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?