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Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

revolt.chat

311–320 of 562 posts

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it is the chat program treadmill. Spend investor money to host a completely commoditized program. Of course it is better than the version that costs money by virtue of being free. Eventually run out of investor money and do something unpopular to raise revenue, leaving the opportunity for the next iteration to come in for free and take your spot. The only thing I don’t really understand is why investors keep fa…

Investors aren't falling for it. Users are falling for it. 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…

Skype is ending this year. Some founders and investors won but only thanks to greater fools.

(notable that three of the four greater fools in your post are Microsoft)

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#312
post #51

Is this still centralized? Or can you self-host without needing a separate client instance for each host?

https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted As for clients I don't know.

8 GB RAM minimum for a non-graphical server software?! This thing must have more components and services than my desktop OS while having a few website open in Firefox and Chromium each

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#313

The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers. 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.

The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc.

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.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#314
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been in a Discord server and thought "Wow this server doesn't do the moderator LARP-ing thing".

My dream is to be invited into a mildly popular server (more than 15 users), than doesn't have 50 channels, 8 separate roles and T&C to agree to. It hasn't happened yet. An entire generation of bureaucrats and bean counters is learning the ropes on Discord.

I'd consider beancounter to be best case. At least a beancounter works for the company and gets paid. It's like they know they're Koolaid drinkers but every server is riced up with Discord's product pipeline like an aftermarket Honda.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#316
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only person who sees this as a negative? I don't want everything I do to be in the same place. 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 common for users to have multiple accounts and use the built-in account switcher.

While useful, I don't think that addresses much of anything in this context.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#317
post #313

The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers. 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.

The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc. It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked…

discord needs to abandon the notion that every message in every channel deserves to be read by every user. it’s absurd in servers with >50 users

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I didn't understand, are you claiming that gamers (perhaps one of the most notoriously toxic communities) are not hostile towards game developers?

Ahhh context was missing. I meant in actual game development discords for game developers, not games that have discords from the developers. 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 mention…

> extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

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.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really is no other app in this space on the same quality as Discord. Discord was born out of Skype, Teamspeak and similar being so awful to use. Discord took the complaints from these and made a product which was the best version of them all.

They must have been super crappy them because Discord is terrible to see and terrible to use.

All clans' voice chats that I've been in were via Mumble, hosted on the server of whoever was the Linux nerd of the clan (nowadays that's me). No complaints about that software, but I heard lots about Skype and Teamspeak indeed. Mumble also uses TLS for encryption and authentication so it was more secure than anything else at the time as well, and more secure than Discord because the admin could maybe listen in but that's another team member and not a stranger working for a commercial entity

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 ^^'

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#320
post #313

The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers. 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.

The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc. It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked…

There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control.

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.

[0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI

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