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I don't know why a significant amount of the comments are so critical of what seems like a pretty incredible project (and based on contributor statistics, primarily built by _a single person_), but I really like it and prefer the overall UX to Element so far (even though it's basically copied Discord entirely).
Also, the backend is written in _Rust_, I thought you guys LIKED THIS KIND OF THING!
Welcome to Hackernews. Being sour is part of every user here just to spread negativity in the guise of "user feedback". Just ignore those comments and read the positive ones.
This project is really good. Really really good!
I agree with this comment. However, having mostly just a single person as the creator and maintainer means it has a truck factor of one.
A small team would inspire more confidence in the longevity of the project.
Give me the UX of Revolt and the backend of Element
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.
Please no.
As someone who doesn't use voice channels, I can't even count how many times I've accidentally joined them because I mis-clicked. And then I have to find the "end call" button because, of course, it's small and located away from the channel itself. It is so unbelievably annoying.
The best feature Discord added recently was the ability to hide channels, so I can finally, once and for all, forget about voice channels.
This was normal back in the days of IRC and Mumble. I should try introducing mumble into our company, come to think of it. I remember not understanding the client-side TLS certificate thing, so like, it had strong encryption way ahead of its time and the UI was basically as smooth as it could be because we all made it onto the server, even if we didn't understand what it was and the server just accepted any cert.
It's a good reminder indeed, I hadn't considered the old gaming toolkit we used as teenagers and I work with 100% technical people that can figure out an apt install mumble
It's crazy how collaboration solutions keep missing this. I passionately hate "calls". You don't catch people with a lasso to talk to them in real life.
It's like talking over cubicle walls vs scheduling conference rooms.
the very first time i went looking for a discord plugin, i was looking for a way to block that after having entered too many chat channels accidentally. it might be a killer OPTION.
You can do this in slack by starting a huddle in a common channel. Its not as good but helps somewhat.
But you can do that
It took slightly longer than expected for me to track down an explanation of their business model. I think it boils down to "run cheap until we have one".
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/monetisation
The future continues to be AGPL[0].
By making their backend AGPL they've left themselves a path to some kind of profitability for companies that want to run custom versions.
> Last revision. 7th March 2022
They're running Docusaurus for docs but adding manual timestamps instead of using the built-in showLastUpdateTime variable... this hurts me.
How's this better than Matrix?
(Not a leading question. I haven't used Discord/Matrix/etc. more than a handful of times and don't know what I don't know.)
What made me choose Revolt over Matrix is the user interface and structure. I vastly prefer the server-with-multiple-chatrooms paradigm that Discord (and by extension Revolt) use, it's a much nicer way to host a hangout with your friends if you have more than a few, so conversations about different things can happen in different places and people can avoid stuff they're not interested in. Matrix kinda has this in that you can group groupchats, but the UI is a lot more awkward. Additionally, Revolt has custom emoji, and you would not believe how reliant you can get on custom emoji if you and your friend group have gotten used to using the samw set for years.
You're trying to compare a web app to a protocol. Better question would be: Why is this not powered by Matrix?
Does Matrix have the equivalent of voice chat rooms that Discord has? I find as a user of Discord that being able to see who's just hanging out is the killer feature there. (As are things like game streaming and bots, ofc)
IIRC it doesn't feature encryption and there's no pairing devices via QR or emotes chain as in Element client. Last time I played around Revolt it was very Discord-alike
Matrix feels a bit monocultural for my taste. Perhaps Revolt can do better, we'll see.
How's this better than IRC?
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.
Isn't that how git is designed to be?
Yeah it’s only a matter of time before enshittification comes for that too.
Gitlab, yeah? We deployed an instance a while back and then found the server cost was high to where it still made sense to use github for now
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?
Also: How do voice channels work in this thing? I've been thinking for approximately forever about making Jitsi meet more flexible to support channels, but never got around to it (I've done some basic ground work on it, in case anyone wants to pick it up).
Why did people even create Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix when Jabber and IRC already had existed?
"All progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Since Discord is getting worse and recently added another dark pattern ("Discord Birthday" crap, that always shows a red "1" just to annoy my OCDs) and did not have a good data protection policy anyway, I might take a look at this one. Hoping it will be a good replacement. But then I will have to deal with even worse network effect than back then, when I switched from Skype to Discord.
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't do notifications on iOS, and can't upload images on Android, either.
Beware projects that demand you sign a CLA. Linux doesn't do this because it's GPL; projects that demand this are leaving the door open to license your work under non-free-software licenses.
I personally won't donate free work to organizations that want the option of releasing nonfree software.
They need to make servers automatically publish onto the web. It’ll bridge that gap between Discord & Reddit wherein discussions can be discoverable. Plus all of that can be indexed and crawled
It's funny (or sad?) that many threads here are saying what Revolt should do just to be followed by why they shouldn't, UX-wise. The days of your software being customizable for your own needs are truly gone. We've mostly been conditioned.
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:
Are custom client's allowed? How can I be sure this won't be sold out of nowhere?
I prefer the radio controlled micromachine game
Do they have a noscript/basic (x)html portal?
Or a plain and simple C client?
I’m a big fan of https://fluxsocial.io/ as it’s fully distributed
Is there any peer to peer video streaming built into it yet? That's one thing I'm really interested in.. even if you pony up for Discord Nitro, the video stream quality is pretty atrocious. I wish I could just fully saturate my home internet connection (or selfhost a private server on a beefy VPS for my friends and I). $20 a month's worth of VPS could go a long way
Looks like it's not end-to-end-encrypted.
Which should be default for anything that offers dms.
I wanted it for Discord so I created an E2EE client on top of it: https://www.discryptor.io
Is it using Matrix?
is the audio mixing as good as Discord's? IMO this is the killer feature, despite being subtle and something no one talks about. The audio mixing in Zoom and Meet is atrocious by comparison: the instant a second person starts talking the audio becomes garbled.
What’s with the terrible names? I’ll never use a communication product named “Discord”, and “Revolt” is even worse.
If this is decentralized/federated than they should make a bigger deal of that on the page, and if it's not, well, no thanks.
someone who knows what he's doing did the optimizations,
this thing is smoooth, kudos