Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
239 comments
·March 6, 2025croisillon
roenxi
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
Rather than open or closed source programs, let's have interoperability. Then everyone can choose. I believe Facebook was aiming for something like that with Threads, and was playing to have WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger be open to a specific standard as well?
I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..
guappa
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.
Arkhaine_kupo
> let's have interoperability.
Should be mandatory. Things like facebook took off because of network effects not because of the quality of the platform. Being able to migrate all your contacts/ chat/ tweets/ etc somewhere else seemlessly should be enforced by the gov to allow for actual competition. else you end up with first player advantage and network effects being unsurmountable and creating de facto monopolies with 0 benefit for the customer, in an environment that has low set up costs and you should see fierce competition.
Qdulf
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.
pjerem
> I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..
You may like https://www.beeper.com/
And if you are nerd/privacy conscious enough, though their app and cloud service is proprietary, it’s based on Matrix and open source bridges which you can have a full list here : https://github.com/beeper
NullifyNAN
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.
theandrewbailey
Since US English retains more historical features of English and has fewer of the newer ones (especially in light of Received Pronunciation, rhoticity, and random u insertion), one could argue that US English is the more traditional one.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...
HeckFeck
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.
dijit
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...
dietr1ch
You know it's way more traditional because they democratically pushed themselves into an oligarchy ;)
lenerdenator
Sounds pretty European to me, honestly.
Y_Y
An old joke, but a good one.
Shoutouts to Noah Webster for "opinionatedly curating" British English from an inconsistent crufty unspellable mess to a randomly tweaked version of the same thing.
arzig
Yep, simplified by removing all those silly extraneous ‘u’s
agumonkey
they might have to update their translation to (limited) soon based on how the current admin is blitzkriegeering
jeffhuys
How to quickly lose a few potential users.
roblabla
Other people might say it's a great way to self-moderate its network.
aredox
Can't handle "locker-room banter"?
You won't be missed.
shaky-carrousel
It's not a loss.
diggan
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.
piva00
Fragile egos that can't take such a innocuous joke are not really a loss in the overall scheme of things though.
csomar
It's open source.
gooseus
lol, or how to easily filter out a few users who can't take a joke.
another-dave
It seems strange that someone would be offended by the US variant being called "simplified" spelling — wasn't that the whole point?
freeopinion
Maybe they meant people who don't want to be considered traditional...
lordofgibbons
The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers.
I'm really hoping for an alternative. I'm always weary of en-shitification whenever a single platform wins all the users.. like what has happened to Reddit.
agumonkey
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.
hnuser123456
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.
dan_can_code
For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.
nativeit
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.
agumonkey
oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their live chat platform in a way :)
qwery
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.
Mashimo
> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects.
Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)
1oooqooq
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.
Mashimo
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.
surajrmal
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.
timeon
Yes but compared to things like Zulip it loads pretty slow.
bsenftner
I hate discord, it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy. Plus, it's an information black hole.
INTPenis
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
> 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
> The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.
In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.
fullstop
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.
mportela
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.
Zambyte
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.
alwayslikethis
> 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.
JeremyNT
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.
smittywerben
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.
hampus
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
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...
adiadd
It's tough to compete in a market like social networks, you need mass adoption for high value. Although this looks cool, I'm interested to see how it differs specifically to provide more value than Discord already does (ton of people, various servers, great integrations, etc.)
asddubs
I think it doesn't necessarily have to be dominant to be considered a success. It's good for people to have the option to choose a free alternative if they want to, where they can be in control of their own data rather than it being centralized and at the mercy of some company, much like with software forges. Of course mass adoption would be cool but I don't think it's necessary to justify these types of projects
NewJazz
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.
openscript
I've accidentally typed https://revolut.chat/ instead https://revolt.chat/. Apparently I wasn't the first one...
JFingleton
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).
nestoras_design
Friendly UI. Looking good!
_mitterpach
Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public, I reckon this might be made in preparation for it. I think it is a wise move to offer an alternative.
The design is very similar to Discord, could this possibly even go to a copyright breach or is the bar for that set too high?
internetter
> 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
DuncanCoffee
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
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
> 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
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
And with good audio chat
wooger
Lol, the design of discord is identical to about 9000 chat apps no?
bryanhogan
There really is no other app in this space on the same quality as Discord. Discord was born out of Skype, Teamspeak and similar being so awful to use. Discord took the complaints from these and made a product which was the best version of them all.
brulard
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.
prmoustache
They must have been super crappy them because Discord is terrible to see and terrible to use.
grumple
Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better voice chat to me.
delfinom
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.
landsman
Importat is funding for these projects. Plenty of them start as open source with donations which can led to frustration and burnout of developers.
mid-kid
Is this still centralized? Or can you self-host without needing a separate client instance for each host?
magicalhippo
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
As for clients I don't know.
TZubiri
[flagged]
q0uaur
edit- shit, it was rocket.chat, i'm so sorry.
Ignore the below, it is for a different "FOSS" discord replacement.
i did self-host it for a week to test it out - and honestly i was put off immediately.
What happens when you set it up according to the docs, is that it automatically "registers" for a license - the free license being limited to 5 users, even if you self host. Ridiculous, and just right out the gate shows me that whoever makes this does not have the user's best interest in mind.
the UI is also full of stuff that requires an expensive license, and i did not see an easy way to remove that stuff when self hosting.
like_any_other
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
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
Mashimo
I read the FAQ, searched google and the documentation and could not find a single ting about any license.
q0uaur
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
internetter
What are you talking about. Revolt is a donation funded FOSS project
elaus
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
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
hexagonwin
maybe you're talking about mattermost?
q0uaur
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
Mashimo
The github https://github.com/revoltchat
cies
This is sorely lacking on the homepage! All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.
Mashimo
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.
JFingleton
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 :)
internetter
> All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.
Says who? I don’t see that in the OSI definition
prmoustache
Nobody but I don't believe any company saying their product is open source if they aren't willing to point me to where to find the code right away.
cies
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?
esafak
It's been in development for five years. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?after=0.2.6
WhyNotHugo
Are they using exiting protocols and networks? Or is it entirely bespoke protocols?
haha i had to laugh at the language selectors: