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Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

revolt.chat

191–200 of 413 posts

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I see “Written in rust” as more of a meme, often using buzzwords like “blazing fast” and “memory safe.” Electron is definitely worse than rust is good.

Is Rust as blazing fast as Electron is slow?

Electron is not necessarily slow - see Visual Studio Code; it's certainly not as reactive as Sublime Text, but it's fast/reactive enough.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#192
post #172

So is it fully decentralized? Nowhere is this talked about so I assume not. If not, how are they going to pay for servers?

It's not decentralized and they don't plan to decentralize it.

One thing some may consider "decentralized" is that you can self-host

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#193

Finally, something that outright says that its intent is to be a discord alternative. So many platforms try to sell themselves on some other feature, rather than just being open source and self-hostable. So many things, like Matrix, come close, but lack key components to really competing, such as voice channels rather than calls. I hope this goes somewhere!

The whole "matrix doesn't have voice channels" thing is a bit frustrating, because... in Element, you can hit the voice or video call button in any channel (not just voice channels!) and it will spin up a voice/video conference in that channel. If you then switch channel, you'll stay in the original conference, unless you drop and rejoin the new one. I think that's basically precisely the same capability as you get i…

The difference is that Discord voice chats work like "meeting rooms".

I don't want to call everyone in a channel, I want to see who's already hanging around and join them on a whim. It's not really "calls" per se as you don't actually call anyone and they're not coupled to actual text conversation channels.

That's the big UX difference, and it's a big deal for gaming and more casual communities with many participants.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the monolithic HN myth again. That's right, let's just ignore that this place has thousands of readers, thousands of commenters, and that there's no thing called "HN" to talk about as it if had intentionality and/or opinion.

While the readership may be large and diverse, there is nevertheless a Hacker News zeitgeist, especially due to the way downvoting causes comments to be greyed out. The acceptable range of discourse does not extend to anything non-flaggable, and comments do not stand or fall based solely on their thoughtfulness or logic. This forum is still a popularity contest, and there are both winners and losers.

Greyed out comments are still legible. I regularly see people saying things like "I'm sure my comment will be flagged", and days later, it just isn't. Sure, there's a popularity contest - unless you get rid of voting and display-in-vote-order, there always will be. But I would say that paying much attention to that rather than the contents of comments represents a personal choice to be distracted by the noise of the "contest", even while the signal remains in plain sight.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you consider Qt or some other cross-platform native option? There was just recently a HN article [1] on the topic of cross-platform development and UX, with a few alternatives proposed. I think some teams just reach for the Electron tool by default now, instead of weighing each alternative and then choosing it with eyes open. Maybe your team did examine the pros and cons, but it seems the overall software industr…

Electron leverages web-style development, which Qt (or GTK or FLTK, or JUCE, or wxwidgets, or libui ... etc) does not manage to do in any real sense. 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.

"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.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance is more important that cross-platform support. If a user has money to feed more and more and more resources into a gluttonous, hideously inefficient web browser masquerading as a program, they have enough money to get on the platform everyone else is on. 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 realiz…

> Do we run our own servers? No, you run them? 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.

Not very familiar with Discord, but from what I understand it seems everyone runs their own server? Like every game/topic/etc community has their own server?

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#198
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd probably recommend ScyllaDB for NoSQL. It's a replacement for Cassandra (which it's mostly compatible with) which is more or less the de facto standard for large NoSQL deployments at big companies, but it's written in C++ rather than Java so it's even faster (and has more consistent latency) and easier to deploy. And it's been around long enough at this point that it's established and not likely to just disappear…

ScyllaDB looks interesting but that AGPL license is a no go for some organizations.

True, but revolt seems to be using AGPL themselves, so I doubt it would be an issue for them.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would strongly urge you to consider migrating to an alternative database, given MongoDB's SSPL license that is difficult to comply with.

What are the best nosql databases? half of our devs dont like sql much (ive tried to make them use orms too, didnt work)

> half of our devs dont like sql much

SQL the language or defined schema and relational data?

I'm honestly curious what it means to "not like" sql - and what/why one would prefer eg mongodb.

Ed: looks like they're running quite close to the db - but doesn't look like there's much tooling?

https://github.com/revoltchat/delta/blob/master/src/database...

https://github.com/revoltchat/delta/blob/master/src/database...

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