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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Andreas@feddit.nutoTechnology@lemmy.ml100K Users - Revolt
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    1 year ago

    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?