Happy to have folks on e2ee matrix. It supports calling directly and group voice and video chat rooms quite well IMO.

Ehhhh I see people with Nitro-included cosmetics but not a lot that have the individually-purchased cosmetics. They exist, sure, but not even close to as many.

I mod a server with 40,000 users and I'm scrolling through the member list as I type this. Majority are either unsubbed accounts or they have the cheap basic Nitro. A lot of the cosmetics I am seeing are the free ones they've given away in recent events. Not many users have full Nitro and have their profiles all decked out with additional cosmetics.

It is open source. But from what I can tell the accounts are largely still hosted centrally, and it isnt federated in any way, which isn't great. Anybody can host an instance or server.

So ultimately it looks like a massive step up from Discord, with some small issues here and there.

Frequently Asked Questions - Revolt Documentation

(developers.revolt.chat)

documentation/docs/faq/instances.md at master · revoltchat/documentation

Moved to https://github.com/revoltchat/wiki. Contribute to revoltchat/documentation development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

"Here little monkey, get your food pellet!"

Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.

I'll check it out! Even without being federated, it's good to have a discord alternative. Matrix hasn't been what I need yet, unfortunately.

What genuinely confuses me is who they're finding to buy this shit to begin with.

I've seen so many of these failed "Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens" schemes over the last ten years. It's like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.

Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.

something that won’t fall into the same pitfal

What exists that cannot be sold to a high enough bidder? Even Lemmy isn't magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?

The internet is fundamentally a privatized system that exists to generate profit for investors. There is no true public domain. Its all just turf up for sale, some of which hasn't gone to a notable bidder yet. If you do manage to improve a patch of digital real estate to the point where someone will pay you enormous sums to divest, you'd be a fool not to take the money.

Oh well. Matrix it is, then.

(I prefer XMPP but no group chats kinda ruins it if it's a feature you expect)

Not immune, but let's say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn't lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn't lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody's going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.

Even Lemmy isn’t magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?

Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.

Because it's federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.

Oh it's undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out

You're correct.

As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap.

However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are:

• Implement our own federation protocol
• Implement a promising up and coming federation protocol, polyproto
• Implement the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable)
• Implement the XMPP protocol (battle-tested and stable)

The thing is I’d much rather they do things like this, where the ads are opt in and the monetized features are mostly just extra for if you are enjoying the platform, than something like introducing ads you have to pay to remove or locking core features behind a paywall.

It is a bit baffling. I think it's more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn't make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I'm in a position where either I'm paying for the service or ditching it entirely.

Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn't rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.

ah yes, seeing deepweb market-esque exit scams on the surface web is a sign of a healthy system

Afaik it's a fork / copy of the actual Discord source code. With all its bugs

I basically had an adblocker for netzero making it a free service. Was super useful for my broke teenage ass.

Only option available is Matrix. It has its problems, but they're being worked on.

Right now it lacks the gaming/voice chat parts of discord - so for an OSS alternative for that part of discord specifically, there's Mumble.

For everything else, Matrix is a good alternative. Just be sure to pick a discord-like client. (E.g. Commet or Cinny)