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Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

revolt.chat

91–100 of 413 posts

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#91
post #3

Not sure "written in Rust" is a headline thing that's worth mentioning anymore. Particularly amusing in this case when parts of Discord are written in Rust too.

It makes sense to specify the language for open source software. A lot of us are devs who might actually fiddle with the source, if it's written in a language we like to fiddle with.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another interesting point is that Conduit (Rust-based implementation of the Matrix homeserver) got a beta release last week.

I'm closely following Conduit and Dendrite. Running a Synapse server currently. Staying on topic, Dendrite is written in Rust, meant to be super performant. Stoked for hybrid-P2P via Bluetooth LE for offline usage. Edit: looks like I got confused. Conduit is written in Rust. Ssenica was right, Dendrite is written in Go. To coffee I go!

Dendrite is written in Go, Conduit is written in Rust

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#93
post #75

Considering the Discord backend uses a bunch of Erlang/OTP AFAIK, I'm not sure Rust is an upgrade.

They also use Rust when they hit the limits of the BEAM in specific ways, eg. this is a great read: https://blog.discord.com/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-m...

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#94
post #89
post #3

Not sure "written in Rust" is a headline thing that's worth mentioning anymore. Particularly amusing in this case when parts of Discord are written in Rust too.

Also, only the backend is written in Rust. The desktop client is an Electron app: https://github.com/revoltchat/desktop

Now I want to know if HN hates Electron more than it loves Rust. Or do they perfectly cancel out?

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#96
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm closely following Conduit and Dendrite. Running a Synapse server currently. Staying on topic, Dendrite is written in Rust, meant to be super performant. Stoked for hybrid-P2P via Bluetooth LE for offline usage. Edit: looks like I got confused. Conduit is written in Rust. Ssenica was right, Dendrite is written in Go. To coffee I go!

Dendrite is written in Go, Conduit is written in Rust

Oops! Well spotted! Edited my comment to reflect that.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#97

How is bot support ? (Or just regular accounts that can send messages using APIs and not GUI clients) I run an instance of matrix for alert bots only but Synapse is too heavy and Dendrite is focusing too much on federation and less of chat related features.

Hi one of the developers here, bot support does exist, we have multiple libraries in different languages you can use, checkout https://github.com/insertish/awesome-revolt

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#98
post #3

Not sure "written in Rust" is a headline thing that's worth mentioning anymore. Particularly amusing in this case when parts of Discord are written in Rust too.

People often use "written in" when they are targeting devs and contributors as no end-user cares about in which jargon we write stuff. In this case, I don't get why they brag as this definitely hits my spaghetti detector: https://github.com/revoltchat/delta/blob/master/src/database...

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#99
post #18

Curious why you decided to use MongoDB as opposed to HBase or Cassandra? Discord moved away from MongoDB because its sharding is “complicated to use and not known for stability.” Are these issues not relevant anymore?

Hi, one of the developers here, there was no specific reason why we went mongo at the start, but there have been talks to move to a different database if needed. Currently mongodb is fine for us.

I would strongly urge you to consider migrating to an alternative database, given MongoDB's SSPL license that is difficult to comply with.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#100
post #4

How does it compare to matrix? Would have been nice to use that since it’s an open protocol that already takes privacy seriously

Their FAQ on “Why no federation?” is relevant: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/federation

I think the punchline on the FAQ entry is:

> Matrix is incredibly buggy at times and it’s left a sour taste in my mouth.

Speaking as project lead for Matrix... I can see where this is coming from. Were we doing Matrix from scratch again, we'd have a smaller scope and polish each feature more before releasing and moving onto the next thing. However, we're very aware of this, and these days do almost nothing else other than polishing the current codebase - for instance, Synapse's RAM usage has dropped enormously (https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1434912387933560837) - all the main serverside bottlenecks have been removed; we're working on speeding up joins enormously; Element's performance is improving massively; we're working a complete rethink of the client-server sync protocol to ensure that only the bare minimum data is ever synced to clients by default. The only new feature work we have on the horizon is exiting Spaces (groups of rooms) from beta, and adding Threading. Otherwise, it's "just" a matter of fixing remaining E2EE bugs; reworking E2EE onboarding UX, and lots and lots of polish.

Critically, *NONE* of these bugs are due to federation or decentralisation. Ironically, the federation bit of Matrix is one of the most robust bits these days - after we spent ages polishing it in 2018-2019 to fix bugs in the merge resolution code. So I think the...

> Federation and Discord-style protocols are inherently incompatible

...assertion in the revolt FAQ is completely false, and Matrix already disproves it. Residual bugs in Matrix implementations are more thanks to the complexity of federation/decentralisation/encryption sucking a lot of energy away from the more business-as-usual things which you'd focus on if building a Revolt/Rocket/Mattermost style thing.

Anyway: Revolt looks cool, and we wish them the best, and hope that they will indeed bridge into Matrix in future, which is honestly quite a good compromise - https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/07/gitter-now-speaks-matrix#... is the guide to follow to rapidly plug an existing chat system into Matrix, much as we did with Gitter :)

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