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Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

revolt.chat

321–330 of 562 posts

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#321
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think that's an inherent notion of Discord at all, although it is a case of poor defaults. I turn on most of the muting settings immediately when I join a new server (notify for: nothing, suppress @everyone and all role @mentions, etc). Throughout the day, I'll mainly click between the 2-3 servers I actually care about, and every few days I'll go through some of the others. New messages are still marked once I click in so I know where I left off, pings are still highlighted so they catch my eye as I'm scrolling through, but if I don't care about a conversation in a channel, I can just scroll to the bottom and it's all immediately marked as "read."

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#322
post #320
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#323
post #320
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Telegram is the undisputed king of shady shit, at least insofar as centralized services go.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#325
post #132

What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing. What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much? What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?

It's very, very badly performing. And yet every time I want to start it, it requires another 15 updates.

An example of the worst-of-both-worlds 'always needs updates' like a website but 'takes over your screen (while strobing your taskbar) so you can't multitask' like a desktop program.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#326
There's a massive shady component of discord inherent to how access and security are at the whim of ar arbitrary discord mods. 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 sickeningly, 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

I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?

EDIT: moved this to a global comment as it was too tangential to where I originally replied

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#327
post #68

The homepage has no explanation of where the server is in all this? Github page doesnt help either?! Where is my data stored?

According to another comment itt it is federated.

I didn't see federation mentioned anywhere, just self hosting. The difference:

- Self hosted means everyone has their own server, people need to register for the server they're interested in using. Websites are an example of this: you host your own system independently of anything else going on (though there are hyperlinks to cross-link content, which aren't necessarily present in other self-hosted software). Git servers are another example, like Gitea or Forgejo or Gitlab or gitweb

- Federated usually lets you connect servers, so that if I'm on HN and want to post a comment on a Reddit thread, if they were federating, I could just do that without logging into reddit specifically (let alone registering a completely separate account for the other server). The best example may be email, where I don't need to register with Google (yet) to send a Google user an email but I specify @gmail.com after the user's name. A more recent popular example is Mastodon

Each has upsides and downsides, like having to moderate content from other servers and having a much more complex protocol (federated) versus being independent and simple but also being another walled garden (self hosted)

Edit: confirmed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278375

> > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#328

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.

"Weary" or "wary"? Or both?

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#329
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even IRC was better for data archiving and searching. We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots. It's really insane how much information is on Discord that is both impossible to discover and will silently disappear at some point.

> We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots. But only IF you are good at regex. On discord you can easily filter by date or date range, if it has media, if it contains an URL or what user/roll got mentioned.

Discord search thinks it knows better than you and won't let you search verbatim.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#330
post #323
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Telegram is the undisputed king of shady shit, at least insofar as centralized services go.

Yea but how many children's games use telegram to manage their community?
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