So…this one is a bit left-of-field.
A friend of mine (Gardiner Bryant of YouTube - who reports on Linux and the Steam Deck) has started a Revolt server.
What is Revolt?
It’s kinda like a FOSS alternative to Discord. You’ll see the layout is almost a direct copy, and it’s far less polished…but then again you haven’t got the downsides of Discord’s constant upselling either:
Why is this relevant?
…I can hear you ask? Well, so far its just a few developers and creators in there, but I thought of all spaces…maybe those very devs and creators whose work you use and watch…well it might be nice to join in there?
My personal friends who are in here so far are:
-
imLinguin whose GitHub is here - but you may know most as a developer of Heroic Games Launcher
-
Eben Bruyns whose GitHub is here - but you may know best as the dev of Junk-Store
-
Gardiner himself, of course whose YouTube link is here,
What is the damn link to the damn server, woman?
I mean, you will have to make an account on Revolt, but it might be interesting to some here. You’re all very welcome!
I’m not gonna lie, I haven’t used discord much. But to my untrained eye it seems like bad IRC. So out of curiousity, why is this (or discord for that matter) better than IRC?
- Fancy layout and theme
- Easy to understand. Receive a Discord link and it’ll ask you to download Discord or join using their web app.
- Media support (images, gifs, videos, sounds), Youtube embed, etc
- Easy to make your own server. Click 5 things and you have one.
- Voice chat with screenshare and even party games
- Free (but ofcourse they steal your data)
- Channels purely for pinning and sharing information. Including channels that look more like a forum.
- No need to remake an account on all the servers.
- And a lot more.
People want something else though because Discord is very bad privacy wise. They keep shoving their premium features in your face. Have horrible support and can ban for an out of context “i’m 10 years old”. (Even if the next message is “i’m joking”). They have been known to share information about protest organizers with governments, take an extremely long amount of time to remove malicious and predatory servers. And so much more.
People want something that can offer them the comfort of Discord, with the freedom of IRC.
Thanks for raising awareness of FOSS Discord alternatives. Revolt certainly is the best looking of all of them.
Last time I looked into this, Revolt’s voice and video chat was “unsupported” for self-hosting while they were working on a complete rewrite. Is this still the case?
The other big FOSS Discord alternative is Synapse-Matrix with the Element X client, but no clue how far along voice and video is over there either.
Then there’s Mattermost, which is more work-oriented and has voice and screen share, but no video calls.
I should host some of this stuff to try it out.
The other big FOSS Discord alternative is Synapse-Matrix with the Element X client
I don’t know why people keep comparing Discord and Matrix. They’re nothing alike. And the Element X app doesn’t even support “spaces”.
Thanks for the clarification! I should try stuff more, and read less landing pages
See, this is why I’m disappointed with revolt. Because it’s such an amazing interface and replaces discord 1:1, but I can’t recommend it because they don’t have federation. So I have to make an account for every server, which is a non starter for me and most of my friends.
It literally takes 20 seconds to make an account and password manager manage everything for you. The federation here would bring almost no value for incredible increase in complexity.
Do you then also proceed to install the client 20 times? Or do you constantly log in and out? Sounds like a hassle that federation would solve!
Yes thats so dumb to make an account on every server.
Yeah, sadly I agree.
I jumped on there six weeks or so ago (before I re-joined here on Lemmy) and was taken by the lovely UI, and it does…work. But there’s some gaps like this. Still, it can be better than the alternative, which is always something to encourage.
But, I totally agree.
Sounds like the perfect use case for an email alias service like addy.io, though, if Revolt is something somebody wants.
I agree that federation would be better, though.
Hey, @[email protected] love your posts, always on point!
Nice shoutout to Revolt!
It’s been a long time since I last saw some news about it. Any comments regarding security and privacy versus Matrix ? Also, last I saw it was a bit of a hassle to self-host, am I right to assume things improved in that area ?
Thank you, very cool! If/when Discord gets bad enough that I try to convince my friends to jump ship, I’ve been thinking about whether Matrix or Revolt or something else would be the next place to migrate to.
Discord relentlessly badgers you to spend more money, sells your data to AI companies, and is about to IPO. How much worse could it get?
