It is an more private alternative to Discord. Even tough they do not offer federation, self-hosting servers is possible, but self-hosting Dms is not possible. Matrix does not have separated voice and text chats in one server, aka Discord style. Is it better to use Revolt for now or create our own Federated Discord alternative?
Revolt: https://revolt.chat/
Matrix is working on dedicated voice channels, and there’s also that cinny client that makes it look like discord.
Pretty much any non-federated chat type system is dead in the water imo, no one should be dedicating developer time to them.
Hrm yeah, seems like its getting pushed back. Either way the entire revolt dev team would have been better off working either on cinny, or this one feature alone.
I remembered and tracked down this comment made by Matthew on HN 4 months ago - I’ve been trying to pay attention to pain points that prevent my friends from trying out federated services. He seems to acknowledge the issue / distinction between discord’s voice channels and what matrix is lacking:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435893
And further down:
Thanks all for the responses - the whole “matrix doesn’t have voice channels” thing is much clearer now: it’s not the hard bit (voice/video conferencing!) but just the UX of how it’s hooked up. This we can fix :)
I’m not sure if there is anything more recent about it though.
Yeah, almost everything really is a UX problem after Spaces fixed the community limitations. Element still desperately needs a UX overhaul.
E: Matthew’s comments also frustrate me as it’s apparent that no one in the Matrix team has actively used Discord and understand what it does right. Otherwise there’s no way the git issue would have been ignored for 5 years.
Lack of dedicated voice channels is a massive dealbreaker for almost anyone wanting to migrate over from Discord. We all know all the things Discord does wrong, but some desing decisions like dedicated channels really should just be copied over.
yep, cinny is great client that has a look similar to discord.
Does cinny have a desktop application? I could only find there browser login.
It’s electron, so you’re better off ram-wise running it in a browser anways, just like revolt.
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Ayo another Lisa Simpson avatar lmao.
Yeaaaaah :D
I assume you already know of matrix.
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It doesn’t have E2EE so nope.
Yop, got my approval, better than pepecord.
You also can setup bridges to telegram and matrix. It is more stable and reliable compared to other solutions. To answer the question about federation, I would create my own if I had to choose.
I like it a lot. I honestly don’t give two shits about federation. The UI is attractive and logical and everything does what I want it to do. I wanted a Discord clone that was open source and doesn’t spy on me. Revolt is just that, and I love it.
How are you going to get people to use it though? Hard enough already with federated systems, but why would anyone switch to a mostly empty walled garden?
How did Discord become so popular?
By being first to a market of combining something like Slack and Teamspeak into a easy to use webclient.
Simply being a libre clone of Discord makes it better than Discord. That being said I’m not very excited about non-federated chat protocols in general.
I’ve used it for a while now and I really like it! It is in the alpha stage, but it is very stable and neat. Can’t wait until they release the final version.
The only downside with Revolt is the lack of good Android apps. But, like I’ve said, it is in alpha so I can’t complain that much 😊
There is an Android app now actually, though it’s basically still a PWA
Is that another one of the “we’ve reinvented IRC badly” things?
I’ve been thinking about this recently too and Revolt does look nice, and would be better than discord, but I would like to see matrix clients/clones that also cater more to discord users.
It’s kind of like the signal app. It’s the best one that is easy to use for now.
Have you seen Cinny? Its idea is exactly that :)
I would like to see matrix clients/clones that also cater more to discord users.
So you want to see a client that works with both discord and matrix? Is that what you mean by that? Discord seems to not like third party clients.
What about bridging a discord room to matrix?
I like it a lot. While in principle Matrix may have some important benefits, in practice it’s a dogshit experience and I have a hard time ever seeing it getting mass adoption even with the many refinements that have been coming down the line.
The way discord groups and manages channels is essential for the kind of community building that it allows, and Revolt copies it directly. Try to mimic that on Matrix or something similar and you’ll end up with a loosely connected mess.
Why does everything have to look like discord?
Cause the UI and UX is so damn good. That’s part of why they got so popular, people really liked their interface, the way they had voice “channels” you could just join instead of fiddling with calls etc.
Not everything, but Discord blends text channels and voice channels together perfectly.
I don’t see why you would use that over the much more developed alternatives like, rocket.chat, zulip or Mattermost.
And of course decentralized solutions like Xmpp, IRC or Matrix.
This is a voice chat app unlike rocketchat and the other you name.
Voice-chat is only a minor part of Discord, or otherwise I would have suggested Mumble, which as far as voice-chat goes is much superior to Discord.
And I think some of the above include voice and video calls. XMPP certainly does.
Oh, I always saw it as a voice chat client with text chat functionalities, never thought it was the other way around.
Good to know.
