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Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

revolt.chat

381–390 of 413 posts

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#381

Also working on a Discord alternative, albeit my project is a decentralized version — neat to see the space has traction. One thing I couldn’t quickly surmise: it looks like your services are centralized and neither servers/spaces (whatever terminology you’re using for logical groupings of communities) nor DMs have support for encryption. Do you have plans to support this? I don’t mean to ask this as a FUD spreader,…

Hi, one of the revolt developers here, we plan to have e2ee on DMs.

Any reason why you think groups shouldn't be able to have private chats?

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#382
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, if one can afford it. Also not sure what you mean by wire encryption is on for enterprise plan and income based. Their plans are size based.

I worked with them and had meetings with them in person. SSO and TLS were Enterprise-only features, and enterprise pricing was percentage based. It was insanely expensive.

Interesting. Probably it's different now. We use both SSO and TLS and TLS is on by default now. May be they changed their plans since you spoke with them.

https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/reference/faq/security/

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#383
post #238

‎Please delete user 01FEY4XQ988G9BYFH45JKQZF5R. Can't even delete our own account....

> Please delete user 01FEY4XQ988G9BYFH45JKQZF5R .. . It's one thing to make a valid complain about there not being an automated account deletion feature yet, requiring you to send an email. And even then it's not that bad since it's literally a "mailto:contact@revolt.chat?Subject=Delete my account" link. It's another thing to make a temper tantrum out of it: https://imgur.com/U2DJwm7 Please don't be the guy that's te…

They could literally create a #DeleteAccount room on the Revolt "Server" or a specific user/bot that could handle deletion request instead of using emails. (Revolt is literally a communication platform!)

I created my account from an email address that could not send emails. (Unless I manually create an alias.)

They told me "Well, did you sign up just to delete your account afterward ?, You could look at the screenshot on the homepage."

I just wanted to test the platform, I don't need a specific reason to have my account deleted.

It reminds me of theses business where you can subscribe through internet but where you need to call them over the phone to cancel the subscription.

It was simpler to create a Curl loop to get my account deleted then sending an email.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question, maybe a bit more meta - is why not instead work on features for matrix and a client like element? As if the world needs yet another slack-like. xkcd_15_competing_standards.png

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.

I mean, there's matrix. Just because you can federate, doesn't mean you have to. You can run it in isolation (in fact, it's even easier). Additionally, you don't have to care about or enable encryption either.

Matrix also has nothing to do with UI or UX. The clients do. Write a new client if all you care about is UI/UX. You have a much higher chance of success.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

FWIW, as a mostly backend/native developer, I know that I've spent way too much time looking for a widget set that works well enough for my needs. These days, if I need a front-end, I'll be targeting the web or Electron.

So, +1 to the developers of Revolt.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks all for the responses - the whole “matrix doesn’t have voice channels” thing is much clearer now: it’s not the hard bit (voice/video conferencing!) but just the UX of how it’s hooked up. This we can fix :)

"it's not the hard bit but just the UX" – I think this is not a good statement. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it shows a certain state of mind: Tech/protocol/crypto/algorithms are hard, but UX is just decor and easy. That's just wrong. For many users, UX is way more important than Key Backups and Cross signing of devices. If FOSS projects want to be an alternative to Slack/Discord, then these things are pre…

Well, tech/protocol/crypto/algorithms require changes to all servers involved. UX is something that can be deployed and iterated upon much more easily. That makes it the "easy bit", for some definition of easy.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any reason to not use the Matrix protocol underneath?

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#388
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with them and had meetings with them in person. SSO and TLS were Enterprise-only features, and enterprise pricing was percentage based. It was insanely expensive.

Interesting. Probably it's different now. We use both SSO and TLS and TLS is on by default now. May be they changed their plans since you spoke with them. https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/reference/faq/security/

Thanks, seems like they indeed changed it (good on them! this always bugged me.)

> Atlas requires TLS connections for all Atlas clusters. After July 2020, Atlas will enable Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol version 1.2 by default for all new Atlas clusters regardless of the MongoDB version.

The last time I interacted with them was in 2019.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of replying to an overtly aggressive post on language bashing nonetheless - can you explain why rustups implementation of `curl https://sh.rustup.rs | sh` is worth mentioning? My understanding, from the 1,000 other times these flames start, is it's done properly and no more dangerous than any other way of running 3rd party binaries from a remote source. Regardless of any other thoughts on Rust folks I'll…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6650987 https://blog.dijit.sh//don-t-pipe-curl-to-bash https://sysdig.com/blog/friends-dont-let-friends-curl-bash/ https://www.seancassidy.me/dont-pipe-to-your-shell.html

Many of the things in this link are avoided by our script. For example, that last one is made impossible by putting the contents of what is to be executed in a function, and then invoking that function at the end. If the connection closes early, nothing will be executed.

The last ones are the same as any other way of downloading software that's executable, and not specific to curl | bash.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#390
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our surveys show that most users use stable rust, with few using exclusively nightly. The issue here isn’t about backwards compatibility, it’s about forward compatibility.

Isn't this a matter of perspective? The older Rust compiler is not forwards compatible with the new project. The newer project is not backwards compatible with older Rust compilers

Compatibility is a property of two releases, and it is usually discussed in the context of the API you provide to consumers. It's Rust that's providing APIs here, not the projects themselves. Either way, the parent is talking about Rust here, so that's the perspective being shown.
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