Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
revolt.chat
revolt.chat
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.
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.
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)
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.
These days I refuse to use Discord for political reasons though.
Curse Voice was absolutely nowhere to be seen.
It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.
The only thing I don’t really understand is why investors keep falling for this? The only real business model is giving their money away. Maybe they get some good ad network profile data in the time between the heel turn and the point where everybody ditches the service.
Leaking millions for years pays off in the end, or even half way through. Some investors would exit at some stage. Taking profit due to valuation going up, despite no revenue/profit.
At the end of the tunnel is acquisition by a major player who is basically buying the users.
Typical examples: Skype, whatsapp.
But also LinkedIn. GitHub.
Businesses that offered some (basically) free offering for over a decade until reaching critical user base, then sold off for billions. Reason being precious data along with millions of daily active eyeballs.
(notable that three of the four greater fools in your post are Microsoft)
I'm glad to see WhatsApp is proceeding relatively slowly down the Shit-en-slide, since it's completely entrenched in some countries. I've had companies who just assume that I have WhatsApp and it's cool to message me on it instead of sending a text or email.
I rarely feel any connection between servers, but that might just be me.
There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P
As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.
My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.
Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.
This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.
1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server.
2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame.
3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook kill off most individual forums.
4. Good marketing, which gave it the critical mass of users and hobby groups that it needed to succeed initially and now make it harder to move away from.
Zoom, in 2025, still makes you wait for the host to figure out which of the 30 other people has a dog incessantly barking or is causing the echo or has horrible feedback, and then try to talk them through fixing it before finally muting them.
I mean, what do you want, it's only been around for 50 years.
Same reason Zoom quickly took over video chat. It was so easy to use that you didn't have to convince your friends to sign up for it, you just sent them a link and it just worked.
It's not quite so easy anymore, partly because when you reach a certain size, it's all about controlling bots and whatnot.
I bet there’s even one related to using the word literally as hyperbole…
Not sure about now, but back then Teamspeak meant installing an application, setting it all up, having someone in the Free Company (almost always more than the limit for a free server on TS at the time) pay for a server or self-host (even more friction). With Discord there was no debate or decisions, just one step: Click link, sign up.
And during a downturn the high touch services lose customers faster because part of the virtue signaling of cost cutting is choosing cheaper options that take a bit more work.
Then there's the many contraindications e.g. privacy policy, walled garden, and the dog shit internal indexing and the fact that it isn't externally indexed, there's a lot of pertinent information on there from skilled individuals that could serve society a la the BBS era that will never be surfaced again because it's now being posted to Discord, though that's tangential. I hate it, but it's easy enough to use, though negligibly dofferent compared to Skype, which had many of the same issues.
I think the biggest attractor for my friends was being able to idle in a server so it was easy to start a party vs starting a call on Skype which requires a little more arrangement. Lower cost less friction.
I don't remember marketing, though.
In discord, a thread becomes a big visible thing in the sidebar. More than a couple and you're annoying everyone on the whole server. Completely the opposite of what I want.
Just funny to find myself knowing I've got this wrong before and being annoyed at myself _and_ at them
True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server.
The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.
It's in progress. Keywords: MatrixRTC, Element Call
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...
The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.
What does that mean?
I hang out with friends that predate discord, on discord and can't see it. Same with new servers.
chat rooms are cliques, almost always
choose any sufficiently populated room on libera chat, join, and start talking a lot without lurking first for awhile and see how the inhabitants react
what you’re seeing in online chat communities is just basic social interaction reflected online
An entire generation of bureaucrats and bean counters is learning the ropes on Discord.
Unnecessary channels are unnecessary subforums. User roles are user ranks (https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3.1/kb/article/everyth...), indicating both software permissions and social status. T&C—well, forum engines like phpBB, MyBB, and SMF come with a standard user agreement they show before registration. There is more concern with it now because the Internet is real life.
As for training an entire generation of bureaucrats and bean-counters, I leave it to the reader to judge.
And it was up to them to provide plenty onboarding to new users, so they're not overwhelmed by the hundreds of subcategories, and thousands of threads in each.
We used to be part of no more than a handful of forum communities. Maybe that changed.
I've never been a mod. I'm just an adult who understands Discord's general operations.
GP was on track - they wanted voice channels, many of them, before we had any demonstrated demand for it at all.
They wanted additional, opt-in roles, so anyone could @ a cadre of self-appointed ‘question answerers’ if they, I guess, (and this still isn’t clear to me), felt as though their question was more important than the questions of those who didn’t elect to do so.
They wanted auto-mod stuff that would maybe somehow automatically answer people’s questions (‘AI’), etc
The software in question (TouchDesigner) is a complex, idiosyncratic, node-based programming environment with a tough learning curve and a GUI dependency that makes question-asking and -answering more onerous than non-graphical programming.
As mods we’ve put a ton of effort into helping the torrent of new arrivals ask better (often less lazy or broad) questions and thus get better answers, more often. Many of the requests we get are well-intentioned but seem to think the reason questions go unanswered is because no one saw them, when it’s obvious to us that in many cases, they’re just extremely lazy questions.
Unreal has a similar problem, in my experience, with the difficulty of asking a question with sufficient information making it common that those willing to help are still only inclined to go the distance with people who are willing to meet them halfway.
And that whether in the ascendency or the fall, the moderators trying to maintain complete opaque control will fight to the death to keep it that way.
And where moderation is done more by feel than by rules people start self censoring and then disengage entirely.
But then you go to a discord that has moderation figured out, and its just... a nice place to be?
I've tried looking it up but among irrelevant results (general LARP info) I just found this comment again as the third result...
You wouldn't stick a kid in the pilot seat of a real Boeing 747, would you?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167147/discord-gaming-f... (2024)
EDIT- Second hint: To summon Galrog the Destroyer, say "Live. Action. Role. Playing." and clap your hands 5 times.
But fear not what is ahead; the entire moderation team's activity status has shown "Playing Roblox" for 8 hours. Luckily, it's just a simulation, and none of this is real.
I'm frankly wondering whether I should ask if you're okay. Idk if you have a legitimate dispute with Discord or some people on there (I dislike Discord as much as the next self hosting open source non walled garden fan, but this is next level), or if it's something else. Wild guess / legitimately concerned: do you have a heater that can leak carbon monoxide? Or maybe I am just extremely bad at understanding what I've just read
The moderators pretend they are vastly more important and significant than they are.
to me, in general the vibe of a given discord is similar to the general vibe of that topic (i.e some games have terrible, vitriolic cesspools for communities and those discords reflect that. other things, such as one of the rust ones i'm on, reflects that community's vibe which is a lot more wholesome imo).
Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)
anything win when compared to the ultimate underdog. but that's hardly a valid comparisons.
discord only win from other opensource forums because you don't have to own a domain, i guess.
the real time part of irc was taken over by matrix.
It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.
IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.
I don't think discord has much of a real network effect, it's just a good value proposition. When the screws tighten that may change.
This isn't a stance driven primarily by privacy/security requirements, although making e.g. compartmentalisation possible is generally a positive thing. Rather, my issue is with mixing business and pleasure, or even business A with business B, so to speak.
It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked messages and frustration at realizing how I didn't care for 95% of them, but I was unwilling to completely separate myself from that community (e.g. quitting or muting the discord)
It becomes a question of which friends you want to implicitly abandon and I ultimately decided to just abandon them all.
If the competitor even has a slightly more unified product it could easily displace discord.
Transferring a bot from one chat format to another chat format isn't some kind of insurmountable moat, and I think it's likely this project could make a few changes to support them with no modification required.
That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.
I still want to try Zulip to see how well it works.
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 sickeneningly 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.
I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. If this doctor had called this girl on her cell phone, no one would be mad at Verizon.
Part of the problem is most parents have no clue about social media/communication tools outside what they use. At my church, I gave presentation about Discord and it was shocking to see how clueless parents were.
It is trivial to find servers with adult topics (BDSM) targeted at minors. It is trivial to find servers that combine those topics with problematic age ranges (like BDSM-themed servers with no ID verification, 'ages 14-28 welcome'). It is trivial to find servers with minors openly selling "content".
Disboard isn't Discord but these things aren't even being remotely "hidden", it is these servers' sole 'purpose'.
Phone and mail networks in letter and spirit obey the law: they don't listen to people's private conversations and they give up complete user info on request by law enforcement. There is nothing more they can do.
Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends. So they are ethically obligated to stop bad things happening on their platform. Whatsapp/Signal have built their platforms so they can't read user private messages, so they have no ethical obligations to stop bad things happening on their platform, beyond banning users in response to legal orders.
So they need to get rid of that capability
Why draw the line there? Why don't those platforms have an ethical obligation to build the features that would allow them to stop bad things happening on their platform? Especially if they knowingly developed the current implementation specifically to avoid ethical culpability?
So I am glad that software like Signal/Whatsapp exist that allow secure communication [1]. And I would take the harms causes by them being unmonitored rather than the harm of future dystopian governments. Due to how crypto works, I don't think there is much middle ground here.
[1] I would prefer open source, more community owned platforms take over than these two.
Phone and email aren't more private than Discord either. Arguably less. Difficult to get a phone these days without buying it on camera. And a phone company will give up all your messages.
Whatsapp/Signal are as close to (1) as possible by design, can't actually do (2) at all. Phone/Mail are somewhere in the middle, but quite close to (1). In most countries in the world, there is no mass recording of phone calls or mail, despite it trivially easy to do so. Moreover, due to long long historical legal precedent, I don't think phone/mail companies have any freedom to do things differently. They are pretty much constrained to do exactly what the government tells them to do.
Discord on the other hand, does not respect (1) at all. In fact, it very intentionally records and reads everything for profit. And it hands over any info requested by law enforcement. So, ethically, either they rewrite Discord to respect (1) or they should do (2). I don't think they are. As others have noted in this thread, it is trivial to find servers that are clearly criminal.
One might argue that it is impossible to do so because there are so many servers. My second political position is that if your public platform is so large that you can't effectively moderate it, that is not an excuse. You are culpable. Simply stop your platform from growing past the point where you can't effectively stop bad things happening. You don't have the right to profit while enabling bad things.
Any platform that’s popular will have its share of undesirable users, out of the company’s control.
Discord has very good moderation in contrast to other platforms (Constant banwaves on illegal/shady servers, terminating accounts frequently, etc)
"very good moderation" makes me believe you work for them because that is a laughable notion.
I would bet that Big Balls swatting/SIM swapping/ddos community "the comm" still has dozens of discords that have been up for years
And how out of touch with teenagers are you that you think cartoons in the UI (whatever that means) are why they use it. What is a kids hobby? Gaming? You cannot call that a kids hobby.
The biggest selling points of Discord are 1) unified login and 2) phone access.
I, personally, consider these to be negatives. However, the majority of people do not.
[0]: Turkey banned Discord in 2024: https://www.reuters.com/technology/turkey-blocks-instant-mes...
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 ;)
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).
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.
You mean the the 31 years of simple text anyone can index or search using any search engine? How awful.
Not that power users don't matter! They do, especially at places like LKML, where everyone is expected to be quite tech-savvy. But most users in the world are not nearly as tech-savvy. For them, zero-friction solutions are a clear win. even if not the only accessible way, despite any other shortcomings.
Its absolute trash. I don't know who's talking to who in what topic. Using ">" as a quote without any coloring and having to judge what level of indentation this is. Its horrible.
After searching on lore.kernel.org, do you click through individual messages with such insightful subject lines as, "media: camss: Format configuration per hardware version," and, "rcar-vin: feature enhancement and fixes?" or do you read through the nested results, which on a test search related to a recent problem I had, gave me 2.5 MB of text across 74K lines?
Even then, I didn't find exactly what I wanted and would need to browse the kernel source (and will it be mainline or next?) and click through. The frontend for git.kernel.org does not have per-line blame (unless I missed it somewhere) so I have to checkout just to find the commit I want or browse the log until I find the changed line or hope that the expanded log is verbose enough to match my search term.
lkml.org is certainly no better, with no method of searching or grouping related topics.
Or... Do you refer to a third-party search engine doing the heavy lifting of indexing and deciding the relevance of a problem?
As opposed to most chat clients, where you just search and get a preview of all possible matches, and then go to that conversation. Sure, with Discord it involves opening the client and the potential for security mishaps and other problems of modern software (ads, useless features) but it is generally not difficult to search through a half-decent channel.
You get similar ease-of-use and searchability with a git repository with a half-decent frontend plus it makes it significantly easier to track proposals, changes, feature history, etc.
... except when a merge request or issue suddenly has more than 5 participants or a branch is building a new feature, where it then makes sense to take it to a chat where you get an instant notification and tight feedback loop between all participants, rather than rapid-fire updating the bug tracker and its associated merge request comments and the reported issues in a dependency's repo.
Gotta go; a coworker is asking me in the chat to push a fix to nightly.
There's also a wide spectrum between chat sites and forums. Threads-centric tools like Zulip can be amazing for a community like that. Some, like rocket.chat, are even search-indexable
EDIT: it was actually Zulip not rocket.chat that has the option to make channels public to the web
I think this really depends on the content. Projects that use discord as their primary community support create a significant barrier for users doing preliminary troubleshooting. I have a huge folder of discord servers of projects I took a couple steps into before passing on. Those should have just been internet searches. Once I have an agent doing that research for me, I assume it will have to register with discord servers just to do its job.
But google/bing/etc index (basically) all of them. Forum search is great for finding exact title matches, and sometimes useful for exact content matches. Google with site: is better for finding conceptual matches. And, if you don’t know what forum you’re looking for, adding “forum” to your search engine term searches all of them.
Discord is not (and likely will never be) indexed by any search engine. The level of discoverability is almost as low as it can possibly be; you can’t find the community by searching general terms, you have to know the community exists, join it (agreeing to both discord’s and the community’s rules), and then search, only with discord’s search itself.
My experience with many forums is that most moderators spend too much time making the forum perfect and less time helping me with my problems. My experience with chat is that I post a question and then someone has an answer pretty quickly
I dislike discord because it's a clumsy UI. Usually you want to be able to research what you're interested in. Not a great experience on discord.
Discord tip - if ever you need to rewind to the first message, append /0. Used to be a pain to get there, maybe they've fixed it.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Not all human discussion can happen in forum-like format. Quick disposable chats are also usefull for when you're in a state of "figuring things out" where quick and short feedback help you navigate a problem rather than reading long well-researched well-formatted replies.
There must be room for both modes: the "thinking about it now" is in chat and the "having thought about it" is in SO, forums, documentation etc etc.
Or so I've heard.
Says who? I don’t see that in the OSI definition
Someone posted the github link here on HN: why would that be?
But now I also know where to go if I'm in need of a femboy community.
It's an unwritten rule :)
You could do a dual license model, where a traditional license can be bought if you dont want to go with AGPL and have the money.
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)?
Why is that?
When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.
Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history and drag 'n drop file upload.
Having to host your own bot for pagetitle preview and user management was also not fun.
You can selfhost your IRC client, which eliminates som of the drawbacks but that also only works for a small portion of people.
It's funny but I personally prefer that the IRC server isn't required to store every chat log indefinitely. You're right though, these are solvable problems, BNC for example but we're getting a little off topic.
The only thing "bad UX" means anymore is that you have parts of your app that people don't find valuable, and you're showing it to them anyway.
> Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.
Disagree. I think most people are pretty okay with it, maybe not in love with it, but they don't see it as particularly bad in most respects either. I use Google's corp chat for work and my god, Discord is SO much better than that it blows me away.
I think that HN users seem to not fundamentally understand the needs of online groups beyond what is necessary to carry out an asynchronous open source engineering project. Much of the "bells-and-whistles" that discord offers are _essential_ to both the day-to-day communication of these groups as well as to moderators. Element does not come fully replicate some core features offering an outright less stable experience. Slack/Teams are not accessible to private users. Telegram has even less features than Element/Matrix.
Edit: Bonus, it comes with its own font!
I wish this project a lot of success but also that it ends up devloping its own identity.
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-exe...
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?
The self-hosting guide even walks you through setting up the VPS on a specific platform. What more do you want? One could even argue that if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything, so from that viewpoint, these instructions are a lot more friendly than they had to be.
Since when does IT tell corporate what to do?
You and I both know that corporate calls the shots, and if they tell someone to do this, and that's not their field of expertise, they'll need their hand held.
There are plenty of non-profits and other orgs that have IT staff of 1, and that guy is IT because he knows how to format a word doc.
Your argument is a bit disingenuous.
As for clients I don't know.
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.
Ignore the below, it is for a different "FOSS" discord replacement.
i did self-host it for a week to test it out - and honestly i was put off immediately.
What happens when you set it up according to the docs, is that it automatically "registers" for a license - the free license being limited to 5 users, even if you self host. Ridiculous, and just right out the gate shows me that whoever makes this does not have the user's best interest in mind.
the UI is also full of stuff that requires an expensive license, and i did not see an easy way to remove that stuff when self hosting.
Matrix does everything we need, to where the group on matrix and the people I talk to on discord are a two separate circle Venn diagram.
Matrix also lets you inline files, do threads (y tho), voice chat, video chat. I don't know if it does conference calls or screen sharing as we don't use that.
I had to sign everyone up in my family. Because "change the server to 'matrix.whatever.com'" is impossible for nearly everyone.
Discord? Click a link you're in.
I don't like discord that much - I don't have it installed on my cellphone with a SIM.
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?
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.
I hate the Discord UI/UX as well (e.g.: sluggish add hell; need to press a few specific pixels on mobile to show the mute button and other controls that automatically fade out if you don't touch them for 2 seconds) but apparently what they do well is filtering out super loud eating noises, or that's what a friend said when I asked them to mute when they were eating crisps with the mic pointed directly at it as well as blowing on the mic with every breath. Apparently they never got complaints doing that on Discord
I feel like an old person when muttering something about mute button etiquette to myself while writing this comment. If machine learning can fix that (if it doesn't require proprietary datasets from storing millions of peoples' conversations), I should let it ^^'
I personally haven't really encountered performance issues running discord
Windows isn't beating out Linux in the desktop space because Linux is awful. Network effects are much more significant.
There is many an open source software that could actually use a little bit of copying from the thing they are trying to emulate. GIMP is still one of the ugliest programs I have installed on my computer.
Apple tried it in the 90's with the infamous "look and feel" lawsuits against Microsoft. They lost.
They've had more success suing Samsung over phone design and UI (which was about more than "rounded corners" to be sure, but a lot of the patents are still questionable).
Revolt has been in development for many years
> could this possibly even go to a copyright breach
Ianl but I’d imagine this would require discord to prove they own the “multiple groups, with subchannels” paradigm, which would be difficult when slack exists
but there's prior art for literally every feature Discord has so as long as they aren't copy-pasting Discord's source code I think they're just fine
I'm not a lawyer either but I am an SWE and I've had to read and been expected to understand so many goddamned licenses that at this point I feel like I'm expected to be one just to be able to navigate this field
That’s disappointing, but even now it’s hard to imagine they’re particularly profitable. The core functionality of Discord is entirely free and I doubt that Nitro / other paid features earn that much.
And Discords design is very similar to mIRC.
That said, I've barely used discord and thus can't rightly say if it has good UI/UX.
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)
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.
- 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
> > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap
This doesn't give me much confidence.
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
I'm not a big Discord user, but the one thing I do use it for is voice chat and game streaming with friends.
Is the API discord compatible? That's basically necessary for adoption.
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.
[1] https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/6/views/4?pane=i...
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-medi...
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?
Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.
They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.
I just wish there were more native applications instead of all the web desktop stuff. But, visual design options and developer availability is a huge factor there. Native iOS designs come the closest to what I'd like to see on the desktop.
Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place.
Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data.
So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.
And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.
The issue is that Discord has replaced things which it shouldn't have, the internet forums. Discord is the epitome of a golden cage. It is a prison for information, a black hole.
I'm not even talking about the absolutely atrocious search functionality, but the fact that information inside the Discord walls is impossible to find from the outside. You can't search across discord communities, none of the content there is indexed by web search engines. Entire communities have FAQs and knowledge as pins inside threads inside Discord servers. Things which used to be on the web.
15 years ago, these discussions would've taken place on forums and on IRC to a lesser extent. IRC itself was a really bad information black hole, but at least the forums were great. They supported long running discussions and were easy to search.
Now everything disappeared into effectively hidden Discord chats and youtube videos where you need to watch 8 different idiots bramble on for 10 minutes before you find the 30 second segment of information that you were actually looking for and could've been a single paragraph.
It's really insane how much information is on Discord that is both impossible to discover and will silently disappear at some point.
But only IF you are good at regex.
On discord you can easily filter by date or date range, if it has media, if it contains an URL or what user/roll got mentioned.
The metadata filters are nice but they're also what keep it usable at all.
But even if Discord search was good, it still doesn't matter because it is not only a walled garden, it is a hermetically sealed chamber from which no information can escape.
I would not get more advanced than that, personally. Sure you'll have matches that aren't exactly what you're looking for, like that'd match both lines I said and lines mentioning me, and URLs that aren't images (better than trying to account for all types of image URLs, IMO) but I'll probably find what I'm looking for fast enough for it to not be worth looking up more complicated regex. Often I'll remember who posted something, too, so then maybe I'll throw their nick in the search as well, before mine. Or at least I could narrow down who posted it to a few people and just try a few searches pretty quickly back to back.
I would also say this particular search you're talking about would be fairly uncommon. I might even remember something like "oh, Bernie said that image was the funniest thing he'd seen all day, I'll search the word 'funniest' starting from the end of the file since it was under a month ago and should end up near the URL".
IRC had so much potential, but somehow we fumbled it. A simple search based on local logs and for the user hidden reg-ex could have been implemented 10+ years ago.
Maybe there are some secret incantations I don't know about, but Discord search is positively useless most of the time and I have to manually scroll up until I find what I want (or give up).
This is a patently ignorant and ridiculous statement. They absolutely shove their own store garbage every release and upsell Nitro at every opportunity. Here's an article from last year about them explicitly introducing third party ads.
https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to...
"Belligerence" as you call it is direct, unambiguous, and will probably be remembered.
But I've never seen these ads myself, so it's surprising.
The Americans do take pervasive advertising to the next level though, with product placement, "influencers", and other deceptive tactics. Their behaviors are a major cost to the legal system, because more legislation has to be introduced to govern against their obviously anti-social and exploitative behavior.
Upselling is basically just unlocking additional features. If you object to that, then you're objecting to the freemium model, not to "ads".
They do that, they call them "quests". Companies pay them to promote their product/service and users get rewards for doing a task (like playing a game, watching a video, etc.) https://discord.com/ads/quests
The article that parent linked even says it.
* please drink verification can
These are the most common complaints I see from people
- They don't allow third party clients and some people have various complaints about theirs (e.g resource usage)
- Some people think discord is too popular, to the point some things that "don't belong there" have moved to discord. This is usually about being search indexable and requiring an account.
- Fear of monopolostic behaviour ( "enshittification" )
- Some people are mad that they killed public urls for files uploaded to discord. Mostly this is people running into links to images online and being unable to see them, usually not the uploaders
- Discord is centralized and you cannot host your own server
- The only client they allow you to use (See above) is propietary, and some people would rather run something open source
As for me personally, their search functionality drives me insane. I feel like the exact same query gets completely different results depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, making it super unreliable.
It's an information black hole, as someone else mentioned in this comment section. Otherwise, it's a nifty communication tool.
I personally come from running and using {TeamSpeak,Ventrilo,Mumble} servers. Started using Discord in winter 2015, it was just trivial to open a browser tab and join a group session with your friends. The audio experience was an order of magnitude worse when compared to other solutions, but the overall UX and ease of use made up for it.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
If you'd allow me to, I'm going to address this question from a different perspective, as this post is about Revolt: What could Revolt do that would make me, at least, start using it alongside Discord?
I'd love it if I could self-host a server, place it online and let people find it and join seamlessly, similar to how Fediverse works for other social networks. They don't seem to be interested in adding this: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revo...
Other than that, I'd see myself using it to run a workspace. Having used Discord as a work-related communication platform in the past, I've come to find voice-based channels very useful, these seem to transmit a better feeling of productivity somehow. Other tools (e.g Slack, Teams) make me feel kind of "alone" when working. Even if it's just for body doubling, I'd argue voice channels are underrated and actually quite helpful for remote workers.
It's not impossible that Discord stays more or less as it currently is, with a few features locked behind its paid subscription but generally a good experience, but it seems prudent to have a backup option for if/when things go further downhill.
They'll hold your account hostage until you give them a phone number if you happen to trigger their "anti-spam" detection. And sending a message with a number below 13 might be all it takes for Discord to withhold your account for age verification as well.
They basically track every click, every action you take on their client. You can see that if you request a data package.
Abuse is rampant. There's no way to report servers, channels, or individual users. Things that were all possible in the past, through the Support form, until they made in-app reporting the only option, which relies on reporting individual messages and has a very low rate limit.
> What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
Let's see...blocking that actually prevents you from seeing messages from the person you blocked. A native client. Better reporting tools. Better message deletion tools - you still can't delete every message along with your account. The ability to opt out of having messages fed into AI. None of these are unfeasible.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
The network effect is the reason why technologically inferior solutions like Discord are still thriving.
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)?
It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
> 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.
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.
Not sure if their own hosted offering has a "click to spin up new server" button. Probably not.
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.
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.
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"
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
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
[just had a longer look around. Is this a Russian project?]
Would also love to see some solution to Discord's problem of being an information black hole here as well.
Why not use a federated group discussion such as Lemmy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)
>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.
If the platform or provider don't want to associate with you, that's their prerogative.
The hubris to assume otherwise is ridiculous.
The alternative is an oligarchy type model where you are bound to the whims of some external party.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want?
Discord has a totally different feature set than Matrix-based software
Also, how is it an alternative for Discord if it's in a whole different jurisdiction?
Why is that?
They market to kids, and have kid safety features.
If your company uses discord as a tool to communicate, it gives the message that it's like a game to you, that it is not serious, that you are relaxed,etc..
Certainly not the right register for serious stuff like an IT company, tax company, weapons, etc...
And it's not just semantics, the app was built for gaming, it has features and design choices built for that, one of them being kid safety. Not a corporate tool like slack.
If you are into that great, but it's what it is.
That does not mean it's for kids only.
Foss on the other hand just clones an app offers a download and calls it a day, "self host", sometimes they encrypt stuff so that not even devs or admins can see the content, they would think of this as respecting privacy, but then when they get a subpoena for a sex offender case, they can't turn up anything.
Certainly not the right register for serious stuff like an IT company, tax company, weapons, etc...
And it's not just semantics, the app was built for gaming, it has features and design choices built for that, one of them being kid safety, another being it shows what game you are playing. Not a corporate tool like slack.
If you are into that great, but it's what it is.
There are so many tech companies with Discord. Are you saying companies like Cloudflare are not serious companies. Know what they know that you don't? You have to meet your users where they are. The open source projects I care about are there.
It's cool if you want to maintain your outdated perspective though
Recent news have shown that they are publishing a product to red team website automation: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/. So they are now on both sides of the red blue counter.
Looking at their product offering it seems they have branched out from their original product that earned them their reputation (IP hiding DNS Servers and proxies), now it looks like they are branching in all directions, including random AI products and generic cloud offerings.
Definitely not getting a "we are a serious company" vibe. More like a "try to appeal and sell everything to everyone banking on our reputation because reputation doesn't pay the bills" vibe.
So yeah that's my take.
{flag:uk} English (traditional)
{flag:us} English (simplified)Shoutouts to Noah Webster for "opinionatedly curating" British English from an inconsistent crufty unspellable mess to a randomly tweaked version of the same thing.
Despite being told long ago by a drunk English visiting student that “the language is English not American” I’ll stand by our American simplification! Lamentably this simplification seems to be backtracking our political system…but hey we’re going from Discord to Revolt!
Still waiting for American Football to be renamed to Handegg.
You won't be missed.
Hope they do well; I dislike closed source chat programs.
I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..
You may like https://www.beeper.com/
And if you are nerd/privacy conscious enough, though their app and cloud service is proprietary, it’s based on Matrix and open source bridges which you can have a full list here : https://github.com/beeper
Threads is working on implementing ActivityPub for interoperability with other platforms that already use it. ActivityPub is an open standard for implementing the Fediverse, a group of federated social platforms heavily based in the open source community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
They did it with XMPP and Windows live messenger in the 2000s.
At the end of the day these companies have no incentive to be responsible stewards of open protocols. The moment they have a tough quarter they’ll eviscerate it if it means they’ll make a buck.
I’m happy IRC is still around in spite of that.
Should be mandatory. Things like facebook took off because of network effects not because of the quality of the platform. Being able to migrate all your contacts/ chat/ tweets/ etc somewhere else seemlessly should be enforced by the gov to allow for actual competition. else you end up with first player advantage and network effects being unsurmountable and creating de facto monopolies with 0 benefit for the customer, in an environment that has low set up costs and you should see fierce competition.
Both facebook and google supported XMPP but that's no longer the case. Slack supported XMPP and IRC, but that's no longer the case.
It's completely pointless to expect proprietary stuff to be interoperable. It requires constant reverse engineering and remember that they have money to throw away to hire developers to make breaking changes to the protocol constantly.
> Facebook Messages are evolving to allow people to share rich content beyond text: photos, videos, audio and even stickers. We want to ensure the best possible send and receive experience where all these rich forms of content are reliably and consistently available on every platform. XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.
This is such a lame excuse, and reveals how much they're control freaks. One of the main points of an open, federated protocol is that people can choose clients that behave the way they want and render things the way they want. "Oooohhh, we can't guarantee with an iron fist that our stupid 'stickers' render correctly on all clients, therefore we can't deal with it!"
This same mentality infests the web, and is why companies insist on slathering JavaScript into everything to force browsers to render their pages exactly as designed, rather than just letting the user agent serve the user's needs.
XMPP isn't dead either. Here's an open source project of an XMPP based Slack - https://prose.org/ (I have no association to this, was amazed how much digging it took me looking for Slack/Discord alternatives to find it.)
The most damage to open communications software probably came from the closed mobile app stores. The barrier to maintaining a working app simultaneously on iOS and Android is high. Almost every iOS game I bought 10 years ago is inaccessible and no longer downloadable. Those barriers are in the process of being torn down too, with or without AI's help.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...
On the broader point I'd agree up until I notice that you'd write 'defense' yet also 'fence', and ponder why the verb 'got' is so overused.
Wonder where that idea even came from, the BBC article even says as such "“It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, [the dialect anthropologist] says."
I mean; we have old runic languages that match northern English pronunciation really well- along with "olde english" spelling which is clearly a rote writing of a southern English accent (likely from somewhere like Gloucestershire).
An attractive myth, perhaps, but I'm not sure how much truth there really is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/bofu3g/how_did_ame...
I get the sense that the article very much believes Americans speak more traditional English.
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).
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.
I know Telegram absolutely requires a mobile number, though
Some chat apps like Zulip have the option to open a channel to the web. It can even be indexed by search engine bots
But as I mentioned in another comment, what's more important is how easy it is to administer and setup. The experience for site/community owners is the critical factor for adaption.
It's just too hard to moderate a space with so little friction, and any friction you add chases away all but the most dedicated users -- and the most dedicated users are often the ones more likely to get entangled in some insane drama and try to burn the whole place to the ground.
It's a difficult problem. I've always wondered what it would actually cost to actually, properly moderate a reasonably sized forum if you paid a professional mod team real wages and gave them proper tools. Probably way more than we would guess.
I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a community around the library. I keep staring at PhpBB ... but it feels too oldskool, so: nope.
I am beginning to like the idea of a self-hosted Discourse[1] thing; there seems to be a fair number of active tech-related communities... maybe if I have some time over Easter I'll investigate further.
Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.
Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.
Ironically internally we still use Discord for comms.
All about the right tool for the right job.
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
[2]: https://discorch.org
edit: oh, this isn't an ejabberd fork. Why didn't they just fork ejabberd like normal people? Seriously, _rust_?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
So the only question is communities desire. There is no technical problem here.
Just financial and organizational one. Not every open-source project is going to do that.
Not sure why Apple had to change how Gatekeeper works. I will have to look for an alternative once my mbp dies. It gets tiresome to fight with the OS for every other app after every update now. Especially when it worked perfectly OK before.
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
TeamSpeak and Ventrilo were like that