Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

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.

The UI is awful, Discord volume isn't exposed, no option to do it, either, so you have to adjust game audio or individual user audio. They put the whole kitchen sink in, for some reason, too, there's a text chat in the voice rooms that needs to be user-revealed for some reason, instead of being exposed by default. Most of it is unintuitive at first use.

Then there's the many contraindications e.g. privacy policy, walled garden, and the dog shit internal indexing and the fact that it isn't externally indexed, there's a lot of pertinent information on there from skilled individuals that could serve society a la the BBS era that will never be surfaced again because it's now being posted to Discord, though that's tangential. I hate it, but it's easy enough to use, though negligibly dofferent compared to Skype, which had many of the same issues.

I think the biggest attractor for my friends was being able to idle in a server so it was easy to start a party vs starting a call on Skype which requires a little more arrangement. Lower cost less friction.

I don't remember marketing, though.

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.

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.

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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)

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

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?

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

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

For now, until they inevitably enshittify their service to increase profits, and a competitor swoops up most of their market.

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.

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.

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.

you can make something free and still profitable. Google search for example. I've been waiting for years to see something replacing it

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.

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.

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.

Out of curiosity, I've just looked at the front page of lemmy.org, and its community seems virtually indistinguishable from reddit.

> it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML.

You mean the the 31 years of simple text anyone can index or search using any search engine? How awful.

> 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.

>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.

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

What do you use? I moved mine to Bluehost and it's been a very expensive nightmare. There is no mystery around the death of forums.

It's only popular if you want to avoid big biz to use your software under that license. Big biz avoids AGPL like the plague.

You could do a dual license model, where a traditional license can be bought if you dont want to go with AGPL and have the money.

There's a considerable amount of FUD around AGPL. Mostly around never being able to actually redistribute exactly what people are accessing, IIRC. I remember conversations about it being rehashed on here constantly a few years back.

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

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.

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?

Spreadsheet software don't have bad UX? I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

Why is that?

It doesn't look like this is the case? I'm looking at https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted/blob/master/README... where you are told to update 2 config files.