Hi, one of the developers here, we use electron because its hard for our small amount of devs (there are about 4) of us to maintain multiple clients, this is the same reason we use the same web client for mobile.
If your dev team thinks in web-like terms, Electron is a more comfortable place to be. Better? I'd agree with you that it's probably not.
Not really disagreeing, but "Better" is just constrained by the real ressources at hand. You have a team, specialised in making plattform independent QT apps? Sure, that is what you do. But chances are you don't, so you just target the web as web devs are plenty around.
"Academic" metrics of what is theoretically more preferable as a plattform and should be considered "better" are usually not very helpful to actually build things.
To the extent that this is true, it acts as disincentive for people wanting to pursue non-web-dev pathways in their careers, which then further limits the availability of such developers, which then further "confirms" the "cross platform is Electron" idea.
Developing with Qt is (I am told [0]) not much harder than typical web equivalents, but it is different. The result is generally more performant, both in terms of UI and also data handling/computation.
[0] I personally work with GTK, not Qt; Qt goes much further with hand-holding developer helpers than GTK does.
Qt runs in a web browser via WebAssembly but building an application that way--I mean, if you want that to work, good luck, but it's a presumptuous ask to make of a developer. If you want to have a client somebody can log into via Chrome or Firefox? Hi, now we have two codebases that aren't sharing logic.
Qt also doesn't work well on iOS or Android. Attempts have been made. They're not viable without significant work that "Qt is cross platform" elides, and you're probably forking your entire codebase for what you can actually salvage. And when you've built a Qt application, there's a whole lot less that's reasonably sharable when you eject out of it on those platforms (because you will), as opposed to the large amounts you can effectively share between React and React Native (see also the web-hosted option above).
So, +1 to the developers of Revolt.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for you guys to do it, and I am pretty certain that most of your userbase won't care.
Best of luck and thanks for dropping by!
Hate on HN does not predict any kind of product metric.
Thank you for writing for all.
on my 4gb, 6 year old daily driver i dont find electron apps to be difficult. personally i dont think it's that worthwhile to try to appease the vast ranks of anti-electron anti-web zealots (i doubt any of them would ever be satisfied no matter how many gains were made). but it would be interesting to hear of folks adopting more advanced techniques to keep resource consumption down.
Discord is an obscene drain on resources. That's the problem that's easy to solve: just stop with the bad programming choices.
That said, I didn't realize at first that Revolt is in fact meant to be a REPLACEMENT top to bottom, and not just a rogue Discord client like Ripcord. You're hawking it on the basis of privacy, rather than speed (since it obviously won't be much better there). But the privacy angle is laughable from the start. Do we run our own servers? It's not clear to me from reading the site. You talk about "creating" servers, but Discord users "create" servers as well: on Discord's hardware. If Revolt genuinely allows for the creation of independant servers, with no control or access by the Revolt devs, that is at least something. If not, I don't see the point.
The backend and the clients are both open source, so I think the idea is that people do run their own servers. There's certainly nothing stopping you. I assume the hosted server is just for convenience and/or demo purposes.
You have to be where the people are to make it worth anyone's time to complain about performance.
telling the author what their priorities need to be... nice.