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100K Users - Revolt (revolt.chat)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

The developers have no plans for financing the platform. In the FAQs, they claim that they managed to raise $2000 in donations, and that covers the costs for now, so they'll think about financing "later".
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 don't want to implement federation, partially because they would have to rewrite their entire backend, but also because...
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?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.