Discord should have been a on-ramp for technical communities, not the foundation.

notepad0x90 2y ago

I think I'm using every chat platform that has wide adaption in tech circles. The one trend I'm seeing is that most of us just use the platform random communities insist on us using, we don't use them out of preference. And those communities choose the platforms because of the support they're getting from companies like discord and the amount of work needed to moderate and administer the community under the platform. My point being: community admins are the real consumers of these products, not normal users. If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. But if I have to run a community, I will chose whatever platform requires the least effort while integrating well into all my administrative and devops workflows. If I could speculate a bit, I think discord webhooks and bot api has helped it succeed a lot. But things can be improved upon. Making it dead-easy to integrate into github actions, alert/monitoring platforms,etc.. is a huge selling point. It should be easier to use a platform like this to send notifications than with email. And it should have at minimum one "bridge" type integration that is natively supported: for email! It's really mind-blowing to me with M365, how I have to switch between teams and outlook. How come they haven't figured out how to get and respond to emails from within teams? (the reverse is possible but doesn't work well).

juliangmp 2y ago
>If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them. Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users can't find their results in search engines.
- notepad0x90 2y ago
  it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML. I prefer discord over LKML any day. But some people prefer them over anything else. That's kind of my point, I don't have the time or energy to complain about this, I just want to talk to the right people. No one asked my preference, so in practical terms, it doesn't even matter.

gibibit 2y ago

Doesn't anyone else miss the old days of forums like PHPBB and VBulletin for collaboration? They had everything I needed, and nothing I didn't. Easily searched by Google. Actual pagination instead of stupid endless scrolling. All the new forums are going to Discord (synchronous) or Discourse (asynchronous) which I find to be much less useful.

doublerabbit 2y ago
I do terribly. However you needed SysAdmin skills to administrate a *nix box. System skills to run the forum and webserver configuration. And money to pay for the webhost/vps/cloud minus any malicious actions such as DDoS or bandwidth stealing. All three are sparse now and not forgetting the laws of the country. UK has become a pain to host anything community oriented.
- sneak 2y ago
  There is cheap managed hosting for forums. I use one such for my BBS.
  - rkuykendall-com 2y ago
    What do you use? I moved mine to Bluehost and it's been a very expensive nightmare. There is no mystery around the death of forums.
zelphirkalt 2y ago
I am thinking about that time and hosting a forum myself all the time. But there are a few issues connected with it: (1) If I hosted one, I could only do it invite only, because I don't want to be responsible or held responsible, if some shithead posts illegal stuff on it. (2) So it is back to friends only. But my friends do not show motivation or interest in being very active initially in such a media. I would have to artificially create topics and discussions around them and ask them to comment or so. It feels like it would require a lot of initial investment to get something that sustains itself by having active people and good info on it to be worth it for people to interact through it.

rmm 2y ago

Still waiting for a new web replacement for phpbb

Bluescreenbuddy 2y ago

Truly built with us in mind....Until they get so big someone with a fat check approaches them and then we just have another Discord.

LinNight 2y ago

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galaxyLogic 2y ago

Lots of comments on Discord here, but is anybody saying this new service "Revolt" is better than Discord?

carlgreene 2y ago

Can we stop building communities in non-indexable locations? The death of forums and hence “google-ability” for problems and solutions is so depressing. The UX is worse in every way

MrLeap 2y ago
I think this is largely a consequence of the escalating commoditization of human attention, political polarization, marketing yadda yadda. Communities disperse, and are drawn to solutions that make them a little trickier to bot into and be absorbed by the marketing apparatus. A little friction that makes it harder for sock puppets / gpt bots carpet bombing your communities wholesale is an ephemeral competitive advantage right now. Not a perfect defense, but what is anymore? Is it even possible to build an effective captcha now? Tell you what would really gum them up, make some communities require people buy a physical X$ RSA token. Sure you could make bots for that, but how long to automate the unboxing of those tokens? It could become an arms race where the packaging becomes the captcha. Some humans are going to always try to keep moving ahead of the noise wavefront. I'm rooting for them. Wanting all things to be index-able these days kind of feels like asking early 90's internet kids to be normal and go hang out at the mall.
remram 2y ago
Nowadays "indexable locations" mean "crawled by big tech to feed your likeness to their AI". It's hard to advocate for now.
- klabb3 2y ago
  Bingo! I changed my mind about this after AI. (Specifically that they are allowed to train & commercialize any IP they want without license - I have nothing against AI itself)
karaterobot 2y ago
Negative. Communities need not be findable by bots on the public web, in fact many should not be. Nobody has a right to read, index, analyze, or resell my conversations with friends. Anyone who wants to has plenty of options for posting in public forums, and the movement away from that behavior indicates a growing awareness of its problems.

Apocryphon 2y ago

Nice and I'll try it out, but I can't help but to wonder what about all of the open-source Slack alternatives like Ferdi, Franz, Rambox, etc. Is it just because Slack is just no longer in vogue that there's a market for this?

shmerl 2y ago

Is it using Matrix? And if not, why the need for another protocol?

anonzzzies 2y ago

The nicest thing about Discord is that there are so many servers for every topic you can imagine; the rather sad thing is that when a server goes away, all that valuable content is gone. It should really stop companies from using it or make sure there is a bot offloading/indexing the content.

mikrotikker 2y ago
Forums are a lot better... but less engaging

Farbklex 2y ago

It looks like this is still a closed platform, isn't it? Is there a way to just browse the chat of a public server without signing up? I would like to have a more open, low friction, internet searchable alternative to Discord. Revolt doesn't take it far enough.

OrangeMusic 2y ago

So... it's not based on Matrix? So yet another non standard/non interoperable protocol? Why?!

culi 2y ago
If you wanted Matrix you would use Element or something. Discord has a totally different feature set than Matrix-based software

stiltzkin 2y ago

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Creator56 2y ago

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