[HN Gopher] Revolt: FOSS Discord Alternative
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Revolt: FOSS Discord Alternative
Author : hyperific
Score : 125 points
Date : 2023-06-22 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (revolt.chat)
(TXT) w3m dump (revolt.chat)
| mannycalavera42 wrote:
| I prefer the radio controlled micromachine game
| jrm4 wrote:
| If this is decentralized/federated than they should make a bigger
| deal of that on the page, and if it's not, well, no thanks.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > We don't think federation is beneficial to Revolt and would
| actively hinder our stance on privacy. In short, federation is
| prone to leaking your metadata, could make removing your data
| harder, and we otherwise have no incentive to develop support
| if it we aren't able to use it for the main platform
| (revolt.chat).
|
| https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/federation
| jrm4 wrote:
| Tough love coming then -- then unless we pay you directly,
| there's no good incentive for anyone to believe that you'll
| be able to always deliver your claimed advantages over
| Discord.
| veave wrote:
| They don't seem to claim any advantages over Discord, at
| least on their home page.
| paulmd wrote:
| It's self-hosted FOSS, you're not paying anyone directly
| and if you don't feel it delivers something you can write
| it yourself or pay to have it written.
|
| Anyway, this gets into a philosophical point about the
| whole Reddit exodus - ID federation and content federation
| are two different things, and when people talk about the
| friction of joining a forum vs clicking subscribe on
| reddit, ID federation is what gives you that, not content
| federation.
|
| And content federation introduces a lot of scalability
| problems, and difficulties deleting comments/etc. Yes,
| someone can notionally always crawl/cache you, but having
| it on your server is different from intentionally putting
| it out into a peer-to-peer CDN, or serving it to a bunch of
| different pods so they can put it in their members' feeds.
| Some people don't want that part, they want the content to
| stay on their self-hosted instance.
| riskable wrote:
| This is disingenuous considering there's plenty of Lemmy
| servers that aren't federated. Just because a thing
| _supports_ federation doesn 't mean it _must_ be federated.
|
| If Revolt supported federation it would be trivial to just
| turn that feature off if you had privacy concerns in that
| regards.
| djbusby wrote:
| And default off, for privacy.
| jackothy wrote:
| You should mention the big red warning box above that text:
|
| > Hold on, this article is quite old at this point, just a
| few things to keep in mind:
|
| > - Federation may end up being part of the project in some
| capacity in the future, just at the moment it is not part of
| any feature (at least publicly) on the roadmap.
|
| > - The complexity and time arguments below are still valid
| but may be necessary to tackle in the future.
|
| > If you have some general ideas on where and how federation
| could be implemented, feel free to drop into the Lounge
| #Revolt Development.
| DreamFlasher wrote:
| Fullack. Is it based on Matrix and federates with it? If no, no
| thanks.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Not really necessary if the client can connect to multiple
| servers.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Federated identity is pretty important for a seamless
| experience in the case where chat itself js not federated
| though. Otherwise you're still going to need to make a new
| account for every server you join, which is more friction
| than people want.
| gigel82 wrote:
| You can fully self host it (server and everything):
| https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
|
| This is for folks that want a self-governed / "no big brother"
| Discord alternative, it's quite nice for that purpose, but it's
| lacking the Discord integrations (audio chat, etc.) that make
| it better for gamers.
| bertman wrote:
| Discussion from 2 years ago when this was new:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28434012
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| 2 years ago matrix did not have voice rooms. Now we have video
| rooms.
|
| How far stuff moves forward in short time.
| alecnotthompson wrote:
| 100 years ago, I was not born. Now, I am born. How things
| happen in arbitrary periods of time.
| arghwhat wrote:
| > short time
|
| 1/40th of an average human life isn't really that short.
| That's 400-700 calendar work days depending on your work
| ethitcs, possibly thousands of man days.
|
| That's an eternity gone in the blink of an eye, not a short
| time.
|
| Life is what is short. :(
| colinsane wrote:
| the first COTS videophones appeared > 50 years ago (though
| very expensive). either that adds to your existential angst
| or now you can frame this as a leap forward: "50 years
| without any widely deployed open source video-conferencing
| stack and suddenly it was rolled out to millions of users
| in the last 5% of that timeline with the majority of those
| end users not having to go out of their way for it."
|
| it's up to you.
| solarkraft wrote:
| This is cool, but why another chat silo? We have Mattermost,
| Zulip and most prominently Matrix, which all come with their own
| big ecosystems already. Why duplicate the work?
|
| Also: How do voice channels work in this thing? I've been
| thinking for approximately forever about making Jitsi meet more
| flexible to support channels, but never got around to it (I've
| done some basic ground work on it, in case anyone wants to pick
| it up).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Competition is good though.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks.
|
| And by "strokes" I mean use-cases, design preferences,
| integration needs, etc.
|
| Personally I'd use RevoltChat if they offered SSO/SAML/OpenID
| support - I like the UX and the Discord-esque vibe as opposed
| to the Slack-esque vibe the alternatives you listed carry.
| nine_k wrote:
| Why did people even create Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix when
| Jabber and IRC already had existed?
|
| "All progress depends on the unreasonable man."
| pndy wrote:
| Wasn't Mattermost turned recently into a paid service?
| Animats wrote:
| The next big worry is Github. Moving major open source projects
| off Github is going to be difficult. But we probably will have to
| go to architectures where there are multiple synchronized
| repositories some time in the next few years.
| melony wrote:
| OneDev: https://github.com/theonedev/onedev
|
| Gogs: https://github.com/gogs/gogs
| rapnie wrote:
| https://forgejo.org (hosted on Codeberg running.. Forgejo)
| omneity wrote:
| I use OneDev in my homelab to host code, both mine and OSS
| forks, and run CI jobs. I'm pretty happy with it, except for
| the limited community/figuring things out on your own vibe to
| it.
| melony wrote:
| The Java web framework (Apache Wicket) it uses is vintage,
| about as old as Rails.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wicket
| salzig wrote:
| No gitea?
|
| https://about.gitea.com/
| melony wrote:
| The Gitea team is full of crypto shillers.
|
| https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/a-message-from-lunny-on-
| gitea-...
|
| Their founder claims to have invented Gogs (he was one of
| the early committers) when the original author is another
| engineer
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea
|
| > _Gitea was created by Lunny Xiao, who was also a founder
| of the self-hosted Git service Gogs._
|
| https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/three-years-at-
| sourcegrap...
|
| > _About the author Joe Chen is Software Engineer and
| maintainer of the open source project Gogs, a painless
| self-hosted Git service. You can chat with Joe on Twitter
| @jc_unknwon or our community Discord_
| nannal wrote:
| Isn't that how git is designed to be?
| mholm wrote:
| Projects on Github are more than git. Commits can move, but
| issues, pull requests, role mappings, wikis, and Actions, are
| all potentially impossible/difficult to migrate elsewhere.
| jvolkman wrote:
| I agree in general, but the wiki specifically is just
| another git repository that you can clone.
|
| e.g. for a repo at mholm/myrepo git clone
| https://github.com/mholm/myrepo.wiki
| Animats wrote:
| Git, yes. Github, no. Github has many Github-only features
| such as "continuous integration". Those need to become
| portable, so you can run your builds on AWS or Hurricane
| Electric as desired.
|
| It's become dangerous for open source to rely on anyone who
| can cut off your air supply. Look at the current flap over
| Red Hat.
| erinnh wrote:
| Good thing that Gitea has/is worked/working on a compatible
| Ci/CD pipeline.
|
| Not sure if it's 100% compatible yet, but that's their
| goal.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| GitLab has many of Github's features including CI, no?
| https://tomasvotruba.com/blog/how-can-we-use-github-
| actions-.... Furthermore, GitLab can be self-hosted and the
| CI can be configured to use your own VMs.
|
| My team does CI in gitlab, and many big organizations use
| self-hosted instances GitLab like KDE and GNOME.
| nrjames wrote:
| We do the same with Gitlab -- self-hosted, using their
| gitlabrunner as the CI agent. It's great!
| dhalucario wrote:
| Are custom client's allowed? How can I be sure this won't be sold
| out of nowhere?
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| It took slightly longer than expected for me to track down an
| explanation of their business model. I think it boils down to
| "run cheap until we have one".
| https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/monetisation
| dingusdew wrote:
| [dead]
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| > Last revision. 7th March 2022
|
| They're running Docusaurus for docs but adding manual
| timestamps instead of using the built-in showLastUpdateTime
| variable... this hurts me.
| JustBreath wrote:
| Dunno if this is the case here, but there are use cases for
| manual timestamps, for example when you want to differentiate
| between metadata updates / formatting changes and content
| updates/reviews.
| db48x wrote:
| What's with the terrible names? I'll never use a communication
| product named "Discord", and "Revolt" is even worse.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| It's FOSS, so make your own variant and give it a better name.
| nocsi wrote:
| They need to make servers automatically publish onto the web.
| It'll bridge that gap between Discord & Reddit wherein
| discussions can be discoverable. Plus all of that can be indexed
| and crawled
| moojd wrote:
| This is really nice. Just needs one click joining for voice
| channels. This is an under-appreciated killer feature of discord
| that slack missed when implementing huddles. The ability to
| instantly hop in and out of voice channels is what keeps discord
| from feeling like any other teleconferencing app. Any friction to
| this makes it so I am less likely to just casually jump into a
| call.
| uoaei wrote:
| It's like talking over cubicle walls vs scheduling conference
| rooms.
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's crazy how collaboration solutions keep missing this. I
| passionately hate "calls". You don't catch people with a lasso
| to talk to them in real life.
| heyoni wrote:
| Lol! This is such a great analogy I might lasso some folks
| just to tell them about it.
| steanne wrote:
| the very first time i went looking for a discord plugin, i was
| looking for a way to block that after having entered too many
| chat channels accidentally. it might be a killer OPTION.
| pohuing wrote:
| But you can do that
| moojd wrote:
| Nice! I tried but I must be missing something. Is it a
| setting? Only way I can see to join voice is to click on the
| channel and then click the voice button?
| lucb1e wrote:
| This was normal back in the days of IRC and Mumble. I should
| try introducing mumble into our company, come to think of it.
| It's a good reminder indeed, I hadn't considered the old gaming
| toolkit we used as teenagers
| sylware wrote:
| Do they have a noscript/basic (x)html portal?
|
| Or a plain and simple C client?
| staunton wrote:
| > plain and simple C client?
|
| You mean native binary? Why? It is too slow?
| kstrauser wrote:
| How's this better than Matrix?
|
| (Not a leading question. I haven't used Discord/Matrix/etc. more
| than a handful of times and don't know what I don't know.)
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Matrix feels a bit monocultural for my taste. Perhaps Revolt
| can do better, we'll see.
| staunton wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean? Is it due to the technology or
| an accidental adoption pattern that's independent of the
| technology?
| pndy wrote:
| IIRC it doesn't feature encryption and there's no pairing
| devices via QR or emotes chain as in Element client. Last time
| I played around Revolt it was very Discord-alike
| muzzio wrote:
| Does Matrix have the equivalent of voice chat rooms that
| Discord has? I find as a user of Discord that being able to see
| who's just hanging out is the killer feature there. (As are
| things like game streaming and bots, ofc)
| Arathorn wrote:
| yes, albeit in beta in Element: https://element.io/blog/drop-
| in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro...
| moojd wrote:
| I saw this and got excited but no, this isn't discord voice
| channels. This is an integrated jitsi meet call. It looks
| like some sort of prototype has been merged to develop
| though:
|
| https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/pull/21476
| prophesi wrote:
| What do you mean it's not discord voice channels? Looking
| at the screenshot[0] their Jitsi Meet integration is
| identical, because discord voice channels are essentially
| voice conference calls.
|
| [0] https://user-
| images.githubusercontent.com/48614497/159062202...
| dingusdew wrote:
| [dead]
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(page generated 2023-06-22 23:00 UTC)