[HN Gopher] Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
___________________________________________________________________
Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
Author : OuterVale
Score : 569 points
Date : 2025-03-06 08:47 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (revolt.chat)
(TXT) w3m dump (revolt.chat)
| unification_fan wrote:
| Pretty cool. I just wish it had its own identity and didn't look
| like Walmart Discord.
| rokkamokka wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you have other opinions about the UI/UX of apps you
| haven't used?
| gingersnap wrote:
| Mom: "We have Discord at home"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdUWZga7T7Q
| high_na_euv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is it beyond to you seek out that information before
| commenting?
| high_na_euv wrote:
| I didnt manage to find it on their page, so I guess it is
| centralized like dc
| no_oneimportant wrote:
| how tf can something be a server if its not selfhosted
| high_na_euv wrote:
| Discord servers arent self hosted
| gibibit wrote:
| Discord servers are not servers.
| m00dy wrote:
| They will have a better stack than Discord once they migrate to
| Tauri.
| moffkalast wrote:
| At first glance it's hard to even tell them apart, did they
| copy literally all of the CSS and layout?
| pas wrote:
| It seems the progress for that stalled. (Last commit 5 months
| ago
| https://github.com/revoltchat/frontend/tree/main/packages/de...
| )
| mogoh wrote:
| So, how does it compares to matrix/element?
| gunalx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| BrenBarn wrote:
| 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.
| 42lux wrote:
| Because matrix isn't the savior everyone makes it out to be
| it's rather the opposite.
| peterjaap wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That and I assume if its open-source you can make clients
| that look like whatever you'd want.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| > 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)?
| Mashimo wrote:
| > as a support channel for software projects, the UI design
| of Discord is indeed atrocious.
|
| Why is that?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| 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.
| bilekas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| And do you think a Discord community force-migrated to
| Telegram wouldn't have their own UX complaints? This is
| gonna happen almost no matter what platforms you're talking
| about, people are used to their thing and don't like seeing
| it forcibly changed.
|
| > Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically,
| they just get used to it.
|
| Disagree. I think most people are pretty okay with it,
| maybe not in love with it, but they don't see it as
| particularly bad in most respects either. I use Google's
| corp chat for work and my god, Discord is SO much better
| than that it blows me away.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Honestly I much prefer
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
|
| Edit: Bonus, it comes with its own font!
| weberer wrote:
| >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.
| Mashimo wrote:
| They did not say they are policing it.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| What is the point of disallowing without policing?
| Mashimo wrote:
| Probably same as most other social platforms. Selective
| enforcement, virtue signaling, a tool to use when they get
| bad press for a server.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| I mean, bad press will chastise you even if you actually
| _enforce_ stuff
| jisnsm wrote:
| It's really fucking boring how every platform that hosts speech
| tries to nudge you in their direction these days.
| bilekas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Anyone that feels this type of moderation is censorship
| can use/host an instance with different rules.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| 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?
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Who determines what's credible or not? This sounds like "if we
| don't like what you have to say, you're gone".
| bilekas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's a good thing because it gives companies autonomy to
| do what they want (within the law). It's your
| responsabilita 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This sounds like a violation of freedom 0, if this extend to
| the software you run (self hosted).
| jasonlotito wrote:
| 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?
| Mashimo wrote:
| The github https://github.com/revoltchat
| cies wrote:
| This is sorely lacking on the homepage! All FLOSS is expected
| to link to the source from the homepage.
| internetter wrote:
| > All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the
| homepage.
|
| Says who? I don't see that in the OSI definition
| cies wrote:
| 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?
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| Mashimo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| front page, scroll down, there's Developers - Source Code
| JFingleton wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not at all when the software is not developer focused.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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?
| croisillon wrote:
| haha i had to laugh at the language selectors:
| {flag:uk} English (traditional) {flag:us} English
| (simplified)
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| How to quickly lose a few potential users.
| roblabla wrote:
| Other people might say it's a great way to self-moderate its
| network.
| gooseus wrote:
| lol, or how to easily filter out a few users who can't take a
| joke.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| another-dave wrote:
| It seems strange that someone would be offended by the US
| variant being called "simplified" spelling -- wasn't that the
| whole point?
| freeopinion wrote:
| Maybe they meant people who don't want to be considered
| traditional...
| acomjean wrote:
| 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!
| aredox wrote:
| Can't handle "locker-room banter"?
|
| You won't be missed.
| csomar wrote:
| It's open source.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| It's not a loss.
| piva00 wrote:
| Fragile egos that can't take such a innocuous joke are not
| really a loss in the overall scheme of things though.
| fatata123 wrote:
| Ones that are offended by a lighthearted joke. Sounds like a
| plus
| anonzzzies wrote:
| How to quickly show you have no sense of humor.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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..
| pjerem wrote:
| > 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
| Qdulf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nope, Matrix has been pushing interop for years (since
| the late teens).
| Aachen wrote:
| 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
| NullifyNAN wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| MS Comic Chat was built on top of IRC.
|
| I'm happy IRC is still around in spite of that.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > 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.
| guappa wrote:
| 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.
| zacwest wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| AJ007 wrote:
| 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.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| I feel like that was Discord's style also, being playful,
| fun, childish. Maybe they're just imitating that appeal?
| agumonkey wrote:
| they might have to update their translation to (limited) soon
| based on how the current admin is blitzkriegeering
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 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...
| dietr1ch wrote:
| You know it's way more traditional because they
| democratically pushed themselves into an oligarchy ;)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Sounds pretty European to me, honestly.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| bbno4 wrote:
| The article you linked says it's a myth.
| mpalmer wrote:
| u wot mate
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| u havin a laff?
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| ight m8 shank u bruv
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| you taking the piss innit?
| arzig wrote:
| Yep, simplified by removing all those silly extraneous 'u's
| t-3 wrote:
| 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.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I think the implication is that discord is designed for profit,
| not you.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Donation page to Revolt before Discord succumbs to platform decay
| or (enshittification) after being owned by Wall Street soon.
|
| https://wiki.revolt.chat/notes/project/financial-support/
|
| https://ko-fi.com/insertish
| CleanCoder wrote:
| The offering in its current form
| (https://i.imgur.com/zcmEOhr.png) does not feel truly communal.
| internetter wrote:
| Discord scale "communities" have tens-or even hundreds of
| thousands of members
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| What's not communal about it? Should they allow anyone to
| participate without limits?
| Mashimo wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| _mitterpach wrote:
| 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?
| wooger wrote:
| Lol, the design of discord is identical to about 9000 chat apps
| no?
| bryanhogan wrote:
| 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.
| grumple wrote:
| Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better
| voice chat to me.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| They must have been super crappy them because Discord is
| terrible to see and terrible to use.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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 ^^'
| brulard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Discord also has threads, if the server has enabled it.
|
| I personally haven't really encountered performance
| issues running discord
| delfinom wrote:
| 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.
| DuncanCoffee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And with good audio chat
| internetter wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| rychco wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I would like to know this, too. What makes it profitable,
| then, considering it has little to no ads?
| MisterTea wrote:
| > The design is very similar to Discord
|
| And Discords design is very similar to mIRC.
| vr46 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's the 99 bucks argument every time...
| Karliss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| The self hosting instructions aren't that friendly imo.
| p2detar wrote:
| I couldn't even find them. Do you have a link?
| OuterVale wrote:
| https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
| diggan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| The homepage has no explanation of where the server is in all
| this? Github page doesnt help either?! Where is my data stored?
| OuterVale wrote:
| https://revolt.chat/legal/community-guidelines#jurisdiction
| guy234 wrote:
| According to another comment itt it is federated.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| 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.
| yownie wrote:
| I couldn't agree more
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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.
| internetter wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| Zambyte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What political reasons? I googled for discord political
| controversies but didn't find anything too shocking.
| Zambyte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fullstop wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| dan_can_code wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their
| live chat platform in a way :)
| nativeit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Users are worryingly hostile to developers.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the
| opposite.
| squigz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, people never read channel topics so we're forced to
| use commands & embeds for common things
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| Arelius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| 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.
| Pikamander2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| viccis wrote:
| 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.
| elictronic wrote:
| Every action had more friction and the ability to post
| images was game changing.
| killerteddybear wrote:
| Teamspeak had a ton of friction. When I was playing FFXIV
| and made my discord account, someone literally just sent
| a link in the text chat of our Free Company, I opened it
| in browser, made an account and used it right there
| immediately. To timestamp this, it was the summer of
| 2015, a little under a decade ago, iirc.
|
| Not sure about now, but back then Teamspeak meant
| installing an application, setting it all up, having
| someone in the Free Company (almost always more than the
| limit for a free server on TS at the time) pay for a
| server or self-host (even more friction). With Discord
| there was no debate or decisions, just one step: Click
| link, sign up.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| foresto wrote:
| > Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement
| voice chats or anything.
|
| It's in progress. Keywords: MatrixRTC, Element Call
|
| https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-
| here/#3-nat...
| Arathorn wrote:
| fwiw, Matrix has had video rooms since 2022:
| https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-
| video-ro... - and VoIP calling since day one in 2014.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Does it have persistent voice _channels_ with simple app
| /game streaming for free?
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If it only works per-client, then it almost doesn't
| exist. That's one of Discord's strengths.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I hate discord, it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls"
| energy. Plus, it's an information black hole.
| Mashimo wrote:
| > it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy.
|
| What does that mean?
| bsenftner wrote:
| Group mentality that picks and chooses who is "cool" and
| then bullies everyone else.
| bo0tzz wrote:
| Sounds to me like you're hanging out with the wrong
| people.
| Mashimo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've never been in a Discord server and thought "Wow this
| server doesn't do the moderator LARP-ing thing".
| sph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| 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.
| smittywerben wrote:
| 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.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| No just a community server.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| What features are you talking about? I admin a server of
| 9k. The new onboarding stuff, automod, opt-in roles?
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| I'll assume it was pronoun roles unless we hear back
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| 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.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what features they were demanding?
| smittywerben wrote:
| 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.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fazeirony wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think they might've meant "mean girls" energy... :)
| bastardoperator wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network
| effects.
|
| Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)
| timeon wrote:
| Yes but compared to things like Zulip it loads pretty slow.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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.
| smittywerben wrote:
| 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.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| 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.
| qwery wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's common for users to have multiple accounts and use the
| built-in account switcher.
| starkparker wrote:
| While useful, I don't think that addresses much of anything
| in this context.
| elif wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| jacobgkau wrote:
| 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."
| kibwen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Note: Discord has given servers the ability to make
| channels opt-in/opt-out - 'Browse Channels' in the
| channel sidebar.
| elif wrote:
| 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
| elif wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Telegram is the undisputed king of shady shit, at least
| insofar as centralized services go.
| elif wrote:
| Yea but how many children's games use telegram to manage
| their community?
| stackskipton wrote:
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Disboard is the biggest Discord search engine.
|
| It is trivial to find servers with adult topics (BDSM)
| targeted at minors. It is trivial to find servers that
| combine those topics with problematic age ranges (like
| BDSM-themed servers with no ID verification, 'ages 14-28
| welcome'). It is trivial to find servers with minors
| openly selling "content".
|
| Disboard isn't Discord but these things aren't even being
| remotely "hidden", it is these servers' sole 'purpose'.
| aryan14 wrote:
| 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)
| Y_Y wrote:
| "Weary" or "wary"? Or both?
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The nature of Discord "servers" is exactly why they won.
| immibis wrote:
| I noticed that, but I also noticed the quality in those
| "servers" (really groups) is kind of shit? There's way more
| random off-topic discussion than about the thing you're looking
| for, and you still have to search through it. And when there
| isn't, there's nothing (due to fragmentation) and you stop
| checking.
| mid-kid wrote:
| Is this still centralized? Or can you self-host without needing a
| separate client instance for each host?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
|
| As for clients I don't know.
| cdaringe wrote:
| The compose file specified a service for the web app
| Aachen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 9 services, 5 theirs, 4 other OSS
| q0uaur wrote:
| 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._
| internetter wrote:
| What are you talking about. Revolt is a donation funded FOSS
| project
| elaus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss"
| discord replacement.
| like_any_other wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss"
| discord replacement.
| Mashimo wrote:
| I read the FAQ, searched google and the documentation and
| could not find a single ting about any license.
| q0uaur wrote:
| sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss"
| discord replacement.
| hexagonwin wrote:
| maybe you're talking about mattermost?
| q0uaur wrote:
| sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss"
| discord replacement.
| jaggs wrote:
| 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?]
| fareesh wrote:
| [edit] seems like it's federated
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| Their FAQ makes it seem like it's not:
|
| https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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?
| Mashimo wrote:
| > Reminder that discord is an app for kids.
|
| Why is that?
| esafak wrote:
| Have you seen the UI? Nothing fit for adults, who value their
| attention and time.
| Mashimo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They just don't like the design and are choosing a
| condescending way of framing it.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Because it's a video game accesory.
|
| They market to kids, and have kid safety features.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| bryanhogan wrote:
| 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.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I've recently heard it said that there's a better alternative to
| Discord called Gilded, but no reasons were provided. Anyone has
| insights?
| maelito wrote:
| How does it compare to Element ?
| threesevenths wrote:
| A British company making a chat app. What's the privacy policy? 5
| eyes first then you?
| prmoustache wrote:
| You know it includes a backdoor for the government.
| crtasm wrote:
| It's open source and you can self host it.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| 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?
| lapcat wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Not open source.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's very, very badly performing. And yet every time I want to
| start it, it requires another 15 updates.
| steezeburger wrote:
| 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?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| The web client is fairly well behaved and does away with the
| need for constantly installing updates:
| https://discord.com/app
| windward wrote:
| 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.
| harryf wrote:
| 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.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| 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.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| 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.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| Brybry wrote:
| 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.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| 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.
| opan wrote:
| 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.
| windward wrote:
| Discord search thinks it knows better than you and won't
| let you search verbatim.
| tredre3 wrote:
| 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).
| drpossum wrote:
| > 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...
| didntcheck wrote:
| A freemium service advertizing it's premium offering hardly
| seems surprizing or objectional. They're not a charity
| drpossum wrote:
| Is this apropos anything? I was pushing back on the claim
| that there were no ads, though your username suggests the
| reason.
| stavros wrote:
| "It has no ads" and "it's not surprising that it has ads"
| are basically opposites.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| Wow,
|
| * please drink verification can
| nickitolas wrote:
| > 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.
| oxcabe wrote:
| > 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.
| Ukv wrote:
| 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.
| crawsome wrote:
| Closed-source, dumb stuff hidden behind premum,and premium ads
| and popups almost every time you launch.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| Discord is American. For many in Europe this is a downside now.
| wigster wrote:
| indeed... Made in Europe, motherland of GDPR.
| throwaway9386 wrote:
| 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.
| ziml77 wrote:
| There are ads in discord now. They just call them Quests and
| the notifications for them can't be turned off.
| t-3 wrote:
| 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.
| landsman wrote:
| Importat is funding for these projects. Plenty of them start as
| open source with donations which can led to frustration and
| burnout of developers.
| freehorse wrote:
| Or prosper fine and then end up being sold anyway to some
| crappy corp for a few million $$$ leaving users stranded there,
| we need better models for both ends of the risks.
| aragilar wrote:
| It's unclear if voice/video are supported or not?
| bovermyer wrote:
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| 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.
| Palmik wrote:
| Why don't you allow OAuth / social login via Google, GitHub and
| yes, even Discord? Seems like it would make adoption much easier.
| erlend_sh wrote:
| We started a contribution towards that end:
| https://github.com/authifier/authifier/pull/63
| nottorp wrote:
| This is as centralized as Discord right? No running your own
| server, should you choose to.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| They publish instructions for self-hosting a server:
|
| https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
| nottorp wrote:
| Oh nice. It wasn't clear at all from the front page that
| there is a server available for self hosting.
| snvzz wrote:
| I cannot find anything on the website about Revolt's end to end
| encryption story.
|
| This doesn't give me much confidence.
| juped wrote:
| 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_?
| seanvelasco wrote:
| 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
| smusamashah wrote:
| Revolut OTOH is a bank https://www.revolut.com/
| hampus wrote:
| 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
| das_keyboard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm on fosstodon.org. Never noticed anything like that, but I
| also can't say I spent much time checkout out the avatars.
| cedws wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway9386 wrote:
| Not being built on Matrix is a plus, at this point, given the
| historically poor moderation of that platform.
| opan wrote:
| 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.
| Tepix wrote:
| Putting your data in a centralized instance may eventually just
| lead to enshittification and/or data loss.
|
| Why not use a federated group discussion such as Lemmy?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)
| LuciOfStars wrote:
| I would move to Revolt in a heartbeat, if it had a PluralKit
| equivalent. Currently the only thing keeping me trapped on
| Discord.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Discord alternatives have a hard time because of network effects.
| Does revolt has a bridge to Discord?
| openscript wrote:
| I've accidentally typed https://revolut.chat/ instead
| https://revolt.chat/. Apparently I wasn't the first one...
| JFingleton wrote:
| 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).
| no_oneimportant wrote:
| hmmm
| esafak wrote:
| It's been in development for five years.
| https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?after=0.2.6
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Are they using exiting protocols and networks? Or is it
| entirely bespoke protocols?
| ryebrd wrote:
| The last release was 3 weeks ago
| (https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/releases), and it looks
| like they changed their tag formats to YYYYMMDD-X.
| https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?before=0.2.6
| Bengalilol wrote:
| 3'000+ lines of code <- this seems pretty low
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| Interestingly (and sadly) the largest deployment of this was
| probably on Andrew Tate's grift course website thing, see the
| dev's blog: https://insrt.uk/post/andrew-tate-stealing-software-
| revolt
| jimmydoe wrote:
| The largest Mastodon deployment is truth social.
|
| https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-medi...
| adiadd wrote:
| 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.)
| NewJazz wrote:
| 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.
| asddubs wrote:
| 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
| nestoras_design wrote:
| Friendly UI. Looking good!
| CivBase wrote:
| I use Discord for three things: text chat, voice chat, and screen
| sharing. Looks like screen sharing isn't supported yet, but it's
| on the roadmap at least[1].
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/6/views/4?pane=i...
| butz wrote:
| Why even build an app? This app should've been a website. Better
| pester browser developers to implement "Add to desktop" feature.
| ddejohn wrote:
| Hard disagree. I'm sick and tired of web apps. Please give me
| more desktop applications not based on electron.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Just a bit of critical feedback: the landing page isn't
| responsive to a horizontally rotated iPad. Otherwise, awesome
| project!
| stevetron wrote:
| 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.
| doubled112 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| Shared404 wrote:
| If you're worried about Windows 10's/11's telemetry, you should
| read Discord's TOS.
| sitkack wrote:
| Every time I see one of these projects, I wince because 2/3 of
| the time the backend is in PHP (no offense). The backend is in a
| typesafe, memory safe language!
|
| https://github.com/revoltchat/backend
| nop_slide wrote:
| I don't see anything about funding/pricing, how is this going to
| stick around for the long term?
| didip wrote:
| 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.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| what do you think it should be written in? golang?
| didip wrote:
| Golang would have encouraged a lot more contributions, e.g.
| https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost (I am not affiliated
| with them).
| ZeWaka wrote:
| I don't think that correlation of number of commits implies
| causation.
| airstrike wrote:
| I would pick Rust for 9/10 of problems today.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| Discords performance is unmatched. I hope that's one of their
| goals as well
| elif wrote:
| 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
| jonstaab wrote:
| I'm also building a FOSS Discord alternative, but this one's
| based on nostr: https://flotilla.social
| ravenbitcoin wrote:
| Flotilla.social and Chachi.chat are both amazing, yet early,
| Nostr alternatives.
| Legion wrote:
| Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has
| been a net loss for the Internet.
| zamalek wrote:
| 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).
| happyweasel wrote:
| Absolutely. Information can no longer be retrieved via internet
| search. Discord and Slack are effectively silos.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| 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.
| nijave wrote:
| Sure but you can search for communities then use the
| platform-native search. Not as convenient as a search engine
| natively supporting, though.
| meta-meta wrote:
| until the discord server goes down
| tcfhgj wrote:
| you have to have an account, with mobile number
| culi wrote:
| Same thing can be said about Twitter and most of Facebook
| UberFly wrote:
| For now at least. Some day everyone's relatives will be
| digging through databases of their ancestor's grand wisdom
| filleted wide open. Maybe it'll even use all that info to
| recreate an Ai version of them. Sorry just thinking out
| loud.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Forum posts were indexed by search engines - doesn't that
| alone provide a minimum level of discoverability?
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Based on how search engines behave to day, not really.
| These days, you'll have to fight spammy forums who game
| SEO, reddit, stackoverflow, ML digested output,etc.. it is
| discoverable as in technically it is somewhere in the
| results, but people never see it. If google paid discord
| like they pay reddit and searched discord servers that
| allow for that, that might be a nice compromise.
| jmb99 wrote:
| Add forum or "forum" to your search term and you'll get
| results from tons of forums. Yes, you have to know to do
| that, but once you do, your results will actually be
| good.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| No. A readme on GitHub that only says "documentation on
| discord" is an active push by the developers to contain
| everything within discord.
| chowells wrote:
| Way to miss the point entirely. GP was talking about _why_
| that happens. And yes, it 's almost entirely due to going
| places that actually provide effective tools to deal with
| bad-faith participants.
| rikroots wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jdwithit wrote:
| Agree 100%. Not the most important example, but I used to be
| heavily into World of Warcraft. The go-to place for discussion
| of high end play was a forum run by the guild "Elitist Jerks".
| Everything was there out in the open, to be read and indexed
| and discussed and preserved indefinitely. The forum eventually
| went away, but the info was still available thanks to the
| Wayback Machine.
|
| Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic
| (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a
| nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of
| the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one.
| There was a separate discord for every single class (mage,
| warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community
| couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own
| discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If
| you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that
| a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a
| crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get
| banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.
|
| Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a
| TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But
| unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and
| I do not for the life of me understand why.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yeah a lot of things are going this route unfortunately. RIP
| to the open internet. Ill still be there when everyone
| decides they have had enough.
| korse wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What you classify as a problem is exactly why Discord was a
| smashing success.
| korse wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| culi wrote:
| discord's search functionality has actually been incredibly
| useful. Many forums are notorious for having awful search.
| This is somewhat made up for by the fact that they're
| indexable and you can google search that forum instead.
|
| There's also a wide spectrum between chat sites and forums.
| Threads-centric tools like Zulip can be amazing for a
| community like that. Some, like rocket.chat, are even search-
| indexable
|
| EDIT: it was actually Zulip not rocket.chat that has the
| option to make channels public to the web
| 1shooner wrote:
| >Many forums are notorious for having awful search. This is
| somewhat made up for by the fact that they're indexable and
| you can google search that forum instead.
|
| I think this really depends on the content. Projects that
| use discord as their primary community support create a
| significant barrier for users doing preliminary
| troubleshooting. I have a huge folder of discord servers of
| projects I took a couple steps into before passing on.
| Those should have just been internet searches. Once I have
| an agent doing that research for me, I assume it will have
| to register with discord servers just to do its job.
| jmb99 wrote:
| > Many forums are notorious for having awful search
|
| But google/bing/etc index (basically) all of them. Forum
| search is great for finding exact title matches, and
| sometimes useful for exact content matches. Google with
| site: is better for finding conceptual matches. And, if you
| don't know what forum you're looking for, adding "forum" to
| your search engine term searches all of them.
|
| Discord is not (and likely will never be) indexed by any
| search engine. The level of discoverability is almost as
| low as it can possibly be; you can't find the community by
| searching general terms, you have to know the community
| exists, _join it_ (agreeing to both discord's and the
| community's rules), and then search, only with discord's
| search itself.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Technically, I think you can make a chat application's chats
| archivable and searchable, but nobody is going to do that.
| Discord actually does a better job than I expected, but the
| text is stuck in the app. It would be great if somehow the
| chats could be archived in text based format online, but then
| you would need to write a security model to handle the
| privacy aspect.
| keyserj wrote:
| I've landed at AnswerOverflow from Google before. It's a
| bot you can add to your server so that your server's
| threads get indexed. I haven't added it to a server myself
| but it seems decent enough. See
| https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow
| gibibit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rmm wrote:
| Still waiting for a new web replacement for phpbb
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| 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.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Lots of comments on Discord here, but is anybody saying this new
| service "Revolt" is better than Discord?
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