There’s been quite a bit of…unsettlement (totally a word) regarding the news that Discord has a new CEO and the company is going public (typically a sign of things going shittier than before).
I’d just like to re-post this which I shared some time ago, if you’ll indulge me in my rare post which isn’t a Steam Deck / Gaming News # post - a rarity for me.
In the end, this is not the be-all-and-end-all alternative, it won’t be for everyone. Matrix exists of course. But this is a nice place. And I thought considering recent events I’d recommend it regardless!
Following is just a copy of what I posted last time. It’s mostly Linux chat, gaming, handhelds (like the Steam Deck), movies and…general chats. Anyway, here’s the post:
So…this one is a bit left-of-field.
A friend of mine (Gardiner Bryant of YouTube - who reports on Linux and the Steam Deck) has started a Revolt server.
What is Revolt?
It’s kinda like a FOSS alternative to Discord. You’ll see the layout is almost a direct copy, and it’s far less polished…but then again you haven’t got the downsides of Discord’s constant upselling either:
Why is this relevant?
…I can hear you ask? Well, so far its just a few developers and creators in there, but I thought of all spaces…maybe those very devs and creators whose work you use and watch…well it might be nice to join in there?
My personal friends who are in here so far are:
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imLinguin whose GitHub is here - but you may know most as a developer of Heroic Games Launcher
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Lazorne whose project is RetroDECK - my personal fav emulation option for the Steam Deck
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Eben Bruyns whose GitHub is here - but you may know best as the dev of Junk-Store
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Kyle Gospo whose project is Bazzite
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Gardiner himself, of course whose YouTube link is here,
What is the damn link to the damn server, woman?
I mean, you will have to make an account on Revolt, but it might be interesting to some here. You’re all very welcome!
I just went through this tree about a week ago. Downloaded the app for iOS to try it and would say it wasn’t ready for mainstream. It looks very similar to discord but it just consistently would crash or send me back to the website in order to get anything done. Even the main channel for Revolt would hang and not load properly. That and iOS is on TestFlight… not gonna work well for non tech enthusiasts who know how about it. That
I have a small server on Discord and would love to move it. But the people on it aren’t super tech savvy and the replacement will need to work. Plus, I have less desire to go from one centralized service to another, especially when the backup doesn’t work well. Wish Element would get it together with the phone app and make spaces appear as they do on the computer. That and stable call/video channels.
It would be nice to see a capable app built on matrix platform. Or just another capable platform that has a well working app. Just my two cents.
SchildiChat Next is a mini-fork of Element X with proper spaces support (and some other nice UI additions).
I say mini-fork as it’s basically just EleX with some UI patches - so it follows EleX actively.
Aaaaand this touches on the problem with matrix in general, no standard is properly followed, way too many forks with feature support all over the place
There’s only one standard, it has no forks. The discussion is about a filtering feature.
A lot of people don’t seem to respect spaces and communities - from my perspective it looks like the devs are currently pivoting to make the official client look and act more like Telegram/Signal/WhatsApp than Discord/IRC.
Your issue is that the dev team of EleX not prioritizing a feature you want.
If anything, this is a strength of an open source ecosystem: someone who agrees with you was able to, months ago, setup a fork that appeals to your work flow.
Try that with Discord, next time!
There is a single standard with no forks, I said not a single one followed. I run my own Matrix Home Server and use it frequently, there are a lot of different clients and there are a good number of them that do run their own features that are not exactly in Spec because one does not yet exist in the official spec. Stickers used to be a good example of that I remember when there were like three different clients Each of which implemented them in a different weird way until the spec finally landed on an implementation.
And even within this back there are some basic features not supported on certain clients and other such problems. I’m just saying it’s not an alternative to Discord and it will never be mainstream because it’s too confusing and frustrating from the perspective of a standard user.
Same concept that made bluesky get popular over mastodon, trying to find anything on Mastodon of interest is a chore because there’s no real Central spot to do everything the very nature of it is that it’s scattered to the winds, there’s also multiple apps available for Mobile on Mastodon Each of which have different layouts, different features, and normal people that just want to be able to find their topic of Interest can’t be bothered to deal with that
Yeah, all good points - especially the stuff relating to stickers (also, custom emojis).
Still, I’m hoping element gets their shit together and improves the default element apps (also brings Web/Desktop up to par with Mobile).