Revolt: FOSS Discord Alternative

I don&#x27;t know why a significant amount of the comments are so critical of what seems like a pretty incredible project (and based on contributor statistics, primarily built by _a single person_), but I really like it and prefer the overall UX to Element so far (even though it&#x27;s basically copied Discord entirely).<p>Also, the backend is written in _Rust_, I thought you guys LIKED THIS KIND OF THING!

This is really nice. Just needs one click joining for voice channels. This is an under-appreciated killer feature of discord that slack missed when implementing huddles. The ability to instantly hop in and out of voice channels is what keeps discord from feeling like any other teleconferencing app. Any friction to this makes it so I am less likely to just casually jump into a call.

It took slightly longer than expected for me to track down an explanation of their business model. I think it boils down to &quot;run cheap until we have one&quot;. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.revolt.chat&#x2F;faq&#x2F;monetisation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.revolt.chat&#x2F;faq&#x2F;monetisation</a>

How&#x27;s this better than Matrix?<p>(Not a leading question. I haven&#x27;t used Discord&#x2F;Matrix&#x2F;etc. more than a handful of times and don&#x27;t know what I don&#x27;t know.)

The next big worry is Github. Moving major open source projects off Github is going to be difficult. But we probably will have to go to architectures where there are multiple synchronized repositories some time in the next few years.

This is cool, but why another chat silo? We have Mattermost, Zulip and most prominently Matrix, which all come with their own big ecosystems already. Why duplicate the work?<p>Also: How do voice channels work in this thing? I&#x27;ve been thinking for approximately forever about making Jitsi meet more flexible to support channels, but never got around to it (I&#x27;ve done some basic ground work on it, in case anyone wants to pick it up).

Since Discord is getting worse and recently added another dark pattern (&quot;Discord Birthday&quot; crap, that always shows a red &quot;1&quot; just to annoy my OCDs) and did not have a good data protection policy anyway, I might take a look at this one. Hoping it will be a good replacement. But then I will have to deal with even worse network effect than back then, when I switched from Skype to Discord.

I actually have my own instance of Revolt set up on my home server for myself and my group of friends to use, the big issue is the lack of good mobile apps. The PWA is janky and unreliable and can&#x27;t do notifications on iOS, and can&#x27;t upload images on Android, either.

Beware projects that demand you sign a CLA. Linux doesn&#x27;t do this because it&#x27;s GPL; projects that demand this are leaving the door open to license your work under non-free-software licenses.<p>I personally won&#x27;t donate free work to organizations that want the option of releasing nonfree software.

They need to make servers automatically publish onto the web. It’ll bridge that gap between Discord &amp; Reddit wherein discussions can be discoverable. Plus all of that can be indexed and crawled

It&#x27;s funny (or sad?) that many threads here are saying what Revolt should do just to be followed by why they shouldn&#x27;t, UX-wise. The days of your software being customizable for your own needs are truly gone. We&#x27;ve mostly been conditioned.

Yet another web page pretending to be an app, reimplementing IRC from scratch including the server. Just build on IRC already and add support for your new features to the open source native apps.

Discussion from 2 years ago when this was new:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28434012">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28434012</a>

Are custom client&#x27;s allowed? How can I be sure this won&#x27;t be sold out of nowhere?

I prefer the radio controlled micromachine game

Do they have a noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html portal?<p>Or a plain and simple C client?

I’m a big fan of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fluxsocial.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fluxsocial.io&#x2F;</a> as it’s fully distributed

Is there any peer to peer video streaming built into it yet? That&#x27;s one thing I&#x27;m really interested in.. even if you pony up for Discord Nitro, the video stream quality is pretty atrocious. I wish I could just fully saturate my home internet connection (or selfhost a private server on a beefy VPS for my friends and I). $20 a month&#x27;s worth of VPS could go a long way

Looks like it&#x27;s not end-to-end-encrypted.<p>Which should be default for anything that offers dms.<p>I wanted it for Discord so I created an E2EE client on top of it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.discryptor.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.discryptor.io</a>

Is it using Matrix?

is the audio mixing as good as Discord&#x27;s? IMO this is the killer feature, despite being subtle and something no one talks about. The audio mixing in Zoom and Meet is atrocious by comparison: the instant a second person starts talking the audio becomes garbled.

What’s with the terrible names? I’ll never use a communication product named “Discord”, and “Revolt” is even worse.

If this is decentralized&#x2F;federated than they should make a bigger deal of that on the page, and if it&#x27;s not, well, no thanks.

someone who knows what he&#x27;s doing did the optimizations, this thing is smoooth, kudos