Technology

34889 readers

164 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.

Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.

Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

MinutePhrase@lemmy.ml

100K Users - Revolt (revolt.chat)

submitted 1 year ago by tmpod@lemmy.pt to c/technology@lemmy.ml

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Andreas@feddit.nu 26 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?

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 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.