Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

revolt.chat

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 562 posts

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#361

Post by concerndc1tizen »

drpossum wrote: post #303
concerndc1tizen wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you belligerent?

Well, concernedc1tizen, I don't like it when people spout of misinformation. Especially when it comes to deep societal issues like pervasive advertising. Making thoughtless and inaccurate blanket statements hurts the overall discussion. "Belligerence" as you call it is direct, unambiguous, and will probably be remembered.

That's fair.

But I've never seen these ads myself, so it's surprising.

The Americans do take pervasive advertising to the next level though, with product placement, "influencers", and other deceptive tactics. Their behaviors are a major cost to the legal system, because more legislation has to be introduced to govern against their obviously anti-social and exploitative behavior.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#362

Post by korse »

The problem with Discord is that it doesn't allow for servers in the same way a protocol like IRC does. Some commenters have alluded to this.

From a quick glance, revolt.chat doesn't allow for server creation either. Am I mistaken or is this pretty much a joke (Discord replacement with the only real benefit being a 'trust us bro, we're European' sort of promise to not do bad things)?

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#363

Post by notepad0x90 »

I think I'm using every chat platform that has wide adaption in tech circles. The one trend I'm seeing is that most of us just use the platform random communities insist on us using, we don't use them out of preference. And those communities choose the platforms because of the support they're getting from companies like discord and the amount of work needed to moderate and administer the community under the platform. My point being: community admins are the real consumers of these products, not normal users.

If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. But if I have to run a community, I will chose whatever platform requires the least effort while integrating well into all my administrative and devops workflows.

If I could speculate a bit, I think discord webhooks and bot api has helped it succeed a lot. But things can be improved upon. Making it dead-easy to integrate into github actions, alert/monitoring platforms,etc.. is a huge selling point. It should be easier to use a platform like this to send notifications than with email. And it should have at minimum one "bridge" type integration that is natively supported: for email! It's really mind-blowing to me with M365, how I have to switch between teams and outlook. How come they haven't figured out how to get and respond to emails from within teams? (the reverse is possible but doesn't work well).

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#364

Post by TulliusCicero »

mikewarot wrote: post #341
lordofgibbons wrote: post #47

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 deceptive nature of Discord's "servers" has always made me wary. You're trusting one service with everything, it's Reddit all over again.

The nature of Discord "servers" is exactly why they won.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#366

Post by TulliusCicero »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #340
ksp-atlas wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cinny exists as a discord-like client, thing is, Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. Also, the space/room system works differently to discord server/channel

I've never used it but Matrix does seem to support conference calls, if not natively then via Jitsi. I'm sure a good app can paper over the differences to get a voice-chanel out of it if this is what people are after, though I've never really used this much on Discord. The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be…

If it only works per-client, then it almost doesn't exist. That's one of Discord's strengths.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#367

Post by TulliusCicero »

foresto wrote: post #338
ksp-atlas wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cinny exists as a discord-like client, thing is, Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. Also, the space/room system works differently to discord server/channel

> Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. It's in progress. Keywords: MatrixRTC, Element Call https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...

Does it have persistent voice channels with simple app/game streaming for free?

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#368

Post by kibwen »

dmonitor wrote: post #317
elif wrote: 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

It's annoying UX, but unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that the alternative is worse. When channels are opt-in, it makes discoverability effectively infeasible in practice. This is what the Element clients that I've seen do (following the IRC convention), and it just means that everyone clusters in the default channel and the others all wither on the vine.

That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#369

Post by airstrike »

didip wrote: post #306

I am surprised that it is written in Rust. Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower. Maybe it's needed for audio/video streaming? Is the API discord compatible? That's basically necessary for adoption.

I would pick Rust for 9/10 of problems today.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#370

Post by hbosch »

bryanhogan wrote: post #73
peterjaap wrote: post #8

So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with the unicorn-puking emoji-littered eye-scorching UX/UI garbage that Discord is? Interesting.

I think Discord, especially when it was new, had amazing UX and UI. Nowadays it definitely became bloated and new features don't integrate that well into the existing UI, but it is still on a perfectly useable level, currently.

Discord's UX is a testament to the fact that people will learn complex systems if they believe all parts of the system are valuable. This is the same truth as, for example, spreadsheet software.

The only thing "bad UX" means anymore is that you have parts of your app that people don't find valuable, and you're showing it to them anyway.

Post reply on HN