This project has a lot of red flags for long-term sustainability. It needs to be forked and maintained by someone who cares about open-source and decentralization, not being a Discord competitor.
For whatever reason, they chose to develop not just the messaging client but the messaging protocol, voice, file and media servers. That creates a lot of work for the small team to maintain.
They want to force people to use the revolt.chat instance. While Revolt can be self-hosted, the documentation actively discourages this and tries to obfuscate the self-hosting process as much as possible.
The open-source code is also several versions behind revolt.chat so that revolt.chat can keep an advantage over self-hosted instances.
The developers are university students who have never developed software professionally or managed a social media platform before.
Combine all of this with the lack of financing plans and you will have a service that is bound to implode or become enshittified when the operating costs and platform administration become too taxing.
Revolt is a very impressive full-stack project for the developers' experience level, but it's not a good FLOSS Discord alternative.
On another note, why are there so many children in the article's comment section? Is that really the quality of the average Revolt user?
I won't use any new social media network without federation. It seems like the only way to avoid enshittification and the massive loss of all the content posted being lost. It also allows competitors to exist without needing to spend tons of money to pull in users to get started up.
I think Matrix/Element is just a tad too confusing. Similar to Mastodon. I don't know how, but Lemmy is the least confusing to use application within the Fediverse. I have easily been able to just subscribe to whatever I want and see it all.
With Mastodon, I can't just see a big feed of content like Twitter, and then follow who I want to.
And Matrix/Element is... Just not quite Discord levels of usable.
I don't know how, but Lemmy is the least confusing to use application within the Fediverse.
I've only used Lemmy and this is a scary thought.
I know some people don't want it anyway, but if there is ever going to be a mass exodus from the corporations to the fediverse, fediverse needs to seriously work on the sign up process. And can't threaten defederation every 5 minutes, which probably means they need proper modding tools/features.
FOSS Discord Alternative. Takes all the design language of Discord too without the nitro garbage. It's still not fully featured, but it's a cool little alternative if you can find a community you like. I personally am rooting for Matrix/Element tho.