notepad0x90 3 hours ago

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).

  • juliangmp an hour ago

    >If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between.

    I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them. Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users can't find their results in search engines.

    • notepad0x90 29 minutes ago

      it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML. I prefer discord over LKML any day. But some people prefer them over anything else. That's kind of my point, I don't have the time or energy to complain about this, I just want to talk to the right people. No one asked my preference, so in practical terms, it doesn't even matter.

Legion 3 hours ago

Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has been a net loss for the Internet.

  • BobaFloutist 2 hours ago

    "Push" is the right word, because moderating web forums was always a labor of love, and automated trolling/spamming has only gotten easier and more prevalent, not to mention anti-mod culture.

    It's just too hard to moderate a space with so little friction, and any friction you add chases away all but the most dedicated users -- and the most dedicated users are often the ones more likely to get entangled in some insane drama and try to burn the whole place to the ground.

    It's a difficult problem. I've always wondered what it would actually cost to actually, properly moderate a reasonably sized forum if you paid a professional mod team real wages and gave them proper tools. Probably way more than we would guess.

    • mystified5016 2 hours ago

      No. A readme on GitHub that only says "documentation on discord" is an active push by the developers to contain everything within discord.

  • happyweasel 2 hours ago

    Absolutely. Information can no longer be retrieved via internet search. Discord and Slack are effectively silos.

    • nijave 13 minutes ago

      Sure but you can search for communities then use the platform-native search. Not as convenient as a search engine natively supporting, though.

    • dbg31415 32 minutes ago

      A lot of sites now block non-Google search engines from accessing their data.

      Honestly, I find it easier to check a Discord server than to get useful results from DuckDuckGo these days.

      Google has done whatever it takes to incentivize people not to use competitors. It sucks.

  • notepad0x90 2 hours ago

    The real loss for the internet is the puritan approach to federation and decentralization. It's either that or app-centric solutions like matrix. Even forums weren't discoverable easily. I'll say this, matrix really has the right idea, it just does too much too fast. An SRV DNS record indicating your matrix server should be enough, then browsers should auto-discover the 'matrix' for the website, and via matrix you can comment on a site, leave reviews, chat with visitors, post forum-style,etc..

    But as I mentioned in another comment, what's more important is how easy it is to administer and setup. The experience for site/community owners is the critical factor for adaption.

    • ghostpepper 2 hours ago

      Forum posts were indexed by search engines - doesn’t that alone provide a minimum level of discoverability?

  • zamalek 3 hours ago

    Don't forget IRC. My previous employer [very reasonably] blocked Discord with their MITM. This meant that the numerous developer/package discords were inaccessible to me.

    Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).

  • rikroots 2 hours ago

    I started a Discord 'server' for my JS Canvas library thing a couple of years ago because - apparently - it was a "good way to build a community". Not only have I failed to build a community, I've grown to hate its UI and confusion of channels.

    I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a community around the library. I keep staring at PhpBB ... but it feels too oldskool, so: nope.

    I am beginning to like the idea of a self-hosted Discourse[1] thing; there seems to be a fair number of active tech-related communities... maybe if I have some time over Easter I'll investigate further.

    [1] https://discover.discourse.org/

    • skydhash 20 minutes ago

      IMO, you should have different channels of communication: A wiki which has commonly requested information; A manual for references; A bug tracker for issues. I strongly believe that IM should be reserved for active contributors. Forums should mainly be user to user help and support.

lordofgibbons 11 hours ago

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.

  • agumonkey 10 hours ago

    I thought the main value of discord was quick and solid voice / game stream integration.

    I rarely feel any connection between servers, but that might just be me.

    • Pikamander2 5 hours ago

      It was a little bit of everything, really. Discord exploded in popularity because:

      1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server.

      2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame.

      3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook kill off most individual forums.

      4. Good marketing, which gave it the critical mass of users and hobby groups that it needed to succeed initially and now make it harder to move away from.

      • killerteddybear 5 hours ago

        Speaking from being very early on the train for Discord, it also had an extremely solid userbase right from the start because much of the early pre-marketing pull into it was for raid groups in the then-new Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. People really needed a chat client to coordinate a big number of players and it was totally free, functional, and new on the scene. It spread a ton in the community and the people working on it were players as well from what I remember, though it's been a long time. So as the game grew in popularity, and everyone who was in a large group was starting to use Discord more, it cemented friend groups that formed in the increasingly popular game along with the Heavensward release and helped solidify a foundation in the gaming community imo.

        • metalliqaz 3 hours ago

          Teamspeak and others were so well entrenched at the time. Wouldn't players of WoW, CS, etc. have brought those tools to FFXIV? What made that special?

          • viccis 2 hours ago

            Its killer feature was how frictionless it was to adopt initially. If I sent you a Discord link, back then you could just click it and be going in under a minute.

            Same reason Zoom quickly took over video chat. It was so easy to use that you didn't have to convince your friends to sign up for it, you just sent them a link and it just worked.

          • BobaFloutist 2 hours ago

            Discord's killer feature for my money has always been that ever user in a call gets a slider bar (and mute button) to control the volume they hear ever other individual user in the call

            Zoom, in 2025, still makes you wait for the host to figure out which of the 30 other people has a dog incessantly barking or is causing the echo or has horrible feedback, and then try to talk them through fixing it before finally muting them.

            • ZeWaka 2 hours ago

              We had that in Teamspeak/mumble/vent, but the chat functionality on those platforms were definitely an afterthought. Not a place you'd cultivate a community.

          • elictronic 2 hours ago

            Every action had more friction and the ability to post images was game changing.

      • hinkley 2 hours ago

        If you can handle a ton of users on not much hardware it’s quite easy to offer a generous free tier. The more “high touch” (resources per interaction) your SaaS is the more VC money you’re setting on fire trying to achieve a network effect.

        And during a downturn the high touch services lose customers faster because part of the virtue signaling of cost cutting is choosing cheaper options that take a bit more work.

    • hnuser123456 6 hours ago

      Completely depends on the niche. The VRChat party scene is comprised of hundreds of clubs as well as a meta-club for people who like to join as many as possible, which imports events channels from dozens of other servers. Some of them even collaborate on scheduling data and can put together a complete calendar/schedule of all events from various clubs each day.

    • dan_can_code 10 hours ago

      For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.

      • nativeit 8 hours ago

        I have noticed it’s frequently the only outlet for communication with developers and communities, which I find worryingly closed off and hostile to users.

        • 9283409232 7 hours ago

          Users are worryingly hostile to developers.

          • thoughtpalette 6 hours ago

            If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the opposite.

            • Arelius 5 hours ago

              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?

              • thoughtpalette 4 hours ago

                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 mentions of AI.

                Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.

                • 9283409232 4 hours ago

                  > 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.

                  • thoughtpalette 4 hours ago

                    I can believe that scenario, but I believe in the cases I've seen regarding game dev, It's more pearl clutching from the artists (rightly so) rather than accusations from the asset users.

            • squigz 5 hours ago

              Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.

              • kevinsync 5 hours ago

                I don’t spend much time on Discord servers (mostly just use it for DM with specific people) but certainly spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s / early 00s; are channel bots not a thing? Especially now with LLM APIs and all that, you’d imagine a lot of the FAQ-level questioning would have automated answers in busy project-based servers

                • squigz 4 hours ago

                  Bots are still a thing, certainly, but much like in IRC, they're still usually triggered by devs (of course some users will use them, but then, those aren't the users who need to be pointed to the FAQ)

                  There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P

                  As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.

                  • ZeWaka 2 hours ago

                    Yeah, people never read channel topics so we're forced to use commands & embeds for common things

                    • squigz 2 hours ago

                      Okay but I don't blame users for that particular failing - topics are not easily discoverable. They should be shown above the input bar the first time a user visits a channel or until they dismiss it or something.

        • crowdstriker 3 hours ago

          [flagged]

          • mech422 3 hours ago

            As opposed to IRC? Forums? hell - even an email list... All things that are a lot easier to search then Discord, have much lighter clients, and can be done free.

            Do you really think there was 'no way to communicate' for projects before discord ?

            • crowdstriker 3 hours ago

              You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client. There's a reason they 'just' use Discord. So now you want developers to have to check emails, IRC, forum posts, whatever other outdated communication platform, AND Discord? Why on Earth would they use all that when Discord takes care of all of those features and more.

              Having more than one central place to communicate is 'hostile'.

            • metalliqaz 3 hours ago

              In 2025, a company using IRC to communicate with its users would be like using ham radio. Sure it exists, but it is far too niche to be worth the effort.

      • agumonkey 10 hours ago

        oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their live chat platform in a way :)

  • qwery 7 hours ago

    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.

    • CharlesW 5 hours ago

      It's common for users to have multiple accounts and use the built-in account switcher.

      • starkparker 4 hours ago

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

  • elif 4 hours ago

    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.

    • dmonitor 4 hours ago

      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

      • kibwen 2 hours ago

        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.

        • ZeWaka 2 hours ago

          Note: Discord has given servers the ability to make channels opt-in/opt-out - 'Browse Channels' in the channel sidebar.

      • jacobgkau 4 hours ago

        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."

    • elif 4 hours ago

      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

      • stackskipton 2 hours ago

        I don't think Discord has anymore shady activities than any other large scale social media platform. When I helped moderate a very large server, we had access to Discord Trust and Safety team and they were trying against what is a massive flood. Automated moderation is extremely difficult even with all AI tools unless you 100% block any NSFW content and sexual messaging and even then, you will get false positives.

        I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. If this doctor had called this girl on her cell phone, no one would be mad at Verizon.

        Part of the problem is most parents have no clue about social media/communication tools outside what they use. At my church, I gave presentation about Discord and it was shocking to see how clueless parents were.

      • aryan14 26 minutes ago

        This isn’t fair to say.

        Any platform that’s popular will have its share of undesirable users, out of the company’s control.

        Discord has very good moderation in contrast to other platforms (Constant banwaves on illegal/shady servers, terminating accounts frequently, etc)

      • elif 4 hours ago

        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?

      • api 4 hours ago

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

        • elif 4 hours ago

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

  • mikewarot 3 hours ago

    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.

    • TulliusCicero 3 hours ago

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

  • bsenftner 9 hours ago

    I hate discord, it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy. Plus, it's an information black hole.

    • Mashimo 9 hours ago

      > it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy.

      What does that mean?

      • bsenftner 9 hours ago

        Group mentality that picks and chooses who is "cool" and then bullies everyone else.

        • Mashimo 9 hours ago

          But I assume that is because of the people on that specific server, not because of the software? Or is there something about discord that enables it, that IRC etc. does not have?

          I hang out with friends that predate discord, on discord and can't see it. Same with new servers.

          • dingnuts 7 hours ago

            happens on irc constantly too

            chat rooms are cliques, almost always

            choose any sufficiently populated room on libera chat, join, and start talking a lot without lurking first for awhile and see how the inhabitants react

            • ghostpepper an hour ago

              try going to a pub on a Saturday night, walking up to a group of people you’ve never met, having a conversation, and start talking about something completely unrelated, and see how they react.

              what you’re seeing in online chat communities is just basic social interaction reflected online

        • smittywerben 9 hours ago

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

          • sph 8 hours ago

            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.

            • networked 7 hours ago

              This shows Discord is a genuine successor to Web 1.0 forums. :-)

              Unnecessary channels are unnecessary subforums. User roles are user ranks (https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3.1/kb/article/everyth...), indicating both software permissions and social status. T&C—well, forum engines like phpBB, MyBB, and SMF come with a standard user agreement they show before registration. There is more concern with it now because the Internet is real life.

              As for training an entire generation of bureaucrats and bean-counters, I leave it to the reader to judge.

              • pestaa 3 hours ago

                I like this take. There was something unique how each bulletin board was customized to the administrator's taste.

                And it was up to them to provide plenty onboarding to new users, so they're not overwhelmed by the hundreds of subcategories, and thousands of threads in each.

                We used to be part of no more than a handful of forum communities. Maybe that changed.

            • smittywerben 4 hours ago

              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.

            • doctorhandshake 7 hours ago

              I started and mod a server of about 6k users for a community around a niche software used by professionals, students, and hobbyists. We keep it really simple and focused primarily on people getting questions answered. Recently a small but vocal cadre of hobbyists have been demanding more Discord-y features oriented towards socializing with other users of the software, and our reticence to complicate the server and add features just because Discord offers them has been a point of contention. They seem to think we mods don’t understand Discord. We are having trouble getting them to understand that we are aware of what other servers are like and that we’re deliberately choosing not go that route.

              • Nuzzerino an hour ago

                Can you elaborate on what features they were demanding?

              • ZeWaka 2 hours ago

                What features are you talking about? I admin a server of 9k. The new onboarding stuff, automod, opt-in roles?

                • Nuzzerino an hour ago

                  I’ll assume it was pronoun roles unless we hear back

                  • doctorhandshake 7 minutes ago

                    Not sure why you would assume that.

                    GP was on track - they wanted voice channels, many of them, before we had any demonstrated demand for it at all.

                    They wanted additional, opt-in roles, so anyone could @ a cadre of self-appointed ‘question answerers’ if they, I guess, (and this still isn’t clear to me), felt as though their question was more important than the questions of those who didn’t elect to do so.

                    They wanted auto-mod stuff that would maybe somehow automatically answer people’s questions (‘AI’), etc

                    The software in question (TouchDesigner) is a complex, idiosyncratic, node-based programming environment with a tough learning curve and a GUI dependency that makes question-asking and -answering more onerous than non-graphical programming.

                    As mods we’ve put a ton of effort into helping the torrent of new arrivals ask better (often less lazy or broad) questions and thus get better answers, more often. Many of the requests we get are well-intentioned but seem to think the reason questions go unanswered is because no one saw them, when it’s obvious to us that in many cases, they’re just extremely lazy questions.

                    Unreal has a similar problem, in my experience, with the difficulty of asking a question with sufficient information making it common that those willing to help are still only inclined to go the distance with people who are willing to meet them halfway.

              • smittywerben 4 hours ago

                Are you a partnered server? Are they even still doing those?

                I've never been a mod. I'm just an adult who understands Discord's general operations.

          • Aachen 4 hours ago

            I'll bite. What's the moderator LARP-ing thing?

            I've tried looking it up but among irrelevant results (general LARP info) I just found this comment again as the third result...

            • smittywerben 3 hours ago

              Discord is shifting focus back to gaming [1]. What was it before? A moderation simulator, of course. That's what I mean by LARP.

              You wouldn't stick a kid in the pilot seat of a real Boeing 747, would you?

              [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167147/discord-gaming-f... (2024)

              EDIT- Second hint: To summon Galrog the Destroyer, say "Live. Action. Role. Playing." and clap your hands 5 times.

              But fear not what is ahead; the entire moderation team's activity status has shown "Playing Roblox" for 8 hours. Luckily, it's just a simulation, and none of this is real.

        • bo0tzz 9 hours ago

          Sounds to me like you're hanging out with the wrong people.

        • fazeirony 8 hours ago

          i'm on a number of discord servers. yes, some have that 'mean girls' vibe but considering the content, i expect that. the more tech oriented ones i'm on...that's not an issue at all.

          to me, in general the vibe of a given discord is similar to the general vibe of that topic (i.e some games have terrible, vitriolic cesspools for communities and those discords reflect that. other things, such as one of the rust ones i'm on, reflects that community's vibe which is a lot more wholesome imo).

      • Melonai 9 hours ago

        I think they might've meant "mean girls" energy... :)

    • bastardoperator 4 hours ago

      I started a channel with some friends last year for game servers we started running. It's been so much fun. We were worried about what you're describing, but we've had the exact opposite experience. People are friendly, they go out of their ways to help others especially new joins or people asking questions, and they try to protect the channel from the few people who break the rules.

  • Mashimo 9 hours ago

    > The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects.

    Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)

    • cosmic_cheese 5 hours ago

      The combo of ease of use and rich feature set makes services like Discord hard to resist for users and hard to compete with for FOSS software/services which prefer to take more focused, more technologically-inclined approaches.

      It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.

      IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.

    • timeon 8 hours ago

      Yes but compared to things like Zulip it loads pretty slow.

    • 1oooqooq 7 hours ago

      that's like selling email with gpg as easy to use compared with newgroup.

      anything win when compared to the ultimate underdog. but that's hardly a valid comparisons.

      discord only win from other opensource forums because you don't have to own a domain, i guess.

      • surajrmal 7 hours ago

        Like reddit or Facebook groups? Discord being realtime chat is an important part as well. I don't think it was necessarily competing with traditional forums that are post and thread based.

      • Mashimo 7 hours ago

        I mostly use Discord for real time chat. And around that time Discord got big it was IRC that filled that roll. Or skype for some.

  • INTPenis 10 hours ago

    I think the biggest selling point is clearly the community.

    Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix.

    Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.

    I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.

    • bee_rider 5 hours ago

      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 falling for this? The only real business model is giving their money away. Maybe they get some good ad network profile data in the time between the heel turn and the point where everybody ditches the service.

      • hirako2000 5 hours ago

        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 some (basically) free offering for over a decade until reaching critical user base, then sold off for billions. Reason being precious data along with millions of daily active eyeballs.

        • windward 4 hours ago

          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)

        • Y_Y 4 hours ago

          It's shocking really that Microsoft didn't buy Slack and drive that into the ground too.

          I'm glad to see WhatsApp is proceeding relatively slowly down the Shit-en-slide, since it's completely entrenched in some countries. I've had companies who just assume that I have WhatsApp and it's cool to message me on it instead of sending a text or email.

    • internetter 10 hours ago

      > they took

      They are more than likely still taking, based on the 17% layoff a few months ago

      As is Snapchat, miraculously (Snapchat is the most wildly mismanaged social media company from a fiscal perspective it’s wild)

    • Dracophoenix 9 hours ago

      > The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.

      In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.

      • fullstop 7 hours ago

        They also have ties to Universities with their student hubs. This part is great if you're a student, as you can find clubs and people with similar interests. There is immense power in what an older sibling does, and soon the younger siblings are using it to chat with them. They can chat with their friends from any mobile device or a desktop without the dreaded green bubble or restrictions of SMS / iMessage. In groups, they can hide their identity.

        It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.

      • Zambyte 9 hours ago

        Skype was also still popular among gamers when Discord was first available. That's what my friends and I switched to Discord from.

        These days I refuse to use Discord for political reasons though.

        • curtisblaine 9 hours ago

          What political reasons? I googled for discord political controversies but didn't find anything too shocking.

          • Zambyte 8 hours ago

            I don't like depending on a proprietary commercial product to facilitate my personal relationships. I don't like the fact that they can (and are likely to) ban / block me from talking to my friends for choosing to run a client other than their proprietary web browser wrapper on my computer. I don't like that it's a single point of failure (that often does) for something as easy to host as chat. These reasons probably fall under the "not too shocking" label, but they're important to me.

      • mportela 9 hours ago

        Curse was becoming more popular than TS at the time, but Discord offered a better quality of audio and stable connection. That's why my group of friends migrated to Discord around 2016.

        • Nullabillity 7 hours ago

          TeamSpeak was usually the default option at the time (with some on Mumble). Skype had some presence, but was usually grumbled about beyond 1:1 calls. RaidCall was starting to gain some presence because it was free but otherwise followed TeamSpeak's UX, but was still pretty niche.

          Curse Voice was absolutely nowhere to be seen.

  • alwayslikethis 10 hours ago

    > The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects

    True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server.

    The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.

    • ksp-atlas 5 hours ago

      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

      • alwayslikethis 3 hours ago

        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 made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.

        • TulliusCicero 2 hours ago

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

  • JeremyNT 8 hours ago

    I mean from what I can tell a lot of its recent success is simply because Slack is terrible. Most of the discord "servers" I use which aren't actually gaming related would be almost the same on slack, but slack has a less generous free tier.

    I don't think discord has much of a real network effect, it's just a good value proposition. When the screws tighten that may change.

  • Y_Y 4 hours ago

    "Weary" or "wary"? Or both?

  • smittywerben 8 hours ago

    The selling point to me was it's sophistication in handling moderation issues. But they enshittified it to be like Facebook moderation. Maybe that's why they're going public.

  • yownie 10 hours ago

    I couldn't agree more

das_keyboard 8 hours ago

Looking at https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers it seems that all reasonably active servers are either turkish[0] or anime related.

[0]: Turkey banned Discord in 2024: https://www.reuters.com/technology/turkey-blocks-instant-mes...

  • josteink 3 hours ago

    So like Mastadon then.

    Every time I’ve looked into it, every server I’ve checked has been filled with furries and anime-avatars.

    I mean, I’m glad they’ve found a community where they feel at home, but it kinda makes it a hard pass for the rest of us ;)

    • PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago

      I'm on fosstodon.org. Never noticed anything like that, but I also can't say I spent much time checkout out the avatars.

openscript 7 hours ago

I've accidentally typed https://revolut.chat/ instead https://revolt.chat/. Apparently I wasn't the first one...

  • JFingleton 7 hours ago

    Revolut (the banking service) and Revolt are both British I believe...

    Seeing as Revolut has been around for a number of years, as a British person I wouldn't have chosen a name so close to Revolut (for any product).

Mashimo 11 hours ago
  • cies 10 hours ago

    This is sorely lacking on the homepage! All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.

    • Aachen 4 hours ago

      May even be required, if you have a license that requires sharing the code along with the product (AGPL). Still not sure why that license isn't more popular, isn't it in the open source spirit that you can get the code whenever you use the product? Same as when you get the binary with GPL license, that you have a right to see what code you're running?

    • Mashimo 9 hours ago

      Yeah, I had to click around a bit to find the link. Oddly it was only on the discover page for servers I found it. Bottom left corner https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers

      But now I also know where to go if I'm in need of a femboy community.

      • MK2k 5 hours ago

        front page, scroll down, there's Developers - Source Code

    • JFingleton 9 hours ago

      Agreed - I usually scroll to the bottom of landing pages to see the Github link - which Revolt did not have. Perhaps a suggestion to the developers?

      It's an unwritten rule :)

    • mattl 4 hours ago

      Not at all when the software is not developer focused.

    • internetter 10 hours ago

      > All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.

      Says who? I don’t see that in the OSI definition

      • prmoustache 10 hours ago

        Nobody but I don't believe any company saying their product is open source if they aren't willing to point me to where to find the code right away.

      • cies 10 hours ago

        Go to ten FLOSS project and check. Some want to be able to quickly assess some tings (is this JS/PHP/Python, or is this Rust/Go -- my interest).

        Someone posted the github link here on HN: why would that be?

peterjaap 11 hours ago

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.

  • bryanhogan 10 hours ago

    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.

    • hbosch 2 hours ago

      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.

  • bilekas 11 hours ago

    I prefer IRC over Discord any day but it's very hard to convince other people not familiar with it to make a move away from Discord to it.

    When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.

    • Mashimo 10 hours ago

      > When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.

      Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history and drag 'n drop file upload.

      Having to host your own bot for pagetitle preview and user management was also not fun.

      You can selfhost your IRC client, which eliminates som of the drawbacks but that also only works for a small portion of people.

      • bilekas 10 hours ago

        > Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history

        It's funny but I personally prefer that the IRC server isn't required to store every chat log indefinitely. You're right though, these are solvable problems, BNC for example but we're getting a little off topic.

  • TulliusCicero 2 hours ago

    > So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with design that appeals to normal humans rather than turbonerds? Interesting.

    • Yizahi an hour ago

      I saw 100+ community force migrate from Telegram to Discord. Most of the people complained about UI/UX, me included. And Telegram is not even very good in that area. Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.

  • diggan 11 hours ago

    I mean, if you are looking for a Discord alternative, isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? If you want something that is the opposite of what you describe, IRC still exists and works well, but not sure many end-users would call it an alternative to Discord.

    • OptionX 11 hours ago

      That and I assume if its open-source you can make clients that look like whatever you'd want.

    • spacechild1 11 hours ago

      > isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for?

      I think this applies to the original target audience, namely gamers, but as a general purpose chat application, e.g. as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.

      Of course, this begs the question why these projects adopted Discord in the first place. I guess the lack of a better alternative (that is not self-hosted)?

      • TulliusCicero 2 hours ago

        They use it because Discord works well and simply, with a rich feature set, that's largely free. And yeah, there aren't FOSS alternatives that actually match up.

      • Mashimo 7 hours ago

        > as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.

        Why is that?

didip 4 hours ago

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.

  • kibwen an hour ago

    > Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower.

    If you're an app dev who's really and truly serious about lowering the barrier to self-hosted services, then you need to consider what the install and deployment step looks like. For languages like Rust that default to producing a single static binary, that's as easy as it gets.

    Likewise, you need to consider that users might want to self-host on a potato, which is where Rust's efficiency shines even for small services.

    These are both things that Mastodon got horribly wrong, for example, by choosing to use Ruby.

  • airstrike 2 hours ago

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

  • vivzkestrel 3 hours ago

    what do you think it should be written in? golang?

gibibit an hour ago

Doesn't anyone else miss the old days of forums like PHPBB and VBulletin for collaboration?

They had everything I needed, and nothing I didn't. Easily searched by Google. Actual pagination instead of stupid endless scrolling.

All the new forums are going to Discord (synchronous) or Discourse (asynchronous) which I find to be much less useful.

  • doublerabbit an hour ago

    I do terribly. However you needed SysAdmin skills to administrate a *nix box.

    System skills to run the forum and webserver configuration.

    And money to pay for the webhost/vps/cloud minus any malicious actions such as DDoS or bandwidth stealing.

    All three are sparse now and not forgetting the laws of the country. UK has become a pain to host anything community oriented.

threesevenths 10 hours ago

A British company making a chat app. What’s the privacy policy? 5 eyes first then you?

  • crtasm 4 hours ago

    It's open source and you can self host it.

  • prmoustache 10 hours ago

    You know it includes a backdoor for the government.

landsman 9 hours ago

Importat is funding for these projects. Plenty of them start as open source with donations which can led to frustration and burnout of developers.

Bluescreenbuddy an hour ago

Truly built with us in mind....Until they get so big someone with a fat check approaches them and then we just have another Discord.

mid-kid 10 hours ago

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

  • magicalhippo 10 hours ago

    https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted

    As for clients I don't know.

    • Aachen 4 hours ago

      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

      • verdverm 3 hours ago

        9 services, 5 theirs, 4 other OSS

    • cdaringe 5 hours ago

      The compose file specified a service for the web app

  • q0uaur 10 hours ago

    edit- shit, it was rocket.chat, i'm so sorry.

    Ignore the below, it is for a different "FOSS" discord replacement.

    i did self-host it for a week to test it out - and honestly i was put off immediately.

    What happens when you set it up according to the docs, is that it automatically "registers" for a license - the free license being limited to 5 users, even if you self host. Ridiculous, and just right out the gate shows me that whoever makes this does not have the user's best interest in mind.

    the UI is also full of stuff that requires an expensive license, and i did not see an easy way to remove that stuff when self hosting.

    • like_any_other 9 hours ago

      License? Isn't revolt open-source, so you could have as many users as your server can handle? https://github.com/revoltchat/backend uses the AGPL, I assume whatever other things a revolt server requires have similar licenses.

      • q0uaur 8 hours ago

        sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.

    • Mashimo 9 hours ago

      I read the FAQ, searched google and the documentation and could not find a single ting about any license.

      • q0uaur 8 hours ago

        sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.

    • internetter 10 hours ago

      What are you talking about. Revolt is a donation funded FOSS project

      • elaus 10 hours ago

        A benevolent assumption would be that GP tries out a lot of stuff (according to their other comments) and therefore mixed something up, unwittingly spreading FUD about Revolt

      • q0uaur 8 hours ago

        sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.

    • hexagonwin 9 hours ago

      maybe you're talking about mattermost?

      • q0uaur 8 hours ago

        sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.

RobotToaster 11 hours ago

The self hosting instructions aren't that friendly imo.

  • diggan 11 hours ago

    The backend seems to be a fairly standard Rust project, you basically run `cargo build --release` and then deploy the binary. For the frontend, it seems like a pretty standard frontend project, you install dependencies, then run build command and you have a bunch of website assets you deploy to your server.

    Overall, seems pretty standard and easy to deploy. Most complicated would be to also run the various services that are supporting the backend, but again, not overly complicated.

    Is there something specific that is missing to be able to self-host this?

    • moiz41510 7 hours ago

      I think it's pointless to selfhost if you have to recompile an app in order to connect to your server. The team should have a field box to add a server URL.

  • IceDane 10 hours ago

    I'm sorry, but what??

    The self-hosting guide even walks you through setting up the VPS on a specific platform. What more do you want? One could even argue that if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything, so from that viewpoint, these instructions are a lot more friendly than they had to be.

jonstaab 4 hours ago

I'm also building a FOSS Discord alternative, but this one's based on nostr: https://flotilla.social

  • ravenbitcoin 4 hours ago

    Flotilla.social and Chachi.chat are both amazing, yet early, Nostr alternatives.

_mitterpach 11 hours ago

Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public, I reckon this might be made in preparation for it. I think it is a wise move to offer an alternative.

The design is very similar to Discord, could this possibly even go to a copyright breach or is the bar for that set too high?

  • internetter 10 hours ago

    > I reckon this might be made in preparation for it

    Revolt has been in development for many years

    > could this possibly even go to a copyright breach

    Ianl but I’d imagine this would require discord to prove they own the “multiple groups, with subchannels” paradigm, which would be difficult when slack exists

    • dingnuts 6 hours ago

      even then it would be a potential patent infringement, not copyright.

      but there's prior art for literally every feature Discord has so as long as they aren't copy-pasting Discord's source code I think they're just fine

      I'm not a lawyer either but I am an SWE and I've had to read and been expected to understand so many goddamned licenses that at this point I feel like I'm expected to be one just to be able to navigate this field

  • MisterTea 5 minutes ago

    > The design is very similar to Discord

    And Discords design is very similar to mIRC.

  • DuncanCoffee 10 hours ago

    I remember a gitea update where they said in the release text something like "new github-like ui" and they basically copied all of it (check some screenshot of the latest version)

    • _mitterpach 10 hours ago

      I would lie if I said I did not ever do something similar, and I am not really aware of any court cases or litigations based on copying a design. Core functionalities, sure.

      There is many an open source software that could actually use a little bit of copying from the thing they are trying to emulate. GIMP is still one of the ugliest programs I have installed on my computer.

      • chuckadams 9 hours ago

        > I am not really aware of any court cases or litigations based on copying a design

        Apple tried it in the 90's with the infamous "look and feel" lawsuits against Microsoft. They lost.

        They've had more success suing Samsung over phone design and UI (which was about more than "rounded corners" to be sure, but a lot of the patents are still questionable).

  • Hamuko 10 hours ago

    When I first saw Discord (est. 2015), my first thought was that it looked exactly like Slack (est. 2013) except was in dark mode.

    • mportela 9 hours ago

      And with good audio chat

  • wooger 11 hours ago

    Lol, the design of discord is identical to about 9000 chat apps no?

    • bryanhogan 10 hours ago

      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.

      • brulard 9 hours ago

        Quality? I see it as extremely bloated, very sluggish and clunky (on M3 macbook pro), search sucks bad and I can not figure out how I should keep track of multiple chained replies (like threads in slack). It's not as bad as teams, but talking about quality seems out of place.

        • Jarwain 4 hours ago

          Discord also has threads, if the server has enabled it.

          I personally haven't really encountered performance issues running discord

      • prmoustache 10 hours ago

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

        • Aachen 4 hours ago

          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 ^^'

      • grumple 10 hours ago

        Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better voice chat to me.

        • Cthulhu_ 8 hours ago

          With an emphasis on the gaming space and open communities, whereas Slack focused on corporate and closed communities.

          I've been in the Go community for a while and they had to write a bot to get access to it (as Slack works invite only) and iirc had to work with Slack engineers to work with the scale they had. Meanwhile Discord's success is down to it being open, anyone can create a new channel and get instant access to things like voice chat.

          Of course, this has its downside, and I'm sure Slack deals with a lot of abuse, ranging from porn to doxxing to it being used as a C&C server.

          • grumple 8 hours ago

            I think it’s a good product. The problem with all these chat apps (as companies to invest in) is there’s no moat; as soon as a more convenient or better option comes along, people will switch. There’s not a big integrated community or advantage to sticking to one app. Which doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t make plenty of money, just that I don’t buy into any hype around them.

      • delfinom 9 hours ago

        I feel like Discord was born out of Slack. Slack was actually once popular for gaming groups but they decided they didn't want to capture that space and focused on business only. Teamspeak and Ventrilo were the alternatives and while they are still solid and arguably still popular with certain groups, they were a bit behind the times.

  • rychco 6 hours ago

    > Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public

    That’s disappointing, but even now it’s hard to imagine they’re particularly profitable. The core functionality of Discord is entirely free and I doubt that Nitro / other paid features earn that much.

    • johnisgood 5 hours ago

      I would like to know this, too. What makes it profitable, then, considering it has little to no ads?

adiadd 7 hours ago

It's tough to compete in a market like social networks, you need mass adoption for high value. Although this looks cool, I'm interested to see how it differs specifically to provide more value than Discord already does (ton of people, various servers, great integrations, etc.)

  • asddubs 7 hours ago

    I think it doesn't necessarily have to be dominant to be considered a success. It's good for people to have the option to choose a free alternative if they want to, where they can be in control of their own data rather than it being centralized and at the mercy of some company, much like with software forges. Of course mass adoption would be cool but I don't think it's necessary to justify these types of projects

  • NewJazz 7 hours ago

    Similarly I'd wonder how this compares to e.g. XMPP or matrix for messaging. Those are the big names in open source and have been for some time now.

seanvelasco 8 hours ago

i wish they picked a more unique name. to me, it just seems like they're a copycat by picking a name that's a synonym - or at least of the same nature - of the word "Discord"

same with the streaming platforms Twitch and Kick

looking at their UI, it's the exact same UI as Discord. no improvements while also inheriting the same flaws that make using Discord neurotic

korse 3 hours ago

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)?

  • TulliusCicero 2 hours ago

    What you classify as a problem is exactly why Discord was a smashing success.

    • korse 2 hours ago

      Financial success, undoubtedly. Successful at distancing users from the systems that underpin their interactions, certainly. As far as granting users more agency over their digital existence, it has been an abject failure, a state consistently exacerbated by the number of tech communities that could easily exist on IRC or a custom platform.

      It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.

      • TulliusCicero 2 hours ago

        A success in terms of popularity, in terms of creating something that regular users enjoy and find value in using.

        > It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.

        It's exactly this sort of sneering attitude that so often causes FOSS projects to fail to catch on in the mainstream.

        The framing isn't "people like this feature set", it's "people got conned". For a certain type of user, they must see others' preferences as beneath them, as lesser.

        • korse 43 minutes ago

          I'm not an elitist and I don't have problems with 'regular users'. What I do have a problem with is all the technical users who know better and turn everything over to Discord corp anyway. How many 'hacker spaces' do you know that use Discord as a primary communications channel?

          They could just as well run a primary communications channel on something sensible, durable and self-hosted that ties in to discord intake for newcomers. Come in to the discord, say hi, chat a bit and then graduate to where the real content is.

          Discord should have been a on-ramp for technical communities, not the foundation.

rmm an hour ago

Still waiting for a new web replacement for phpbb

aragilar 9 hours ago

It's unclear if voice/video are supported or not?

  • entropicdrifter 2 hours ago

    Voice is kinda supported, in the sense that they implemented the feature years ago and then proceeded to decide to do a huge rewrite that they've also decided blocks any sort of improvement or iteration on their voice chat features. Last I checked we're like 3 years into said big rewrite with 0 improvements to voice chat.

  • bovermyer 6 hours ago

    Yeah, this is the part I care about.

    I'm not a big Discord user, but the one thing I do use it for is voice chat and game streaming with friends.

dabeeeenster 11 hours ago

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

  • guy234 10 hours ago

    According to another comment itt it is federated.

    • Aachen 4 hours ago

      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

mogoh 11 hours ago

So, how does it compares to matrix/element?

  • gunalx 11 hours ago

    I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord. If i would want something opensource i would also want something decentralized.

    • diggan 11 hours ago

      > I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord.

      Judging by the FAQ, they see Matrix as a protocol as "obtuse and unstable":

      > Does Revolt have federation?

      > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap. However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are:

      > Implement the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable)

      https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html

      • freeamz 6 hours ago

        It is hard to get E2E (device 2 device) right. I get matrix is not perfect, but I have jet seen an open source alternative with both server/client implementation that get it right.

        One thing about matrix is that every device has a key in addition to the password, that key in in addition encrypted with another password, it makes it very difficult for average user, but then just use matrix in unencrypted mode to get the slack/discord effect.

        • ranger207 5 hours ago

          If Revolt is a Discord alternative, then they may have chosen not to implement E2E because their intended audience generally doesn't care for it and the UX is too confusing for a marginal perceived benefit

    • 42lux 10 hours ago

      Because matrix isn’t the savior everyone makes it out to be it’s rather the opposite.

    • BrenBarn 11 hours ago

      Matrix definitely has problems. I'm not sure if Revolt solves them (and it likely has problems of its own) but I'd say there's room for multiple approaches.

LuciOfStars 8 hours ago

I would move to Revolt in a heartbeat, if it had a PluralKit equivalent. Currently the only thing keeping me trapped on Discord.

maelito 10 hours ago

How does it compare to Element ?

dmos62 10 hours ago

I've recently heard it said that there's a better alternative to Discord called Gilded, but no reasons were provided. Anyone has insights?

butz 6 hours ago

Why even build an app? This app should've been a website. Better pester browser developers to implement "Add to desktop" feature.

  • ddejohn 3 hours ago

    Hard disagree. I'm sick and tired of web apps. Please give me more desktop applications not based on electron.

cedws 8 hours ago

Is it built on Matrix?

I used Riot (now Element) back in the day, but like others have said in this thread, without a network effect these things don't really take off. I haven't heard of anyone using Element for years now.

  • opan 5 hours ago

    I have over a dozen people I regularly talk to on Matrix, though I prefer to not use browser/electron apps, so I only use Element on my phone (separate codebase from other Element), and Nheko on my PC. FluffyChat on Android also seems decent and recently added multi-account support.

  • throwaway9386 6 hours ago

    Not being built on Matrix is a plus, at this point, given the historically poor moderation of that platform.

joshdavham 6 hours ago

Just a bit of critical feedback: the landing page isn’t responsive to a horizontally rotated iPad. Otherwise, awesome project!

tonymet 4 hours ago

Discords performance is unmatched. I hope that’s one of their goals as well

nop_slide 5 hours ago

I don't see anything about funding/pricing, how is this going to stick around for the long term?

elif 4 hours ago

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

Bengalilol 7 hours ago

3'000+ lines of code <- this seems pretty low

snvzz 9 hours ago

I cannot find anything on the website about Revolt's end to end encryption story.

This doesn't give me much confidence.

concerndc1tizen 9 hours ago

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?

  • drpossum 9 hours ago

    > there's no ads

    This is a patently ignorant and ridiculous statement. They absolutely shove their own store garbage every release and upsell Nitro at every opportunity. Here's an article from last year about them explicitly introducing third party ads.

    https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to...

    • concerndc1tizen 6 hours ago

      I would define ads as promoting other businesses' products, as you would see on YouTube etc.

      Upselling is basically just unlocking additional features. If you object to that, then you're objecting to the freemium model, not to "ads".

      • KomoD 5 hours ago

        > I would define ads as promoting other businesses' products, as you would see on YouTube etc.

        They do that, they call them "quests". Companies pay them to promote their product/service and users get rewards for doing a task (like playing a game, watching a video, etc.) https://discord.com/ads/quests

        The article that parent linked even says it.

    • didntcheck 8 hours ago

      A freemium service advertizing it's premium offering hardly seems surprizing or objectional. They're not a charity

      • stavros 7 hours ago

        "It has no ads" and "it's not surprising that it has ads" are basically opposites.

      • drpossum 7 hours ago

        Is this apropos anything? I was pushing back on the claim that there were no ads, though your username suggests the reason.

        • concerndc1tizen 6 hours ago

          [flagged]

          • drpossum 4 hours ago

            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.

            • concerndc1tizen 3 hours ago

              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.

  • oxcabe 9 hours ago

    > 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.

    It's an information black hole, as someone else mentioned in this comment section. Otherwise, it's a nifty communication tool.

    I personally come from running and using {TeamSpeak,Ventrilo,Mumble} servers. Started using Discord in winter 2015, it was just trivial to open a browser tab and join a group session with your friends. The audio experience was an order of magnitude worse when compared to other solutions, but the overall UX and ease of use made up for it.

    > What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?

    If you'd allow me to, I'm going to address this question from a different perspective, as this post is about Revolt: What could Revolt do that would make me, at least, start using it alongside Discord?

    I'd love it if I could self-host a server, place it online and let people find it and join seamlessly, similar to how Fediverse works for other social networks. They don't seem to be interested in adding this: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revo...

    Other than that, I'd see myself using it to run a workspace. Having used Discord as a work-related communication platform in the past, I've come to find voice-based channels very useful, these seem to transmit a better feeling of productivity somehow. Other tools (e.g Slack, Teams) make me feel kind of "alone" when working. Even if it's just for body doubling, I'd argue voice channels are underrated and actually quite helpful for remote workers.

  • harryf 9 hours ago

    That's exactly the question - how does a free communication app achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation despite not having ads or directly selling user data?

    Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place.

    Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data.

    So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.

    • concerndc1tizen 6 hours ago

      And there's no way to delete your chat history basically. You can delete your account, but that doesn't destroy your messages.

      And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.

    • Lanolderen 9 hours ago

      Data on Discord has never been safe really. I don't know how it is nowadays since my memes have gotten less edgy/dank but you could get banned for private messages for a long time.

  • Ukv 8 hours ago

    Many platforms have followed the trend of first offering a legitimately good product to build up a userbase, then squeezing out profit with increasingly anti-user changes, exploiting the fact it's difficult to switch (network effect and intentional lock-in).

    It's not impossible that Discord stays more or less as it currently is, with a few features locked behind its paid subscription but generally a good experience, but it seems prudent to have a backup option for if/when things go further downhill.

  • throwaway9386 5 hours ago

    They use your messages for AI training, even if you disable the AI summaries "feature". I kept seeing events related to AI summaries on a custom client, even with them turned off in the only server I was in.

    They'll hold your account hostage until you give them a phone number if you happen to trigger their "anti-spam" detection. And sending a message with a number below 13 might be all it takes for Discord to withhold your account for age verification as well.

    They basically track every click, every action you take on their client. You can see that if you request a data package.

    Abuse is rampant. There's no way to report servers, channels, or individual users. Things that were all possible in the past, through the Support form, until they made in-app reporting the only option, which relies on reporting individual messages and has a very low rate limit.

    > What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?

    Let's see...blocking that actually prevents you from seeing messages from the person you blocked. A native client. Better reporting tools. Better message deletion tools - you still can't delete every message along with your account. The ability to opt out of having messages fed into AI. None of these are unfeasible.

    > What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?

    The network effect is the reason why technologically inferior solutions like Discord are still thriving.

  • pjc50 9 hours ago

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

    • windward 4 hours ago

      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.

    • Cthulhu_ 8 hours ago

      Sounds like your average web development project though; frequent releases are a good thing, although I suppose for each individual they'll want to slow it down a bit.

      I just wish there were more native applications instead of all the web desktop stuff. But, visual design options and developer availability is a huge factor there. Native iOS designs come the closest to what I'd like to see on the desktop.

    • steezeburger 9 hours ago

      I agree about the updates, but I'm in a shit ton of servers and performance is fine for me. Can you talk to the issues you've had a bit?

  • nickitolas 9 hours ago

    > What do people find upsetting about Discord?

    These are the most common complaints I see from people

    - They don't allow third party clients and some people have various complaints about theirs (e.g resource usage)

    - Some people think discord is too popular, to the point some things that "don't belong there" have moved to discord. This is usually about being search indexable and requiring an account.

    - Fear of monopolostic behaviour ( "enshittification" )

    - Some people are mad that they killed public urls for files uploaded to discord. Mostly this is people running into links to images online and being unable to see them, usually not the uploaders

    - Discord is centralized and you cannot host your own server

    - The only client they allow you to use (See above) is propietary, and some people would rather run something open source

    As for me personally, their search functionality drives me insane. I feel like the exact same query gets completely different results depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, making it super unreliable.

  • ziml77 5 hours ago

    There are ads in discord now. They just call them Quests and the notifications for them can't be turned off.

  • t-3 4 hours ago

    They want my phone number and email address just to look at a forum I don't plan to participate in yet which information I would like to access is siloed in.

  • finnjohnsen2 8 hours ago

    Discord is American. For many in Europe this is a downside now.

    • wigster 7 hours ago

      indeed... Made in Europe, motherland of GDPR.

  • lapcat 9 hours ago

    "Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht...

    Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.

    • PaulKeeble 9 hours ago

      They have been trying to get to IPO for a while. 2 years ago they deleted a huge swathe of accounts to cause those people to create new ones to boost their growth stats and frankly having been caught up in it that was the push I needed to get off Discord. It caused a huge discontentment at the time as it wasn't clear if it was a bug or intentional but Discord didn't fix it.

      They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.

  • crawsome 8 hours ago

    Closed-source, dumb stuff hidden behind premum,and premium ads and popups almost every time you launch.

  • short_sells_poo 9 hours ago

    Let me preface this by saying I use Discord daily to keep in touch with friends. It's a great digital campfire where you can relax with people, talk with them over voice and video or just post random stuff.

    The issue is that Discord has replaced things which it shouldn't have, the internet forums. Discord is the epitome of a golden cage. It is a prison for information, a black hole.

    I'm not even talking about the absolutely atrocious search functionality, but the fact that information inside the Discord walls is impossible to find from the outside. You can't search across discord communities, none of the content there is indexed by web search engines. Entire communities have FAQs and knowledge as pins inside threads inside Discord servers. Things which used to be on the web.

    15 years ago, these discussions would've taken place on forums and on IRC to a lesser extent. IRC itself was a really bad information black hole, but at least the forums were great. They supported long running discussions and were easy to search.

    Now everything disappeared into effectively hidden Discord chats and youtube videos where you need to watch 8 different idiots bramble on for 10 minutes before you find the 30 second segment of information that you were actually looking for and could've been a single paragraph.

    • Brybry 8 hours ago

      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.

      • Mashimo 7 hours ago

        > 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.

        • tredre3 2 hours ago

          Discord search won't even surface partial word matches or typos or matches in URLs (eg you share a facebook.com link then later on you search for "facebook", it won't show you that post).

          Maybe there are some secret incantations I don't know about, but Discord search is positively useless most of the time and I have to manually scroll up until I find what I want (or give up).

        • opan 5 hours ago

          I still use IRC, irssi in particular. My go-to for searching local logs is `less` rather than grep. I have the date on every line in the log file. I can jump to a specific date easily, then search a different term up/down from that spot, and I see context of surrounding lines easily. No regex needed.

        • Brybry 6 hours ago

          Only if it's in the discord search index, which sometimes doesn't include all history, and it does some fuzzy elasticsearch query that works ok for most cases and awful for anything that isn't most cases.

          The metadata filters are nice but they're also what keep it usable at all.

        • windward 4 hours ago

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

        • short_sells_poo 6 hours ago

          Discord search still sucks a lot because by nature discussions are largely unstructured. It's not really suitable for discussing specific topics - only perhaps types of topics. Discord threads could ostensibly fulfil the forum topic role, but their implementations is so utterly incompetent that it is genuinely puzzling. You can't search specific Discord threads, they often disappear from the left hand nav bar even if you subscribed to the thread. Whoever implemented the Threads in Discord should be kept away from computer systems because they are a danger to any application.

          But even if Discord search was good, it still doesn't matter because it is not only a walled garden, it is a hermetically sealed chamber from which no information can escape.

unification_fan 11 hours ago

Pretty cool. I just wish it had its own identity and didn't look like Walmart Discord.

  • rokkamokka 11 hours ago

    I'm all for good UI/UX spreading as much as possible for the benefit of users.

    That said, I've barely used discord and thus can't rightly say if it has good UI/UX.

    • drpossum 10 hours ago

      Do you have other opinions about the UI/UX of apps you haven't used?

nottorp 9 hours ago

This is as centralized as Discord right? No running your own server, should you choose to.

CleanCoder 11 hours ago

The offering in its current form (https://i.imgur.com/zcmEOhr.png) does not feel truly communal.

  • concerndc1tizen 10 hours ago

    What's not communal about it? Should they allow anyone to participate without limits?

  • internetter 10 hours ago

    Discord scale “communities” have tens-or even hundreds of thousands of members

  • Mashimo 9 hours ago

    Can you elaborate?

9283409232 7 hours ago

Discord alternatives have a hard time because of network effects. Does revolt has a bridge to Discord?

bryanhogan 10 hours ago

Love to see this! Worried about Discord's future, with its monopole position greater enshittification is definitely a real risk.

Would also love to see some solution to Discord's problem of being an information black hole here as well.

TZubiri 10 hours ago

Reminder that discord is an app for kids. Is your open source code and volunteer run project going to keep kids safe? Is it an advantage that the comms protocols are open and everyone can build bots? Or a disadvantage for this usecase?

Also, how is it an alternative for Discord if it's in a whole different jurisdiction?

  • verdverm 3 hours ago

    This is an outdated perspective. A lot of open source projects are picking Discord now that Slack has become hostile to small projects. The vast majority of the Discord groups I am in have nothing to do with gaming

  • Lanolderen 8 hours ago

    Not sure about that one. There's a ton of minor edating/esex/grooming going on. You have massive community servers that essentially work like gaiaonline back in the day and tons of servers of 18+ communities. Horny, curious kids will always find a way so I can't blame Discord for not having a magic wand but I would be monitoring its usage if I were a parent. Only 1 of the servers I'm in is what I'd consider kid safe and it's a company's community server.

    • TZubiri 6 hours ago

      Yeah I get that it would have problems. But I'm saying that being a closed source product with staff is what allows it to fight against that.

      Foss on the other hand just clones an app offers a download and calls it a day, "self host", sometimes they encrypt stuff so that not even devs or admins can see the content, they would think of this as respecting privacy, but then when they get a subpoena for a sex offender case, they can't turn up anything.

  • Mashimo 9 hours ago

    > Reminder that discord is an app for kids.

    Why is that?

    • TZubiri 6 hours ago

      Because it's a video game accesory.

      They market to kids, and have kid safety features.

    • esafak 7 hours ago

      Have you seen the UI? Nothing fit for adults, who value their attention and time.

      • Mashimo 7 hours ago

        Sorry, I don't see it. I can quickly jump around channels and server with shortcuts, the UI looks similar to other chat apps. Auto-Embed can be disabled, if that steals your attention. Or what do you mean?

        • TulliusCicero 2 hours ago

          They just don't like the design and are choosing a condescending way of framing it.

weberer 11 hours ago

>To ensure users stay safe on the platform, we explicitly disallow:

>Misinformation & Conspiracy Theories

>Spreading false or misleading information that can cause harm to individuals or society is prohibited. This includes conspiracy theories that have been debunked or lack credible evidence.

Why? That sounds so dumb to waste resources policing it.

  • jeffhuys 11 hours ago

    Who determines what’s credible or not? This sounds like “if we don’t like what you have to say, you’re gone”.

    • bilekas 10 hours ago

      And why is that a bad thing ? That's the free market. The business owns the platform and you don't have an innate 'right' to be there.

      • weberer 10 hours ago

        Why is it a good thing? What's the motivation behind it? It just seems like a really unnecessary restriction to have when you're trying to launch a FOSS alternative existing software.

        • bilekas 9 hours ago

          It’s a good thing because it gives companies autonomy to do what they want (within the law). It’s your responsabilità to take it or leave it.

          The alternative is an oligarchy type model where you are bound to the whims of some external party.

    • jasonlotito 4 hours ago

      Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want? Why do you support people that don't run your servers controlling what you can and cannot say?

  • alwayslikethis 10 hours ago

    This sounds like a violation of freedom 0, if this extend to the software you run (self hosted).

  • Mashimo 11 hours ago

    They did not say they are policing it.

    • Almondsetat 11 hours ago

      What is the point of disallowing without policing?

      • Mashimo 11 hours ago

        Probably same as most other social platforms. Selective enforcement, virtue signaling, a tool to use when they get bad press for a server.

        • Almondsetat 8 hours ago

          I mean, bad press will chastise you even if you actually enforce stuff

  • jasonlotito 4 hours ago

    This is for content on Revolt.chat itself. You can download and host your own servers and allow people to lie all you want. But on the servers they control, they can decide what they allow.

    Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want?

  • jisnsm 11 hours ago

    It’s really fucking boring how every platform that hosts speech tries to nudge you in their direction these days.

    • bilekas 10 hours ago

      I don't know why everyone think's they have a right to say and behave however they want using someone else's services.

      If the platform or provider don't want to associate with you, that's their prerogative.

      The hubris to assume otherwise is ridiculous.

    • bryanhogan 10 hours ago

      No platform can allow you to 100% say whatever you want, just how it has limit to what it can enforce. Every platforms has to balance this fact. It is impossible to enforce clear borders on this as well, as human interaction is endlessly complex.

      • jisnsm 9 hours ago

        They can allow you to 100% say whatever you want as long as the law allows them to host your speech. If they try to limit you beyond that, they are censoring you, which is what is occurring here.

        • crtasm 3 hours ago

          Anyone that feels this type of moderation is censorship can use/host an instance with different rules.

    • jasonlotito 4 hours ago

      Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want? Why do you support people that don't run your servers controlling what you can and cannot say?

jaggs 10 hours ago

Really nice. Perfectly timed for enshitification, and love that it's open source. Now just need some sort of federation and it's good to go. And choosing to go with an established UI will make adoption that much easier when TSHTF.

[just had a longer look around. Is this a Russian project?]

croisillon 11 hours ago

haha i had to laugh at the language selectors:

  {flag:uk} English (traditional)

  {flag:us} English (simplified)
  • roenxi 10 hours ago

    I also spot "That’s the website, you can’t scroll further." in large, helpful letters. These people seem to have a pretty solid sense of humour. Mild enough it is difficult to take offence to, playful enough to add character.

    Hope they do well; I dislike closed source chat programs.

    • jorvi 9 hours ago

      Rather than open or closed source programs, let's have interoperability. Then everyone can choose. I believe Facebook was aiming for something like that with Threads, and was playing to have WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger be open to a specific standard as well?

      I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..

      • guappa 6 hours ago

        Proprietary services are interoperable in the beginning and then stop.

        Both facebook and google supported XMPP but that's no longer the case. Slack supported XMPP and IRC, but that's no longer the case.

        It's completely pointless to expect proprietary stuff to be interoperable. It requires constant reverse engineering and remember that they have money to throw away to hire developers to make breaking changes to the protocol constantly.

        • AJ007 4 hours ago

          One of the highest confidence outcomes I predict from LLM use in software dev is more use of open protocols. It is going to become difficult to maintain a network if you don't use them.

          XMPP isn't dead either. Here's an open source project of an XMPP based Slack - https://prose.org/ (I have no association to this, was amazed how much digging it took me looking for Slack/Discord alternatives to find it.)

          The most damage to open communications software probably came from the closed mobile app stores. The barrier to maintaining a working app simultaneously on iOS and Android is high. Almost every iOS game I bought 10 years ago is inaccessible and no longer downloadable. Those barriers are in the process of being torn down too, with or without AI's help.

        • zacwest 6 hours ago

          Facebook never federated so their implementation was just an API they couldn't control to them:

          > Facebook Messages are evolving to allow people to share rich content beyond text: photos, videos, audio and even stickers. We want to ensure the best possible send and receive experience where all these rich forms of content are reliably and consistently available on every platform. XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.

          • ryandrake 5 hours ago

            > XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.

            This is such a lame excuse, and reveals how much they're control freaks. One of the main points of an open, federated protocol is that people can choose clients that behave the way they want and render things the way they want. "Oooohhh, we can't guarantee with an iron fist that our stupid 'stickers' render correctly on all clients, therefore we can't deal with it!"

            This same mentality infests the web, and is why companies insist on slathering JavaScript into everything to force browsers to render their pages exactly as designed, rather than just letting the user agent serve the user's needs.

      • Arkhaine_kupo 8 hours ago

        > let's have interoperability.

        Should be mandatory. Things like facebook took off because of network effects not because of the quality of the platform. Being able to migrate all your contacts/ chat/ tweets/ etc somewhere else seemlessly should be enforced by the gov to allow for actual competition. else you end up with first player advantage and network effects being unsurmountable and creating de facto monopolies with 0 benefit for the customer, in an environment that has low set up costs and you should see fierce competition.

      • Qdulf 8 hours ago

        The push for messenger interoperability is a reaction to the EUs Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires certain gatekeeper services to allow interoperability with smaller platforms.

        Threads is working on implementing ActivityPub for interoperability with other platforms that already use it. ActivityPub is an open standard for implementing the Fediverse, a group of federated social platforms heavily based in the open source community.

        • LorenDB 6 hours ago

          Nope, Matrix has been pushing interop for years (since the late teens).

          • Aachen 3 hours ago

            Not like it's new, though? The Internet is literally interoperating networks, emails hop from server to server until they reach the user-specified destination server, DNS delegates zones to other servers. These are protocols older than I am, and I've had a driver's license for longer than Matrix exists. Their push is amazing but not by any means unique

      • pjerem 8 hours ago

        > I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..

        You may like https://www.beeper.com/

        And if you are nerd/privacy conscious enough, though their app and cloud service is proprietary, it’s based on Matrix and open source bridges which you can have a full list here : https://github.com/beeper

      • NullifyNAN 8 hours ago

        This is literally the old Microsoft playbook for destroying open source software. “Embrace, extend, extinguish”.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

        They did it with XMPP and Windows live messenger in the 2000s.

        At the end of the day these companies have no incentive to be responsible stewards of open protocols. The moment they have a tough quarter they’ll eviscerate it if it means they’ll make a buck.

        • sshine 7 hours ago

          MS Comic Chat was built on top of IRC.

          I’m happy IRC is still around in spite of that.

    • concerndc1tizen 6 hours ago

      I feel like that was Discord's style also, being playful, fun, childish. Maybe they're just imitating that appeal?

  • theandrewbailey 10 hours ago

    Since US English retains more historical features of English and has fewer of the newer ones (especially in light of Received Pronunciation, rhoticity, and random u insertion), one could argue that US English is the more traditional one.

    https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

    • HeckFeck 8 hours ago

      I live in a region of the UK where rhoticity is alive and well. It actually means I've an easier time understanding some words when Americans speak them, compared to the English.

      On the broader point I'd agree up until I notice that you'd write 'defense' yet also 'fence', and ponder why the verb 'got' is so overused.

      • t-3 4 hours ago

        I'll just say that I sometimes use defense because the Firefox spellchecker seems to prefer UK spellings even when US English is set in the language settings and the red squiggly lines bother me.

    • bbno4 6 hours ago

      The article you linked says it's a myth.

    • dijit 8 hours ago

      Isn't that a myth?

      Wonder where that idea even came from, the BBC article even says as such "“It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, [the dialect anthropologist] says."

      I mean; we have old runic languages that match northern English pronunciation really well- along with "olde english" spelling which is clearly a rote writing of a southern English accent (likely from somewhere like Gloucestershire).

      An attractive myth, perhaps, but I'm not sure how much truth there really is.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/bofu3g/how_did_ame...

      • toolz 6 hours ago

        > even if Americans do speak more like the Elizabethan English than today’s Brits themselves

        I get the sense that the article very much believes Americans speak more traditional English.

    • dietr1ch 9 hours ago

      You know it's way more traditional because they democratically pushed themselves into an oligarchy ;)

      • lenerdenator 6 hours ago

        Sounds pretty European to me, honestly.

  • Y_Y 11 hours ago

    An old joke, but a good one.

    Shoutouts to Noah Webster for "opinionatedly curating" British English from an inconsistent crufty unspellable mess to a randomly tweaked version of the same thing.

  • arzig 9 hours ago

    Yep, simplified by removing all those silly extraneous ‘u’s

    • t-3 4 hours ago

      Other way around. The British wanted to differentiate themselves from colonial hillbillies so they tried to assume the appearance of culture by making the words look more French.

  • agumonkey 10 hours ago

    they might have to update their translation to (limited) soon based on how the current admin is blitzkriegeering

  • jeffhuys 11 hours ago

    How to quickly lose a few potential users.

    • roblabla 11 hours ago

      Other people might say it's a great way to self-moderate its network.

    • aredox 11 hours ago

      Can't handle "locker-room banter"?

      You won't be missed.

    • anonzzzies 6 hours ago

      How to quickly show you have no sense of humor.

    • diggan 11 hours ago

      With emphasis on few. I'd wager less than 0.01% of potential users would be butthurt enough by that joke to avoid the platform as a whole. And the ones who got butthurt, probably better off not having them on the platform in the first place.

    • csomar 11 hours ago

      It's open source.

    • piva00 10 hours ago

      Fragile egos that can't take such a innocuous joke are not really a loss in the overall scheme of things though.

    • another-dave 11 hours ago

      It seems strange that someone would be offended by the US variant being called "simplified" spelling — wasn't that the whole point?

      • acomjean 4 hours ago

        I’m an American and not offended in the least. It is simplified (color vs the obviously incorrect UK variant colour). Gray va grey. y’all is a great addition to the Simplified English.

        Despite being told long ago by a drunk English visiting student that “the language is English not American” I’ll stand by our American simplification! Lamentably this simplification seems to be backtracking our political system…but hey we’re going from Discord to Revolt!

      • freeopinion 9 hours ago

        Maybe they meant people who don't want to be considered traditional...

    • gooseus 11 hours ago

      lol, or how to easily filter out a few users who can't take a joke.

    • fatata123 10 hours ago

      Ones that are offended by a lighthearted joke. Sounds like a plus

hampus 8 hours ago

Seeing as this is closely related to [1], which I also commented on, and in the hopes that someone finds this useful regarding Discord's ownership of your data (where your messages remain even if you delete your account):

If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [2]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276504

[2]: https://discorch.org

GAPAT 11 hours ago

[dead]

drpossum 9 hours ago

[flagged]

  • hypercube33 9 hours ago

    At first I thought you were being brutal but...a GitHub page with a screenshot would be better. The aesthetic of the website is...unique

juped 9 hours ago

I like a good ejabberd fork!

edit: oh, this isn't an ejabberd fork. Why didn't they just fork ejabberd like normal people? Seriously, _rust_?

vr46 11 hours ago

How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? If you are constantly forced to override the warnings about unsigned software, assuming your system even allows you in the first place, how much friction before less technical users give up?

Code signing is good, I like it, I approve, but it is a big obstacle for me personally and others who cannot afford Apple Developer Credentials.

  • diggan 11 hours ago

    > How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates?

    Does the license of your application somehow prevent you from following whatever Apple wants to do regarding signing? I think there are plenty of apps/games out there built on FOSS technology yet they're still signed and run like anything else signed on macOS, but maybe I remember incorrectly?

    • devsda 10 hours ago

      It might be nothing technical.

      Some developers avoid paying for the Apple dev program on principle. Joining it could be seen as supporting Apple's attempt at building walled gardens.

      There's also the operational challenges for open source like who will sign-up and how to secure or maintain the signing keys etc. It brings in lot of friction.

    • 42lux 10 hours ago

      It’s the 99 bucks argument every time…

      • Karliss 9 hours ago

        The problem is that with exception of single person projects it's not as simple as paying 99$.

        Using individual developer account means exposing private information of one of the developers (which not everyone wants) and is a major buss factor.

        Doing it properly with organization account means nontrivial amount of paper work to establish either a commercial company or an officially registered non profit. There are very few open source projects big enough for this.

  • konart 11 hours ago

    I'm pretty sure I use many open-source projects that have Apple's certificates.

    So the only question is communities desire. There is no technical problem here.

    • timeon 7 hours ago

      > There is no technical problem here.

      Just financial and organizational one. Not every open-source project is going to do that.

      Not sure why Apple had to change how Gatekeeper works. I will have to look for an alternative once my mbp dies. It gets tiresome to fight with the OS for every other app after every update now. Especially when it worked perfectly OK before.

voidUpdate 11 hours ago

> Revolt is the chat app that’s truly built with you in mind.

Is this meant to be a unique selling point? All of the features also exist in discord.

Also, "Bots some for extra spice". Might need a text review

  • benrutter 11 hours ago

    I think the implication is that discord is designed for profit, not you.

high_na_euv 11 hours ago

I hope the communities/servers arent self-hosted because that would be shot in the knee, cuz this is security issue

TeamSpeak and Ventrilo were like that

  • Underphil 11 hours ago

    Is it beyond to you seek out that information before commenting?

    • high_na_euv 11 hours ago

      I didnt manage to find it on their page, so I guess it is centralized like dc

  • no_oneimportant 7 hours ago

    how tf can something be a server if its not selfhosted

    • high_na_euv 5 hours ago

      Discord servers arent self hosted

      • gibibit 2 hours ago

        Discord servers are not servers.

stevetron 5 hours ago

Discord seems to be going the way of Skype: deprecating their support for Windows 7, in favor of a newer OS offering from Microsoft which harvests data in the background under the feeble guise of telemetry. Granted there is telelmetry in Windows 7, but you can disable it in Windows 7 and not worry obout it being over-ridden the next day, or even the same day, with some forced update.

  • Shared404 5 hours ago

    If you're worried about Windows 10's/11's telemetry, you should read Discord's TOS.

  • doubled112 5 hours ago

    I'm not sure what to take from this.

    Are you worried there is some sort of anti-Windows 7 conspiracy, where software vendors stop supporting a 15 year old years out of support OS so that an unrelated software vendor receives more data?

    Or is it simply more likely that nobody wants to test their software on a 15 year old OS? When XP came out that would have been Windows 95, and the same thing happened.

  • squigz 5 hours ago

    Windows 7 is a 15 year old OS that's been out of support for 5 years. It is utterly ridiculous to paint Discord as unreasonable for not supporting it?