This project has a lot of red flags for long-term sustainability. It needs to be forked and maintained by someone who cares about open-source and decentralization, not being a Discord competitor.
- The developers have no plans for financing the platform. In the FAQs, they claim that they managed to raise $2000 in donations, and that covers the costs for now, so they’ll think about financing “later”.
- For whatever reason, they chose to develop not just the messaging client but the messaging protocol, voice, file and media servers. That creates a lot of work for the small team to maintain.
- They don’t want to implement federation, partially because they would have to rewrite their entire backend, but also because…
- They want to force people to use the revolt.chat instance. While Revolt can be self-hosted, the documentation actively discourages this and tries to obfuscate the self-hosting process as much as possible.
- The open-source code is also several versions behind revolt.chat so that revolt.chat can keep an advantage over self-hosted instances.
- The developers are university students who have never developed software professionally or managed a social media platform before.
- Combine all of this with the lack of financing plans and you will have a service that is bound to implode or become enshittified when the operating costs and platform administration become too taxing.
Revolt is a very impressive full-stack project for the developers’ experience level, but it’s not a good FLOSS Discord alternative.
On another note, why are there so many children in the article’s comment section? Is that really the quality of the average Revolt user?
I won’t use any new social media network without federation. It seems like the only way to avoid enshittification and the massive loss of all the content posted being lost. It also allows competitors to exist without needing to spend tons of money to pull in users to get started up.
Revolt is a great alternative to Discord, although I personally am still rooting for Matrix/Element in the long run.
If Revolt had federation I’d be more willing to root for it but the devs have made it clear they have no plans to do so :(
Regardless it’s a cool piece of software and more competition is a good thing. It’ll be cool to see how it matures
I thought so too but they only support 20mb uploads. I understand why but also it’s a dealbreaker for me. If they could build in some sort of compression like Discord or any other social media service but I’d have switched but right now if I try to upload a 20 second via it’s just like “yeah nah”.
I think Matrix/Element is just a tad too confusing. Similar to Mastodon. I don’t know how, but Lemmy is the least confusing to use application within the Fediverse. I have easily been able to just subscribe to whatever I want and see it all.
With Mastodon, I can’t just see a big feed of content like Twitter, and then follow who I want to.
And Matrix/Element is… Just not quite Discord levels of usable.
I don’t know how, but Lemmy is the least confusing to use application within the Fediverse.
I’ve only used Lemmy and this is a scary thought.
I know some people don’t want it anyway, but if there is ever going to be a mass exodus from the corporations to the fediverse, fediverse needs to seriously work on the sign up process. And can’t threaten defederation every 5 minutes, which probably means they need proper modding tools/features.
Well, they just need to make the applications work exactly like their alternatives. Mastodon should show a random feed across the entire Mastodon Fediverse. And Matrix/Element should have a “Discover” section to allow you to browse the entire Matrix, and needs DMs
DMs are one of Matrix’s main features
They don’t really work like Discord DMs… Maybe that has changed since I last used Element though.
idk what you mean by that… you can send messages or files to eachother, just like on discord. What else is there?
They aren’t in a separate section as far as I remember. And you couldn’t have Group DMs.
What’s revolt?
FOSS Discord Alternative. Takes all the design language of Discord too without the nitro garbage. It’s still not fully featured, but it’s a cool little alternative if you can find a community you like. I personally am rooting for Matrix/Element tho.
