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Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

revolt.chat

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Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#341

Post by cassonmars »

schmorptron wrote: post #306
antcas wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to your project or a way to follow your progress? I'm interested in decentralized community platforms.

I was curious too, on their profile it says "Howler", so I'd assume it's this? https://github.com/HowlerChat/Howler

Correct — I suspended development on the repository a few weeks ago to switch from launching centralized and federated initially to going fully decentralized at the start of the public beta. I’m taking the time to work on an extension to double ratchet to extend to group conversations but avoid a painful group ECDH key rotation scheme or take on integrity compromises like with megolm.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#343

Post by stouset »

mhh__ wrote: post #284
stouset wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynicism aside, from what I’ve seen it’s been the former. See regex and rg by burntsushi as an example.

Don't get me wrong there's a lot of room for speed in programs we use regularly, but I make two observations: 1. Speed is usually found by by people have worked on existing tools in the space, and they don't often make that much of a song and dance about it beyond that theirs is faster. 2. Speed is found in the minds of people not in their tools. When you get past a certain amount of native- ness, you get optimizatio…

You were the one that cynically asked if the advertised performance improvements were real or imaginary, not me.

To your point, many of the improvements from Rust-based tools appears to come from the ability to express performant semantics safely and elegantly in the language. You could write an equivalent in C, but the Rust one comes naturally, can be expressed at a higher level with better abstractions, and often comes out with top-tier performance before even investing in microoptimizarions (as long as the Big-O performance is in check).

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#344

Post by genewitch »

NmAmDa wrote: post #252
matbatt38 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not much (any ?) open-source self-hostable good slack/discord-like apps. Open source projects usually focus on federation and/or encryption when Revolt focus on UI/UX. If you're looking for a free software that just works, with good UI and you don't care for encryption, that might just be the best option out there. I'm not sure you can find anything more convincing.

There is Mattermost which is very good self hosted alternative to slack. Big players like CERN are using it.

Mattermost and rocket.chat don't do voice themselves. Discord does, in the client (no jitsi, etc) Matrix with coturn also does localized voip (i.e. confined to the homeserver) if configured correctly.

When I hear discord I generally think of voice/video chat and screen sharing, and less about text chat; this may be a side effect of all the bridges, though, as I tend to chat on IRC and all three of my primary discord channels are bridged.

I run matrix, mattermost, and rocket.chat. I like the api/whatever of mattermost but I really like the overall feel of matrix the best.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#345

Post by genewitch »

busterarm wrote: post #268
superkuh wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can of course install from your package manager Debian 11 was released a couple weeks ago and the rustc it ships with is already so out of date (7 months old, gasp!) software written for modern rust versions can't be compiled with it. And this isn't a Debian only problem.

For those that say that it can't be done, most of Haskell's ecosystem updates frequently in Arch.

Also rust updates fine in gentoo, as I know from compiling Firefox, but mentioning Gentoo all the time as an alternative to Ubuntu got old in 2012, hah.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#346

Post by zorkian »

eschaton wrote: post #339
zorkian wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run the infrastructure department at Discord which includes our anti-spam engineering team -- Just want to +1 what you're saying and confirm that we are never trying to ban third party clients (that aren't self-bots). Honestly, it would be a waste of our time and basically do nothing good for Discord. But as you correctly point out, they do sometimes trip the ever-evolving heuristics we build that try to identify a…

That sounds like maybe Discord actually supports third party clients? Or is there some subtlety to this that I’m missing?

Define 'supports.'

It's still against the TOS -- my point is only that we don't specifically look for third party client users and we have no specific plans to do so.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#348

Post by NmAmDa »

genewitch wrote: post #344
NmAmDa wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Mattermost which is very good self hosted alternative to slack. Big players like CERN are using it.

Mattermost and rocket.chat don't do voice themselves. Discord does, in the client (no jitsi, etc) Matrix with coturn also does localized voip (i.e. confined to the homeserver) if configured correctly. When I hear discord I generally think of voice/video chat and screen sharing, and less about text chat; this may be a side effect of all the bridges, though, as I tend to chat on IRC and all three of my primary discord…

I was saying that mattermost is reliable alternative to slack. I wasn't talking about Discord.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#349

Post by zorkian »

rusht wrote: post #323
zorkian wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. We (Discord) moved off of MongoDB for various reasons and are quite happy about that decision but managing Cassandra/Scylla clusters is not exactly a walk in the park either.

If you had to do it all over again, would you still start with MongoDB or would you go with Cassandra right off the bat?

I didn't make the original decision but if I were starting something and I had no idea whether or not it'd be successful, I'd do whatever was the absolute fastest way to get to MVP. That'd probably be a cloud database, honestly -- but a modern MongoDB would be technically fine too (licensing stuff notwithstanding.)

Most startups fail not because they picked a suboptimal database for their usage but because they didn't build something that was good or it didn't achieve product market fit. I wouldn't worry about your database over-much in the beginning (unless it's critical to what you're doing and in that case, worry like hell, but you will probably know if that's the case.)

Many of Discord's issues with Mongo were exacerbated that we were using TokuMX which was abandoned shortly after we started using it. A few years into Discord we found ourselves with a rapidly scaling dataset and userbase that was built on top of an abandoned and not super popular third party version of MongoDB. (Funny story: at one point towards the end we realized that all of the packages had been pulled from every mirror we could find and literally the only place we could find the package files was off of some gov.uk mirror... that was a bad day. Thankfully we had the hashes and were able to validate the packages...)

FWIW, we did honestly debate moving our core user model (which was what was left in TokuMX by the end there) into a modern version of MongoDB -- some of the things we did (reverse indexes, secondary indexes, locking, etc) are much more complicated in a database like Scylla. It was tempting to just migrate the data from one "Mongo" to another and call it a day.

We didn't for a variety reasons, not least of which is keeping things simple by reducing the number of technologies you have in production (like when we chose to embrace Rust we went back and migrated nearly all of our Go systems).

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with not running MongoDB anymore, but not because MongoDB is inherently bad. It's popular for a reason!

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